The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X | Hacker News Reader

The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

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92 pointselblanco42 comments

This is a good story (it contains some details that I don't think were publicly revealed back in 1996) but the title is misleading since NT plays a very minor part.

Edit: I'm not sure which embarrasses me more; the fact that this old story got 30 points or that my trivial comment got 16 points.

I agree. Sensationalist title that isn't even the real title of the article.

To be fair, it is right up at the top of the page.

I looked at the <title> and it says "Apple Confidential: The Acquisition of NeXT". Since the actual title at the top of the page isn't bold or a larger text size I tuned it out thinking it was an advertisement.

The Internet has ads?

I didn't know HN guidelines required one to hunt through the HTML source of a page to get the title.

I thought that my response was an implicit agreement that I was wrong and missed the actual title of the article. Instead I get an intellectually disingenuous response implying that I 'noticed' the <title> of the page because I decided to look at the HTML source for some strange reason.

You were probably just nostalgic for the simplicity of late 90's web code.

Dunno, that's the real title of the article up at the top of the page.

Indeed, this might at least be better titled "The Day They Almost Decided To Put BeOS On The Mac Instead Of OS X"

But that's a genuinely fascinating alternate-history concept -- Windows NT was never likely, but from the story, it seems as if Be almost made it, foiled only by its founder's hubris. What if Jean-Louis Gassée had settled for one of Apple's numerous offers? It seems he had it in the bag for months, holding out for more until he got too greedy and Apple turned to Jobs.

If Gassée hadn't been blinded by the dollar signs, what would have become of BeOS in Apple's hands? Would an alternate-universe, Be-based OSX have still saved the company? Would Jobs have gone down with his NeXT ship, and simply laid low for the 2000s? We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI.

Or maybe it couldn't have happened any other way. Maybe Jobs knew Gassée would push his luck too far and timed NeXT's overtures to Apple. Maybe he had done all the research, knew all the angles, and had planned this from the start. Maybe, just maybe, there was no force of nature that could stop Jobs' return to Apple.

>We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI.

And why in your hypothetical alternate universe where Apple went with Be instead of NeXT is this a given? You don't know that there'd be no iPod or iPhone, and you don't know that Apple would end up like SGI or Sun. Why do you assume that Jobs and NeXT are so important?

Surely history turns on small hinges, but that doesn't necessarily mean the decision to go with Be would have doomed Apple to failure. Things would probably be much different today with the actual products, but there's no reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone, or that it wouldn't be stylish.

Jobs, and the team he hired, including Jon Ive, were the driving force behind the iMac, iPod, and iPhone designs.

If Apple felt no need to hire Jobs because they had Be, why would it be reasonable to presume they would still create the same game-changing products that were primarily created by the team Jobs hired, who were not employed at Apple prior to his arrival?

Even Tim Cook, Apple's widely respected COO, was hired by Steve in 1998.

Right, right, but what's to say that the BeOS people wouldn't have done something comparable if they had been given the same resources?

I don't argue at all that what would have been the equivalents of the iPhone and iPod would be very different without Jobs and his people, but I don't think that there's any necessity to presume that these projects would have been failures if they had been executed by the BeOS people instead of the NeXT people.

what's to say that the BeOS people wouldn't have done something comparable

Statistics. Lots of people have the resources, but very few do anything comparable to Jobs at Apple (Maybe Flip?). There's certainly no reason to think Apple would have gotten into Mp3 players and mobile phones.

My take on it is that at the time Apple didn't have a visionary and whatever you think of Steve Jobs (like or loath) he is a visionary and when he turns his attention to something he demands perfection. The iPod was game-changing and the iPhone I believe has been more so (as nobody was doing what the iPhone has, but they're all copying it now). Large companies with corporate layers usually end up dumbing down products and it takes a focused (and powerful) person or team to push these things through. How Apple will fair without Steve Jobs is anyones guess - it depends if he has managed to implant the desire for perfection as a culture there now... Time will tell

Jonathan Ive was already employed by Apple before 1997. The Newton eMate, a sort of proto-netbook running the Newton OS, was designed by him.

> there's no reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone, or that it wouldn't be stylish.

I agree completely, and I have no doubt there was plenty of good talent at Apple before the Jobs II era. But it's that certain, genuinely rare element that Jobs brought to the company that turned its experiments from good products into iconic successes.

To take this fun exercise down the rabbit hole: I'd even suggest that Jobs-less, Be-powered Apple would have had a Newton Phone on the market a good deal earlier than 2007, maybe not long after Palm's first Treo. Maybe a little iffy at first, it would have gone through a few revisions and could even occupy a spot on the market next to Palm today. I'm sure it would have been a nice product. I don't think it would have been an iPhone.

I did a case study on this in a design class. The design talent at apple didn't change much, but the quality of finished designs coming out did. This had more to do with slashing all the changes between what a designer wants and what the finished product is. When you don't let every middle manager have their say and force a change, then end result is better. And Jobs with his dominating personality was able to make this happen

Have you published this case study? I am interested in reading it.

By promoting Ive, didn't Jobs actually affect a fairly large change in design talent? According to wikipedia:

"He is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac, aluminum and titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone, and iPad"

Or, looking at it the other way, why assume that Apple is so important? Couldn't Jobs have made the NeXT iPod?

NeXT was contractually obliged to not compete with Apple, which pretty much meant they had to stay out of the consumer and home markets, and focus on business and education. That's why their products were very expensive hardcore UNIX workstations (with the best GUI that had ever been put on a UNIX).

If Apple had chosen Be, then Jobs would have had to wait until the combined Apple+Be was well and dead before moving back into the personal computer market.

On the other hand, had NeXT stayed independent, they would have been able to continue their relationship with Sun and the merger of OPENSTEP and Java, and the combined product could have started weakening the Windows monopoly long before OS X became competitive due to the Intel transition. (It's not too hard to imagine the NeXT/Java development environment seriously catching on in enterprise environments circa 1999.)

Apple at the time was heading fast for the way of Commodore. Tied to past greatness and completely unable to move their technology into the present.

The OS was being left behind, the systems had all the stylish elegance of a car battery, and all efforts were focused on turning Apple, a great place for artists and designers, into IBM. In short, Apple was failing fast.

Jobs came in, and after wrestling with quickly increasing, unsellable inventory of crap computers (the increasing inventory numbers headlines lots of news during this time period "35 days unsold inventory!" "60 days unsold inventory!"), gave us the original iMac which quite literally restarted Apple's heart.

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IMac_Bondi_Blue.jpg

Replaced This: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Power_Mac...

This: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/PowerBook...

Replaced This: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Powerbook...

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:15-inch-titanium-powerbook... replaced the Pismo and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBook_redjar.jpg was a new product line

I remember this time period fairly distinctly as I almost purchased a BeBox. I decide to wait since it was probably all just going to end up in some future Apple product anyways, so the BeBoxes were already obsolete.

There was quite a bit of press concerning Gassée's and Apple's desire to tie the knot, but history turned out all different in the end. And I remember thinking that it was a huge failure for the world all caused by Gassée's desire for more money.

Actually at the time Apple was working towards what was termed the Common Hardware Reference Platform or CHRP in which the main goal was to be able to run the new NT being developed, on Apple hardware. It actually happened too, for a brief time there was a NT 4 PPC version that ran on the CHRP platform. The thinking was we will give it our all and if all best efforts fail we will just become a high-end windows platform. The management at the time really did not understand the dynamics of their customer bases.

To this day, I am dumbfounded as to how they survived. That first iMac landed at a crucial time and took off like wildfire. As well someone started listening to the right people because if I remember correctly there was some pretty open Steve hating on the board, how he ascended to power again is another one in a million shot.

> “Amelio now admits that Apple overpaid for NeXT”

Really? The result seems to have been worth the price to Apple shareholders.

"now" = 1999 when the book was written. The "Apple is doomed" perma-meme was still going in those days.

Yes, I realize. I was pointing out that his assessment may have been a bit off. :-)

It's from a book in 1999. As of 1998, the share price hadn't soared as much as they'd hoped.

Yep, in 1996 I hired on with an oil co in Scotland. One of my first tasks was to migrate everything from gawdawful Performa 6100s to Windows 95 boxes and laptops.

Being in IT, I was lumbered with one of said Performa's. It was awful. Unstable, slow. It was sad, since 4 years before in 92, I'd had a dream box Mac IIcx on my desk. Pre-Internet of course.

Thank goodness for NeXT and NeXTStep. OS X has done nothing but get better and better with every release.

Personally, I'm wondering how 200m for Be is extravagant and unthinkable and absolutely absurd, but 427m for NextStep is absolutely fine.

That point was made repeatedly by BeOS fanboys in the wake of the deal, but as the article says, "the BeOS still needed three years of additional expensive development before it could ship (it didn't have any printer drivers, didn't support file sharing, wasn't available in languages other than English, and didn't run existing Mac applications)." In retrospect, Apple gave NeXTSTEP a pretty thorough multi-year overhaul as well, so maybe BeOS would have been fine.

> In retrospect, Apple gave NeXTSTEP a pretty thorough multi-year overhaul as well, so maybe BeOS would have been fine.

I was going to say... And 200 million dollars pays for a lot of development. (How much do localization and printer drivers cost?)

NEXT had an existing customer base and a larger hardware operation, it's valuation was higher.

Didn't NeXT sell their hardware operation before they sold themselves to Apple?

They did have a customer base, and it probably was larger than Be's, though.

They did sell it:

> NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993 and the company was renamed NeXT Software Inc; subsequently 300 of the 540 staff employees were laid off.[1] NeXT negotiated to sell the hardware business including the Fremont factory to Canon.[1] Canon later pulled out of the deal. Work on the PowerPC machines was stopped along with all hardware production. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/NeXT#1993.E2....

Wonder how many of those customers followed NeXT to Apple, and whether that and the greater maturity was worth a fifth of a billion dollars.

To be honest, if Windows NT had lived up to its promise it would have been the greatest OS of all time.

Ugh, I remember what they promised in Cairo. What was promised wasn't realistic; making it inappropriate to consider NT as having failed by not meeting expectations.

Isn't that anthropomorphizing NT a bit? I mean, it's an OS, not a being. And the "promise" turned out to be mostly hype, at least in the 1995-1996 time frame. "A better Unix than Unix", "The Best Designed Operatings System", stuff like that is almost totally illogical, just an emotional appeal really.

If you read Helen Custer's "Inside Windows NT" you might have been excused for thinking you were reading about Mach 2.5, but I'm not sure what relation the OS described by "Inside Windows NT" (1st ed) had to the real Windows NT 3.1. So I'm still confused about what "promise" NT had.

great movie idea!

if ("Windows" == "controversial") views > more

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