Yes. Except that it wasn’t acquiring NeXTSTEP that saved Apple’s skin; it was acquiring Steven P Jobs.
True, version 1 had been rough and flakey as hell, and honestly really didn’t work all that well.
But Steve 2.0? Damn, that one could sell.
You may have the finest tech on the planet—and that means precisely squat. What counts is putting bums on seats. Your seats. And keeping them there. Limps of tech are just a vehicle for that; to be used, abused, chewed up, and/or discarded on the road(s) to that end.
Apple could have done better; they certainly did plenty worse (Copland, Taligent, the first Mac OS).
As it turned out, NeXTSTEP proved it was indeed “good enough” to fit a pressing need at the time; and the rest was just hammering till it looked lickable enough for consumers to bite. All it was needed was a salesman to shift it—and Steve 2.0 proved to be one of the greatest salesman in modern marketing history.
That’s what made the difference between selling a tech to a million dyed-in-the-wirewool nerds, and selling tech to a billion everyday consumers. And then up-selling all of those customers to completely new worlds of products and services invented just for the purpose.
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Want to created a whole new device? Hire Steve Wozniak.
Want to create a whole new world? Oh, but that is the real trick.
And Steve Jobs gave us the masterclass.
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Had Steve started Be and Jean-Louis built NeXT, we would still be in the exact same situation today, and the only difference would be chunks of BeOS as the iPhone’s bones instead. Funny old world, eh? :)
Jobs was obviously talented, but assuming no matter where he went he would have had the same level of success is discounting a lot of luck in how everything lined up,and who was available to help bring all the things to market jobs is famous for. There's no guarantee the hundreds or thousands of people that were also essential to the major successes of Apple would have been around jobs had he stayed at Next. Those people deserve respect and recognition too.
And unlike v1 v2 seems better on human level as well. We do not need saint. He still parked in space for hadicapped only I guess. But let us admit, it is not just one for all. But all for one.
“But let us admit, it is not just one for all. But all for one.”
Damn straight. Epically focused leadership.
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(† For all others who aspire to build their own businesses, there is HR procedure and askamanager.org—and do not for the life of you ever bypass either!)
Epically focused indeed.
ORLY? Name them.
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Not “great man”. Great vision.
Geeks tend massively to overrate the importance technical aptitude, which is what they’re good at, and underrate everything else—business experience, sales skills, market savvy, and other soft skills—which they’re not.
Contrast someone like Jobs, who understood the technical side well enough to be able to surround himself with high-quality technical people and communicate effectively with them, but make no mistake: they were there to deliver his vision, not their own.
Tech-exclusive geeks a useful resource, but they have to be kept on a zero-length leash lest they start thinking that they should be the ones in charge since they know more about tech than anyone else. And the moment they’re allowed to get away with it, and you end up with the tails-wagging-the-dog internecine malfunction that plagued Sculley’s Apple in the 90s and has to some extent resurfaced under Cook.
Lots of things happened under Jobs 2.0. That was NEVER one of them.
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Case in point: Just take the endless gushing geek love for Cook-Apple’s Swift language. And then look at how little the iOS platform itself has moved forward over the 10 years, it’s taken to [partly] replace ObjC with the only incrementally improved Swift. When NeXT created what is now AppKit, it was 20 years ahead of its time. Now it’s a good ten behind, and massively devalued to boot by the rotten impedance-mismatch between ObjC/Cococa’s Smalltalk-inspired model and Swift’s C++-like semantics.
Had Jobs not passed, I seriously doubt Lattner’s pet project would ever have advanced to the point of daylight. Steve would’ve looked at it and asked: How can it add to Apple’s existing investments? And then told Lattner to chuck it, and create an “Objective-C 3.0”; that is, the smallest delta between what they already had (ObjC 2.0) and the modern, safe, easy-to-use (type-inferred, no-nonsense) language they so pressingly needed.
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Look, I don’t doubt eventually Apple will migrate all but the large legacy productivity apps like Office and CC away from AppKit and ObjC and onto Swift and SwiftUI. But whose interest does that really serve? The ten million geeks who get paid for writing and rewriting all that code, and have huge fun squandering millions of development-hours doing so? Or the billion users, who for years see minimal progress or improvement in their iOS app experience?
Not to put too a fine a point on it: if Google Android is failing to capitalize on iPhone’s Swift-induced stall-out by charging ahead in that time, it’s only because it has the same geek-serving internal dysfunction undermining its own ability to innovate and advance the USER product experience.
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TL;DR: I’ve launched a tech startup, [mis]run it, and cratered it. And that was with with a genuinely unique, groundbreaking, and already working tech with the product potential to revolutionize a major chunk of trillion-dollar global industry, saving and generating customers billions of dollars a year.
It’s an experience that has given me a whole new appreciation for what another nobody person starting out of his garage, and with his own false starts and failures, was ultimately able to build.
And I would trade 20 years of programming process for just one day of salesmanship from Steve Jobs’ left toe, and know I’d got the best deal by far. Like I say, this is not about a person. It is about having the larger vision and having the skills to deliver it.
And neither of them would've mattered a jot if they were born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or if they were medieval peasants, or if Jobs hadn't been adopted, or or or ...
Luck is enormously influential. There thousands of Jobsalikes per Jobs. Necessity isn't sufficiency.
I would also say, Jobs had a far, far higher regard for technical talent than you do. He was absolutely obsessed with finding the absolute best engineering and technical people to work for him so he could deliver his vision. He recognized the value of Woz's talents more than Woz himself. He gathered the original Mac team. If he had, say, a random group of Microsoft or IBM developers, the Mac never would have happened. Same with Next, many of whom were still around to deliver iOS and the iPhone.
Your take is like a professional sports manager saying having good athletes isn't important, the quality of the manager's managing is the only thing that matters.
Very true. “Renaissance Man” is a such cliche, but Steve Jobs really was. Having those tech skills and interests under his belt is what made him such a fabulous tech leader and tech salesman; and without that mix he’d have just been one more Swiss Tony bullshit artist in an ocean of the bums. (Like many here I’ve worked with that sort, and the old joke about the salesman, the developer, and the bear is frighteningly on the nose.)
But whereas someone like Woz loved and built tech for its own sake, and was perfectly happy doing that and nothing else all his life, Jobs always saw tech as just the means to his own ends: which wasn’t even inventing revolutionary new products so much as inventing revolutionary new markets to sell those products into. The idea that personal computers should be Consumer Devices that “Just Work”; that was absolutely Jobs.
And yeah, Job always used the very best tech talent he could find, because the man’s own standards started far above the level that most geeks declare “utterly impossible; can’t be done”, and he had ZERO tolerance for that. And of course, with the very best tools in hand, he wrangled that “impossible” right out of them; and the rest is history.
Woz made tech. Jobs made markets.
As for Sculley, he made a hash. And while Cook may be raking in cash right now, he’s really made a hash of it too: for he’s not made a single new new market† in a decade, while Apple’s rivals—Amazon and Google—are stealing the long-term lead that Jobs’s pre-Cook Apple had worked so hard to build up.
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(† And no, things like earpods and TV programming do no count, because they’re only addons, not standalone products, and so can only sell as well the iPhone sells. And the moment iPhone sales drop off a cliff, Cook’s whole undiversified house of cards collapses, and they might as well shut up shop and give the money back to the shareholders.)
Postscript: You misread me. I understand where Jobs was coming from better than you think. But maybe I’m not explaining myself well.
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When my old man retired, he was executive manager for a national power company overseeing distribution network. Senior leadership. But he started out as a junior line engineer freshly qualified from EE school, and over the following three decades worked his way up from that.
(I still remember those early Christmas callouts: all the lights’d go out; and off into the night he would go, like Batman.:)
And as he later always said to engineers under him, his job was to know enough engineering to manage them effectively, and their job was to be the experts at all the details and to always keep him right. And his engineers loved him for it. Not least ’cos that was a job where mistakes don’t just upset business and shut down chunks of the country, they cause closed-coffin funerals and legal inquests too.
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i.e. My old man was a bloody great manager because he was a damn good engineer to begin with. And while he could’ve been a happy engineer doing happy engineering things all his life he was determined to be far more, and worked his arse off to achieve it too.
And that’s the kind of geek Steve Jobs was. Someone who could’ve easily lived within comfortable geeky limitations, but utterly refused to do so.
’Cos he wanted to shape the world.
I doff my cap at that.
You shouldn't talk about Sun like that.
Jobs was an outstanding product manager who sweated all the details for his products. And in contrast to Tim Cook, Jobs was a passionate user of actual desktop and laptop computers. He sweated the details of the iPhone too, but his daily driver was a mac, not an iPad. Cook is less into the product aspect, and it really really shows. Cook is a numbers and logistics guy, but not really into the product.
That's a thing I think Apple has fixed recently with some reshuffling and putting a product person (Jeff Williams) in the COO role. The COO role is also a signal that he'll be the next CEO when Tim Cook retires.
To be clear, I don't disagree that Jobs was a great marketer. But that stemmed from his own personal involvement with the product design of the mac--and later the iOS devices--rather than some weirdly prodigious knack for marketing.
It's wrong.
Original NeXT classes were prefixed NX_. Then NeXT worked with Sun to make a portable version of the GUI that could run on top of other OSes -- primarily targeting Solaris, of course, but also Windows NT.
That was called OpenStep and it is the source of classes with the prefix NS_ -- standing for Next/Sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep#History
This is why Sun bought NeXT software vendor Lighthouse, whose CEO Jonathan Schwartz who later became Sun's CEO.
Unfortunately for NeXT (and ultimately for Sun), right after this, Sun changed course and backed Java instead.
OSX/macOS/iOS is the latest evolution of NeXTStep/Mach which originated in the Aleph (and other) academic kernels.
(of course OS's evolve pretty far in a few decades...)
Not quite. Everything in Foundation gets the NS prefix because it's in Foundation; only a fraction of it came directly from NeXT.