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Comment by LordKano | Hacker News Reader

My favorite Apple related What-If is What If Gassee hadn't been so greedy when Apple was interested in buying the BeOS?

Oh yeah. I think about that all the time.

I’m thrilled that we have unix with nice GUI that runs Photoshop. That was always my dream machine as a kid.

But boy, was BeOS awesome. The most responsive OS I ever used. The priorities were set straight: user input is king, so is audio and video.

And the aesthetics matched my taste remarkably well. I always thought NeXT was hideous by comparison.

At the time (2000) BeOS was the only interesting enough operating system that I spent days or weeks to pirate over a slow phone connection because it wasn't available to purchase in my country. Even if I used a download manager, the code was corrupted somehow and installing crashed after I tried to boot from the CD. CRC was wrong. I had to retry a few times. Phone bill was crazy and I had to justify it to my parents. But it was worth it, I enjoyed BeOS more than any other OS at the time. Windows, Linux, SkyOs, AtheOS/Syllable.

My favorite what if, too. BeOS was much more innovative than NEXT at the time.

Mine is if Apple actually bought Bungie (which they reportedly missed out on my three days), Halo would have been killed and Bungie dissolved, and who knew what would have happened to Xbox and the console market.

Wouldn't Halo have been released on Mac instead? The earlier Bungie games (the Marathon series) were all Mac exclusive.

Halo was originally demoed at Macworld for the Mac! I'm sure it would have launched, but I can't imagine Apple would be very good at running a games company.

I think money wasn't as big a problem as it's been reported.

Take this snippet from the wikipedia:

"Apple CEO Gil Amelio started negotiations to buy Be Inc., but negotiations stalled when Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassée wanted $300 million;[11] Apple was unwilling to offer any more than $125 million. Apple's board of directors decided NeXTSTEP was a better choice and purchased NeXT in 1996 for $429 million, bringing back Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.[12]" [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS ]

It seems to me that BOTH $300M and $429M are greater than $125M and $429M is greater than $300M.

Having been both a NeXTStep and BeOS developer, I can assure you that NeXTStep was a MUCH more mature product than BeOS. Was it money? maybe. a little. Was NeXTStep better value for money? maybe. probably.

I rankle every time I hear the story about Gassée being greedy. He might have been asking for more than Apple wanted to pay, but I think it's simplistic to say it was only about money. NeXTStep morphed into Rhapsody and MacOS reasonably quickly. And the MetroWerks compiler for BeOS was DEFINITELY buggy.

I think there was no discount Gassée could offer that would make up for the longer time-to-market for a BeOS based next-gen Mac OS.

What's missing from this is what each OS brings to the table. It's entirely possible that they considered BeOS to not have as many desired features as NeXTStep delivered. Whatever the perceived relative value of each, I don't think it makes sense to consider them equivalent, as Apple apparently didn't. In other words, obviously $300 million wasn't too much for Apple to buy an OS for, but they seemed to consider too much to buy that OS for.

This would certainly have destroyed Apple, right? BeOS despite its cult followers was really almost useless and JLG would not have initiated the projects that made Apple a success after acquiring Next.

I agree in the sense that BeOS wouldn't have saved Apple, though this has less to do with the merits of BeOS and more to do with Apple's circumstances. Even with the purchase of NeXT, there was still a considerable time period between December 1996 (when the purchase of NeXT was announced) and March 2001 (when Mac OS X 10.0 was released) where Apple's customers still had to use the aging classic Mac OS (and even then Mac OS X didn't start getting widespread adoption among Mac users until the Jaguar/Panther eras). More to the point, Apple's operating system strategy wasn't the only issue Apple faced. NeXT's OpenStep API and OPENSTEP operating system weren't enough by themselves to turn around Apple; it was Steve Jobs' leadership and the successful launches of products such as the iMac G3 (1998), the iBook G3 (1999) that kept Apple afloat until Mac OS X was released. I don't know if Apple would have survived had Gil Amelio remained in power or had Jean-Louis Gassée took control.

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