A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018) | Hacker News Reader

A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

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257 pointsingve86 comments

I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel were nice, the smart people from NeXT made a huge difference, but Steve was, Steve.

If I'd know this would happen I would have never left.

Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.

Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on hand on fire. The business turnaround story is amazing, forget the creative factor and all that, the only reason Apple is still around is that he walked in and rapidly course corrected a company that wasn’t even his anymore. He wasn’t anything when Gil bought NeXT, his title was just “Advisor” to the CEO. A hilarious title. The magic of the next purchase was that it saved Apple way more money than it cost by effectively letting in a “Good” virus that infected the company’s management and cut the cruft fast. ‘97 Steve had had 10 years of startup OPs pain under his belt.

https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE

Transcription at: https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcri...

> The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that’s gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars — 10 billion dollars of product a year? One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.

I agree -- I like Gasee and BeOS but there's no chance he would have managed to do the same with Apple. The modern Apple, like the original Apple, is Job's creation. In a way that very very few CEOs (who get all the credit regardless) can say.

Indeed. BeOS would have made Macintosh as successful as the Amiga.

A good, pithy summary.

BeOS was a beautiful OS, my favourite ever x86 OS.

But the _other_ key thing most people miss is that NeXT also had amazing, industry-beating development tools. Be didn't.

Both BeOS and NeXTstep were amazing OSes, but NeXT offered 2 other things as well as a great OS:

• best-of-breed dev tools, including Interface Builder

• Steve Jobs.

No contest, I'm afraid.

Even if personally I preferred BeOS.

Be was a tech demo at best. It looked finished on the surface but had less than 10% of what a complete operating system needs in terms of feature depth, libraries and extensive real word testing.

Steve Jobs was utterly critical, but NeXT technology was also insanely valuable.

Right it was a great single user workstation, but had no where near the underlining stack to compete in a corp environment. Be did one thing and, did that one thing light years better than anything on the market. next was the clear choice for what apple needed to stay competitive.

Classic MacOS had multitasking (cooperative...), but it was missing memory protection. The same was true of earlier 68K-based OSes (Atari, Amiga.)

The problem with cooperative multitasking is that a SINGLE poorly behaved process in the background locks up the whole operating system. This leads to a horrible user experience.

As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again.

Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.

Yes, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking, but no memory protection, and the situation wasn't really any better. A single rogue process could bring down the whole system by overwriting parts of the OS.

Guru Meditation :)

It wasn't unique to the 68K world.

Windows/286 (from long before Windows 3) could multitask too, but not very stably. No memory protection.

Acorn RISC OS -- the original ARM OS -- had _both_ cooperative and (for command-prompt windows) pre-emptive multitasking, but again, no memory protection.

A big part of the problem was that the 68000 had no MMU. Nor did the 68010 or the 68020. One only came onboard as standard with the 68030 -- analogous to Intel's 80386DX -- and then it was too late: to rework all the existing OSes would have been both a huge amount of work, and badly broken backwards-compatibility with the large existing software libraries.

Whereas the PC industry more or less rebooted the OS stack (eventually), with a new, graphical OS that could use the hardware multitasking features of the 386 if it got one, and do without if it didn't.

This was Windows 3, and it evolved into Windows 9x. Meanwhile in the background Microsoft frantically worked on turning OS/2 3, the CPU-independent version, into something saleable.

OS/2 3 became OS/2 NT became Windows NT and the rest is history.

A big piece to that power play was Bill Gates backing Job with capital. It was a win win for both of them, Steve used it to wrangle political control of the company and Gates used it to stave off an impending anti-trust litigation. Had Steve not had the capital from Gates a year after rejoining, the story would have been much different.

Proof that a good CEO is worth the money.

Now all we need is a reliable way to identify a 'good' CEO without the benefit of hindsight.

Not just anybody is hired to be a CEO. A candidate has to have a track record of success. That's how.

If you know of a reliable way to identify CEOs who can effect the kind of turnaround that Jobs executed at Apple, then, with respect, I tend to think you may be in the wrong business :)

My point was that the rarity of that kind of turnaround is strong evidence that that level of CEO performance is not even close to being predictable.

Most CEOs run their companies successfully. The ones that don't get the boot and are not likely to be recruited for another CEO position. After all, would you?

Counter example: John Scully

Who'd you hire for the top job - someone with a track record of success, or another with a track record of failure?

I think I missed the bit where anyone said anything about hiring someone with a track record of failure?

A good track record maybe necessary but is clearly insufficient.

Having said that - ironically - Job himself wasn't exactly an obviously successful CEO prior to his return to Apple. He'd been fired from Apple previously, NeXT was one of many workstation manufactures and less successful than many direct competitors (eg Silicon Graphics).

Eric Schmidt is another example. Prior to Google he was CEO at Novell where (quoting Wikipedia): "He presided over a period of decline at Novell where its IPX protocol was being replaced by open TCP/IP products, while at the same time Microsoft was shipping free TCP/IP stacks in Windows 95, making Novell much less profitable."

Jobs was very successful with Pixar.

Let me put it another way. Can we reasonably assume that people who find themselves in the position of needing to hire a CEO with their own money are not complete morons and will spend more than 5 minutes thinking about it?

I'm lost. The original question was:

Now all we need is a reliable way to identify a 'good' CEO without the benefit of hindsight.

Your response was "A candidate has to have a track record of success."

People are pointing out that doesn't appear to be sufficient.

So I agree that people hiring CEOs aren't morons and think about it. But I'm still not sure what indicators are useful outside track record, or indeed if you think that is sufficient.

> Your response was "A candidate has to have a track record of success." People are pointing out that doesn't appear to be sufficient.

I didn't say it was sufficient. For example, if I say "an airplane has to have wings" would you argue that isn't all it needs? Of course not.

There's a reason that English has the words "all", "only", etc. For example, there's a difference between "people like hamburgers" and "all people like hamburgers." There's a difference between "choosy people choose cheese" and "only choosy people choose cheese." English is not a programming language.

I suggest interpreting my messages from a presumption that neither am I a moron nor are people who select executives.

I do understand English, but I don't understand what your point is in this thread?

You've said "A candidate has to have a track record of success. That's how", but every question people have raised to try and identify additional points the response hasn't really added any additional information.

If your point that "people who [successfully] select CEOs" have some additional criteria that they use (outside the track record) then: Yes! Great!

What is it?

Are there any engineers on HN who worked on Copeland? Because I've always found it astounding that while the stated reason for the NeXT aquisition and the transition to the OpenStep-based OS was that Copeland was still years away from completion -- but then after Jobs took over it was still 5ish years for OS X to finally be released... And in the meantime they continued to release OS 8 and OS 9 as updates, including some tech that was under development from before the NeXT acquire.

Surely Copeland could have been completed in that time period. Or was it _really_ that off the rails? 5 years off the rails?

Second hand (I wasn't there at the time), but Apple had more than anything a management problem. Managers making a land-grab put everything+kitchen sink into Copland. It was an incoherent mess. Then the VM folks would decide to rewrite the VM subsystem and Copeland would go a month without a single usable build.

Steve and the management team he brought in essentially fired all the MBAs and non-engineering managers. Copeland was doomed by bad management.

I was in elementary school during Copland and the NeXT acquisition and so I wasn't there, but based on everything that I've read, the reason for the long gap between the purchase of NeXT in December 1996 and the release of Mac OS X 10.0 in March 2001 had largely to do with the inclusion of the Carbon API.

The story goes as follows: after Copland was cancelled in 1996, Apple then pursued the idea of purchasing or licensing an operating system from another company and then building a new Mac operating system on top of it. Existing Mac programs running on then-current System 7.5 would run in emulation under what's called the "Blue Box," which would later be known as Classic Mode in Mac OS X. New programs would run under a then-undefined API called Yellow Box that ran natively on Apple's future operating system. The questions were: (1) what would be Yellow Box, and (2) what would be the native operating system? The choices were Windows NT, Solaris, BeOS, and OPENSTEP. BeOS and OPENSTEP ended up making it to the "final round." In the end, Apple bought NeXT, and work started on a project called Rhapsody, which was essentially OPENSTEP with a Mac OS 8-style theme. Yellow Box was the OpenStep Objective-C based API, which would later be renamed Cocoa in 1998. Rhapsody was supposed to be released sometime in 1999 if I recall correctly.

In the beginning, it was expected that Mac developers would port their software from the classic Mac API to Yellow Box. However, some developers balked at the prospect of porting their code to Yellow Box, most notably Microsoft and Adobe. Given the importance of products like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop to the Mac platform, during WWDC 1998 Apple announced the Carbon API, which was similar to the classic Mac API but was designed to take advantage of features such as preemptive multitasking and protected memory. Also, Apple announced that both Carbon and Cocoa would be based on a common substrate of C functions, allowing "toll-free bridging" between the two APIs.

The addition of Carbon was a significant engineering effort that contributed to the delay of the release of Mac OS X. There may have been some other factors, such as designing the Aqua interface and incorporating the feedback received from users of the Mac OS X Public Beta, which was released in 2000.

In the meanwhile, Steve Jobs was able to buy time for Apple through the introduction of well-received, now legendary products such as the iMac and the iBook. By 2000 Apple got its mojo back, and the attention became less on when Apple would finally release Mac OS X and more on anticipating what type of products Apple would come out with next. Eventually Mac OS X 10.0 would get released in March 2001, just in time to compete against Windows XP, the first consumer version of Windows based on Windows NT as opposed to MS-DOS.

Yep Adobe and their unwillingness to port was a big part of it. I think Steve carried that with him and gained a little joy in staking Flash in the heart when he did.

The irony is that Flash is pretty much alive.

After those actions, Adobe created an AOT compiler for Flash, so before Unity and Unreal took off, plenty of iOS games were actually AOT compiled Flash ones.

Following up on that, Animate was born.

Now thanks to WebAssembly and CheerpX, old Flash applications can keep on running.

You have most of the details right, but not in the right order.

Yes, Apple looked at buying in an OS after Copland failed. But all the stuff about Carbon, Blue Box, Yellow Box, etc. -- all those were NeXT ideas after the merger. None of it was pre-planned.

So, they bought NeXTstep, a very weird UNIX with a proprietary, PostScript-based GUI and a rich programming environment with tons of rich foundation classes, all written in Objective C.

A totally different API, utterly unlike and unrelated to Classic MacOS.

Then they had to decide how to bring these things together.

NeXT already offered its OPENSTEP GUI on top of other Unixes. OPENSTEP ran on Sun Solaris and IBM AIX, and I think maybe others I've forgotten. Neither were commercial successes.

NeXT had a plan to create a compatibility environment for running NeXT apps on other OSes. The idea was to port the base ObjC classes to the native OS, and use native controls, windows, widgets etc. but to be able to develop your apps in ObjC on NeXTstep using Interface Builder.

In the end, only one such OS looked commercially viable: Windows NT. So the plan was to offer a NeXT environment on top of NT.

This is what was temporarily Yellow Box and later became Cocoa.

Blue Box was a VM running a whole copy of Classic MacOS under NeXTstep, or rather, Rhapsody. In Mac OS X 10.0, Blue Box was renamed the Classic environment and it gained the ability to mix windows with NeXT windows.

But there still needed to be a way to port apps from Classic MacOS to Mac OS X.

So what Apple did was go through the Classic MacOS API and cut it down, removing all the calls and functions that would not be safe in a pre-emptively multitasking, memory-managed environment.

The result was a safe subset of the Classic MacOS API called Carbon, which could be implemented both on Classic MacOS and on the new NeXTstep-based OS.

Now there was a transition plan:

• your old native apps will still work in a VM

• apps written to Carbon can be recompiled for OS X

• for the full experience, rewrite or write new apps using the NeXT native API, now renamed Cocoa.

• incidentally there was also a rich API for Java apps, too

Now there was a plan.

Here's how they executed it.

1. Copland was killed. A team looked at if anything could be salvaged.

2. They got to work porting NeXTstep to PowerPC

3. 2 main elements from Copland were extracted:

• The Appearance Manager, a theming engine allowing skins for Classic MacOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appearance_Manager

• A new improved Finder

The new PowerPC-native Finder had some very nice features, many never replicated in OS X... like dockable "drawers" -- drag a folder to a screen edge and it vanished, leaving just a tab, which opens a pop-out draw. Multithreading: start a copy or move and then carry on doing other things.

The Appearance Manager was grafted onto NeXTstep, leading to Rhapsody, which became Mac OS X Server: basically NeXTstep on PowerPC with a Classic MacOS skin, so a single menu bar at the top, desktop icons, Apple fonts and things -- but still using the NeXT "Miller columns" Workspace file manager and so on.

Apple next released MacOS 8, with the new Appearance control panel and single skin, called Platinum: a marginally-updated classic look and feel. There were never any official others, but some leaked, and a 3rd party tool called Kaleidoscope offered many more.

http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...

So some improvements, enough to make it a compelling upgrade...

And also to kill off the MacOS licensing programme, which only covered MacOS 7. (Because originally 7 had been planned to be replaced with Copland, the real MacOS 8.)

MacOS 8 was also the original OS of the first iMac.

Then came MacOS 8.1, which also got HFS+, a new, more efficient filesystem for larger multi-gigabyte hard disks. It couldn't boot off it, though (IIRC).

MacOS 8.1 was the last release for 680x0 hardware and needed a 68040 Mac.

Then came the first PowerPC-only version, MacOS 8.5, which brought in booting from HFS+. Then MacOS 8.6, a bugfix release, mainly.

Then MacOS 9, with better-integrated WWW access and some other quite nice features... but all really stalling for time while they worked on what would become Mac OS X.

The _paid_ releases were 8.0, 8.5 and 9. 8.1, 8.6, 9.1 and 9.2 were all free updates.

In a way they were just trickling out new features, while working on adapting NeXTstep:

1. Rhapsody (Developer Release 1997, DR2 1998)

2. Mac OS X Server (1.0 1999, 1.2 2000)

3. Mac OS X Public Beta (2000)

But all of these releases supported Carbon and could run Carbon apps, and PowerPC-native Carbon apps would run natively under OS X without the need for the Classic environment.

Finally in 2001, Mac OS X 10.0 "Cheetah".

BeOS might have worked well enough in the short term but it would have turned into a disaster later. It lacked the fundamental security foundations that Nextstep already had built in. Retrofitting that level of security would have been extremely difficult, perhaps just as hard as adding preemptive multitasking to classic MacOS.

Apple was also in close to licensing Sun Solaris 2.5 which already ran on PowerPC. They just had to put the Apple UI on it but history happened.

The alternate timeline where sometime in late 200x Apple buys Sun (instead of Oracle) and still invests in Unixy datacenter things, ZFS, and similar tech that Sun was good at, and use it to build high quality services and hardware is a fun thought experiment to explore.

Wouldn't have happened because of the iPhone profit rocketship which caused Apple to abandon that entire market segment.

Apple was doing some half-hearted enterprise-y efforts at the time like the Xserve. As an IT industry analyst at the time I got invited for various briefings related to such things. However, as you note, once the iPhone in particular really took off, Apple pretty much stopped pretending to be anything other than a consumer company, especially after BYOD became the norm.

I used BeOS. It had some great features, but it wasn't great the way NeXTStep was great. If it had been built on top of C++ 11 or later, instead of whatever C++9x they were using, maybe.

What I really don't get was how even Windows 3.1 had better multitasking than MacOS. Really.

I get the multiple issues with MS and Windows, but at that time, they had the better system for Home/SME users. Ok maybe not for Graphical Designers, but still.

Steve laid off a sizable chunk of non-Nexters when his people started to fill the top spots at Apple. The cutting was deep and brutal. Would you have survived?

Definitely. Steve was unique, and his fanatical devotion to simplicity and quality established Apple as a force to be reckoned with.

Slightly Off Topic.

I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two )

Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but I think it is still too early to tell.

Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Apple, Tim Cook would be on the list as well. But their doing on Mac still leaves a bad taste in my mouth so I am not quite over with it yet.

What other Great CEO are there in Silicon Valley's history?

Edit: Looking at this list just now makes me realise all the CEO I considered as great are product CEO. Which sort of got me thinking as to why I don like Tim Cook as much, he is simply not a product person.

Tim Cook arguably made Apple what it is today. Without him, Apple might've had great products but failed miserably in the supply chain management side of the business. It's telling that after Jobs, Apple didn't slide into irrelevance but instead continued to thrive.

Tech aficionados (myself included) might have qualms about their product strategy, but overall the business continues to be wildly successful with regular consumers.

"It's telling that after Jobs, Apple didn't slide into irrelevance but instead continued to thrive."

Tim Cook is clearly incredibly important to the success of Apple, but from a product perspective it is a refinement of all the products Steve Jobs launched that still carry the company. Those products are faster and slicker and have better cameras -- the innovations afforded to a hyper-profitable company -- but it isn't like Apple has done a 90 degree turn or anything. They aren't a smartphone/pad/computer company that turned into a smartcar/massage chair company.

Apple Watch and AirPods both launched after the Jobs era, and they're doing pretty well in their respective categories. I wouldn't bet against Apple on their product strategy with Cook running things, they're a lot doing more than just adding polish to what Jobs left them with.

> it is a refinement of all the products Steve Jobs launched that still carry the company

Not really. You could say that the iPhone still carries the company, but with the exception of that outlier newer initiatives like Services and Wearables/Home/Accessories bring in way more money than products that Steve Jobs launched (Mac and iPad).

Not really? Then you casually say "if you exclude the iPhone" which kind of undercuts the entire argument, doesn't it?

70% of Apple revenue comes from the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Services revenue is entirely and absolutely based upon that, and certainly didn't originate post Jobs.

Even the Watch -- have one and love it -- exists on the back of the iPhone.

So, yeah, really.

Everything Apple has done that has been successful since Jobs is entirely in the halo of the iPhone, which of course still accounts for the vast bulk of Apple's profits.

How much of that is staying power because of the ecosystem and just enough incremental improvements to keep consumers happy? I agree that Tim Cook made all of the logistics work to turn the dream into reality but now that Jobs is gone it just feels like the dream stopped evolving and lots of blemishes and complexity are slipping into the operating systems that Jobs wouldn't have allowed.

Blackberry also had tons of brand loyalty as did Nokia, Motorola. I don't know that, ecosystem, and incremental improvements are enough to keep going with how competitive the space is, or they'd be eaten alive by samsung, Microsoft, etc that are also slowly but surely building those same things. And the apple watch is a huge success - and sure, year to hear iPhones are iterative, but look back a few years and it's amazing how far tech has come

I wondered that, but they've made at least a couple of good product decisions in the post-jobs era. Most notably in my mind: the AirPods, and the iPad Pro (with pencil, and more powerful iOS).

Nadella has been amazing and Huang underrated. Bezos should be on that list?

Grove vs. Jobs is interesting (for discussion; not that we can't just put them both in the same very small group at the top). For example, difficult to envision anyone being a better CEO for Apple than Jobs was. On other hand, if you take any_random_company, and put either Grove or Jobs at the helm, then Grove is likely the better fit for a much higher percentage?

Definitely would add Bezos and Musk. Bezos is one of the most managerially/business astute CEOs and Musk is able to will futuristic companies basically out of thin air.

I think bezos has to show continued dominance - but he's obviously up there. I don't know I'd you can call it for muak without a few decades to see whether his companies stick. Sure, he's changed the conception of electric cars and made low earth orbit really accessible, but as a CEO and leader it's still not clear whether he can lead that revolution long term or if some of his more erratic tendencies will bring things down. Tesla still isn't a stable, well functioning business (and as he veo he just put an awful lot of people at risk with his behavior during the pandemic - look at what's happening in Italy - he defied the rules meant to prevent that. I dont think that sounds like leadership). But in the long run he very could be.

”Bezos has to show continued dominance”....?

Please say that is a typo, surely it should say...

Bezos has shown continued dominance

Amazon is a huge conglomerate on a huge scope and scale. Bezos has built a book store into a Japanese style mega-corp.

AWS is killing it, Amazon.com is killing it, Prime is killing it, A9 is killing it, Whole is killing in....

So many subsidiaries: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)

It takes a while to become a legend. He's well on his way, but it's not something you really want to call till the end if their careers. Even then, might be too soon, look at how people viewed jack Welch at the end of his career versus now.

Cook deserves more credit. iPhone survived the onslaught of Android and remained the most profitable smartphone. That alone is a minor miracle.

I would submit that Rob Mee (founder of Pivotal Labs, former CEO of Pivotal) is one of the greatest unsung heroes of Silicon Valley. So many of the biggest success stories in tech today were either advised by him or worked with Pivotal Labs in their early stages.

Both Twitter and Square are notable examples, but it is a very, very long list. Google also worked with Pivotal Labs in their early days.

Why VMWare/Patrick?

(The rest make sense to me because of all the hullabaloo around the company comebacks...)

Steve Ballmer was pretty good. He couldn't evolve the company to a changing world, but he made shit tons of money for Microsoft. Also I think Nadella has done a really good job: I think they both kind of needed each other to turn Microsoft into what it is today.

Elon.

After Steve left, and Apple was floundering I wanted Sun to buy Apple. I was working with Wall Street Companies at the time and I tried my best to make it happen.

I also worked with Scott McNealy here and there and brought it up to him a couple of times. Once he said to me, “Apple’s not worth having without Jobs, and Apple doesn’t need anyone else if they have Jobs.”

So I knew Sun would never buy Apple.

Imagine if Oracle ended up owning Apple. Unthinkable.

One would hope that Apple+Sun would have been successful enough to never be acquired by Oracle.

> And that’s when Andy lost some credibility with me. I can’t remember exactly what he said about future speeds, but I seem to remember 400 megahertz or maybe even more. Oh, please. You’re claiming 10x more than Motorola?

Discarding numbers out of hand, at least those number actually were fictional. Reminds of a recent comment on HN where people twisted themselves into knots ignoring numbers they could easily reproduce themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590983

I love this story so much because of that paragraph specifically. (I had read it before but couldn't find it anymore. Happy to see it show up again!)

> The only thing more insane was Intel’s 80486 running at 66 megahertz! Can you imagine? I was a physicist, I should know.

It's so perfect! I'm glad he gives us the benefit of his hindsight.

Fantastic read. Once again, the chaotic nature of our future unfolding.

These days, the scientists that advise our countries‘ leaders about the pandemic can make a difference as Chris MacAskill made back then.

Thanks! The fascinating thing is I had been a geophysicist for 10 years before joining NeXT, so all my instincts were to approach this as a scientist. When I see Dr. Fauci speaking the best known truths despite the political winds, it resonates with all I know of science -- speak the truth as best you know it and history will forgive you later.

OP shows up to comment! Love your article! I echo the first comment in your article, about writing a book. There can be never be too many books about 90s era Jobs.

The truth is immutable -- that's what makes it so successful.

The challenge is to ensure that what you say is the truth. It’s often difficult to talk about science casually without erroneously confusing factual evidence with our best, tentative conclusions.

It's crazy to think that if:

1. Apple had bought Be instead of Next.

2. Then OS X would have been based on BeOS instead of OpenStep.

3. Which in turn means it would have been written in C++ instead of Objective-C.

4. Which means iOS wouldn't have chosen Objective-C.

5. Which means Swift would never have been created to address its shortcomings.

Maybe there would have been some alternate-universe Swift to deal with C++'s shortcomings, but it would likely be a very different language. If nothing else, the lack of keyword arguments would lend a very different feel.

Dylan was the C++ alternative that was being developed at Apple before the Jobs coup. It had all kinds of awesome sauce, much much better than Objective-C. Likely a non-Jobs Apple would have used Dylan in conjunction with C++, or Java since that was in ascendency at the time. The hate for any tech that came from Newton or was non-NeXT in general was a Jobs thing.

Also it's nice to think about an alternate universe where we had Newton descended mobile products, rather than iOS.

I wonder then if iOS would’ve ever happened. Probably not, unless they still somehow got Steve Jobs.

Apple at least incidentally got some of the benefit of BeOS, or really, the talent behind it: Dominic Giampaolo, who contributed significantly to BeFS, has been with Apple for some time now working on their file systems. I think he is/was a principal on APFS. I’m sure there are others!

Also, muni! From robot frog!

The Newton team ended up becoming the BeInc team. iPhone might have happened earlier. BeInc in 1999 focus shifted to internet appliances and had tablets on their minds. The iOS revolution would have happened 5 years earlier.

Newton's OS was the iOS of the 90s. A very compelling system.

Apple would not exist if they had bought Be instead. Buying Next brought Steve back, and that's the only thing that kept Apple alive.

Well regardless of whether if Be or NeXT was chosen, Apple was very close to becoming bankrupt in 1997 and without the Microsoft $100M investment in Apple shares, I'm not sure if Apple would be here anyway without it even with Jobs being on board.

Apple lost their lawsuits against Microsoft and had to compromise with a deal with Bill Gates to save themselves. It was at that point Microsoft could have refused at the time and Apple would simply be relegated to the history books.

You have to thank Gates for saving Apple because Jobs did too. [0]

[0] https://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1...

Oh not _this_ again.

IT WAS NOT AN INVESTMENT.

This is a widely-repeated lie.

Gates did not “save” Apple. Microsoft did not “invest” in Apple.

Microsoft stole Apple code. Apple sued. The companies settled out of court.

The famous US$150M payment from MS to Apple was not an investment. It was punitive damages. Microsoft Video for Windows contained code stolen from Apple QuickTime. The money was MS paying the penalty.

Citations:

• Stop the lies! The day that Microsoft 'saved' Apple | ZDNet https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...

• San Francisco Canyon Company - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

That’s a different discussion.

Well you said: "Buying Next brought Steve back, and that's the only thing that kept Apple alive." earlier and the on-going lawsuits were critical for Apple's survival with them having to compromise a deal with Microsoft in order for Bill Gates to save them.

The acquisition choice alone was half of the story even if NeXT or Be were bought and Apple still wouldn't be here without compromising a deal with Microsoft to invest in them since the lawsuits were in Microsoft's favour.

Apple would be dead if Steve Jobs had not come back.

Nothing MS did would have saved Apple if Jobs hadn't come back and turned the company around.

That's the end of the story.

It would be safer to say that history would certainly be different if that outcome happened. But you’re almost there on completing the actual story.

You do realise that to turn the company around in the first place you still need cash / stock in the company? The time that Jobs joined, Apple was close to bankruptcy and couldn’t afford to lose anymore lawsuits. He had to compromise with Gates with a lawsuit settlement to invest $100M+ shares in the Apple and offer Office on the Mac which essentially saved them from bankruptcy. There’s plenty of evidence to explain this outcome.

My point to this argument is regardless of Jobs returning from NeXT or not, he couldn’t have even performed the turn around without the investment from Gates and the company would be bankrupt anyway. The Microsoft settlement and the investment is the reason why Apple still exists today or else Apple would have no doubt be certainly bankrupt and finished. Period.

The money could have come from anywhere, and likely Jobs would have found it. It didn't have to come from MS.

It's not really that cash backed Steve's power play to gain control of the company. They are interrelated.

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609813

“ he would ask who on planet earth is the best person to pull off something impossible and he would do anything to hire them.” Steve

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