Adios Avie

SFGate ^ | 3/27/2006

[Swordmaker]

Avadis "Avie" Tevanian, Apple Computer's Chief Technology Officer, is leaving the firm to "pursue other interests," the company confirmed Monday. Tevanian, who came to Apple in 1997 from his previous post working for Steve Jobs at NeXT, played a key role in developing Mac OS X, the company's widely adored operating system. Although Apple wouldn't say what Tevanian's plans are, Vice President of Worldwide Corporate Communications Katie Cotton wrote in an e-mail that, "He plans to take some time off in the interim. He hasn't left yet, though. His last official day is March 31."

Tevanian, who is considered an operating systems whiz and, is also a Carnegie Mellon graduate. This was culled from an interview he gave the Pittsburgh university's computer science department:

Question: Did you ever have a moment of epiphany while a student at Carnegie Mellon?

Tevanian: Yes. The day I met Steve Jobs. NeXT, the company he was CEO of then, was very interested in using the research we had done (the Mach operating system) and this was when I heard just how interested he was in it. I ended that day with a feeling of - it is time for me to get in gear, finish my Ph.D, and get out in the working world. The end result was that I made it through the Ph.D. program in only 4.5 years - which is very short for the CMU CS Ph.D. program - especially in the systems area. Just another example of the Steve Jobs school of motivation.

Maybe Avie had enough motivation after nearly 10 years?

[Swordmaker]

Avie Tevanian is leaving Apple.

[Swordmaker]

Avie Tevanian, prime designer of OS X is leaving Apple... PING!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[HAL9000]

There goes a real Chief Software Architect.

[IncPen]

Well, I guess it's time I stepped up to the plate.

Steve, you have my number...

[SlowBoat407]

I guess it's back to Area 51 for more inspiration.

[antiRepublicrat]

I'm now a little worried about the future of OS X. I hope Jobs has another genius in the wings to take over, maybe someone who's worked under Avie for long enough.

[Uri’el-2012]

This article about "Avie" Tevanian is almost three years old, but has some insights.

[Glenn]

Maybe Jobs should have paid him what he's worth.

[Question_Assumptions]

The "Bad" part in that article is one of the reasons why I'm not upset about this and think it might be a good thing. He came from the NeXT school, not the Mac school, and made choices for OSX based on his NeXT biases that dropped useful features from the Mac OSX and did goofy things like make it more dependent on file suffixes to type files, a step backward from the metadata and duel forked files of the old Mac OS.