Ellen Hancock

Ellen Mooney Hancock is a technology manager from the United States who has worked for IBM and Apple, among others.

Hancock was born in the Bronx, New York City and raised in Westchester. She graduated from the College of New Rochelle, and obtained a master's degree in mathematics from Fordham University.

Among PC users, she is best known for her 29-year tenure at IBM, where she rose to the position of senior vice president in charge of network hardware and software. She ran the networking hardware division through the first half of the 1990s, at a time when it produced double digit losses in market share year after year. (The same division was ultimately sold to Cisco in 1999.) She was also a member of the IBM Corporate Executive Committee and the IBM Worldwide Management Council.

In September 1995 she started with National Semiconductor as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer (COO), after being lured from IBM by Gil Amelio. She worked closely with Amelio to move National Semiconductor to profitability. During that time Hancock worked with National's CompactRISC architecture, which was a forerunner to the successful ARM7 architecture

Not long after that Amelio left to take the CEO position at Apple Computer, and in July 1996 he hired her to join him there.

At Apple she took over the Chief Technology Officer role in the midst of the floundering next generation Copland operating system (OS) project. She was largely responsible for the decision to cancel Copland. To replace it, Hancock had favored Sun Microsystems's Solaris operating system over NeXT Inc.'s NeXTSTEP, and was against the eventual purchase of NeXT. Even after the deal was done, she wanted to use at least the kernel of Solaris. With NeXT came Steve Jobs, who publicly lampooned her on several occasions calling her a "bozo". When the Apple board of directors fired Amelio, Jobs reorganized the company leaving her with a much reduced role in charge of quality assurance as former NeXT executives took over many positions in Apple. She soon resigned.

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