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August 9, 2007

people

PC World asks: “Hey Apple, Who is iMovie’s ‘Brilliant Engineer?’”

Posted Aug. 9, ’07, 12:00 PM PT by Cyrus Farivar
Category | Apple » People

imovie.jpgThe big boss man at PC World, Harry McCracken (no relation to the similarly-named sea monster, Kraken) wonders why doesn’t Apple tout its engineers like it used to? Steve Jobs alluded to the “brilliant engineer” who created iMovie ‘08 — so what’s the harm in giving us his name?

PC World Techlog: Once upon a time, Apple was a company famous for glorifying its hardware engineers and software developers. The Woz himself may have been the first famous computer engineer, and members of the original Mac team such as Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld were nearly as famous as Jobs himself. (This post at Hertzfeld’s wonderful Folklore.org site explains how and why the Mac team got credit for their work; Bill Atkinson’s name was even displayed each time you launched MacPaint.) Even Susan Kare, who designed icons and fonts for the original Mac user interface, was a celeb.

Seriously, Apple. What gives?


7 Comments

Dave-O said:

First of all, what post?

Jobs addressed this several years back when he abolished easter eggs. Everyone at Apple makes these products possible. He didn't want anyone (especially anyone without the initals SPJ) deciding who was important and, by extension, who isn't.

Of course, everyone read that to mean, "We don't want other companies wooing our talent away from us." Leaving Jonathan Ive as the exception.

August 9, 2007 12:36 PM
nicleT said:

I was exactly asking myself the same question when I saw the Keynote.

August 9, 2007 12:43 PM
RambOrc said:

Steve Jobs DID name the engineer at the end of the iMovie presentation.

August 9, 2007 1:51 PM
Jason Snell Author Profile Page said:

Pretty sure he didn't. He named an Apple employee, yes, but I don't think it was the person who wrote iMovie.

August 9, 2007 1:52 PM
Joel said:

Presumably, he doesn't want genius boy/girl's name out there for other companies to pick up and offer genius boy a better gig somewhere else. I know I would do that given the chance...

Plus i'm sure it wasn't really just one engineer who did the whole thing. Probably an engineer presented the idea to Serlet or whomever. It trickled up, became the basis for the new project, then trickled back down to a team of folks to actually make it what we see.

August 9, 2007 2:34 PM
Andre Da Costa said:

All I have to say is, thats one heck of an engineer. For him to just decide to write a whole new app just for his personal needs and Apple amazed by it at the same time that they decided to make it a commercial product shows that person has some really good talent when it comes to software engineering. Any software company would be after that person simply because they are good at solving problems really, really well. I don't blame Jobs for keeping them a secret.

August 9, 2007 10:47 PM
Anton said:

I though it was obvious to everyone else as well that the whole story was and is just marketing.

August 10, 2007 11:00 AM

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