For several years Bertrand was the most important manager in my life at Apple, before I was laid off in 2003, probably as a result of a decision he made.

My first observation about him was that every time I had to hear him talk, I got a headache. That was back when he was telling us (around '98-'99, maybe) that the next Mac OS was likely to be a thin client OS on a computer that had no hard disk. We rolled our eyes.

Pretty soon he was standing up in front of seasoned Apple software engineers and lecturing us on how not to make mistakes when cutting and pasting code. I said at that time that I had never felt so thoroughly disrespected as an engineer in my entire career. The NeXT/Apple culture wars were at their height.

Not long after that, we had a problem building the system because of a UNIX script that didn't work. I complained about it on an unmoderated email list -- the only way we had to communicate -- and Bertrand told me to go fix the script. At that point, the man had no idea of how to run a software organization that was too big to meet in a single room. That particular issue wound up with me and Bertrand bitching at each other in a hallway where we happened to run into each other. No resolution, Bertrand still thought that an engineer working on a user feature should fix a system build script if it didn't work.

After that Bertrand and I stayed out of each others' way, or spoke carefully when we were both in the same meeting.

What I'm saying, from my point of view, he was an absolute bitch to work for.

And in 2003 after working with OS X for a few years, I was laid off. As I left, Bertrand was hounding me to fix a bug in a system I was only peripherally related to. I was pretty bitter about Bertrand for a few years. Called him a few names. But I eventually calmed down.

And then, when I started hearing about Snow Leopard, I realized that this was what Bertrand had been aiming at all along: the release where the system -- not the user features -- really got what it needed. I suspect he had to win a big argument with Steve Jobs to get to that point. And he got there. Snow Leopard's under-the-hood features, such as Grand Central Dispatch, were huge leaps forward in operating system and application frameworks technology. I gained a great deal of respect for Bertrand at that point.

With hindsight, I can look back at a relatively young man with brilliant technical insight and very little experience managing a group larger than the one at NeXT, clambering upward through the thicket of Apple/NeXT intrigues and of half-baked visions for Apple -- a company he knew very little about -- to find his way to do something really significant for OS technology at Apple.

I wish him well.