I wonder why exactly Copland went off the rails, do we have anyone from the Copland team here on HN who can share their view?
For example, there was no support for screensavers in MacOS classic; screen savers such as After Dark hacked that in by patching various OS calls. There was no support for Adobe type 3 fonts; Adobe Type Manger hacked that in. There was no support for showing a row of extension icons on-screen as they loaded; an informal protocol was created by various extension-writers to support that.
I actually maintained a "Crash Log" at the entrance to my cubicle, recording how many times a given application had crashed that day/week/month/year and ultimately extended it to record even the preceding years.
Quark XPress 6 required a colour-coding which reached into the hundreds for a given year (my recovery folder got cleared out once a week and had hundreds of GBs of files in it most Fridays), and Adobe Acrobat wasn't far behind (but no recover folder), while the OS itself was quite reliable --- work done using TeXshop and other Cocoa apps rarely crashed or had problems.
It was a big change from NeXTstep, where I can only recall one software crash, and two hardware faults (SCSI) during college, which was the high-water mark of my GUI experience, w/ a NeXT Cube (w/ Wacom ArtZ and a scanner) and NCR-3125 (running Go Corp.'s PenPoint) and Apple Newton MessagePad all connected together using a serial interface to write papers and take notes and do graphic design work on.
Which is basically one of the reasons Mac OS X actually ended up shipping. You got a Classic VM in an OS that otherwise didn't care about making breaking changes, but you had a sliding scale from Classic to Carbon to Cocoa to fix your software eventually. Also OpenDoc got thrown out of consideration very early in the house cleaning process at Apple.
It wasn’t actually a completely lost cause. They could have shipped it in six months if they’d just simplified the damn thing to a native UI toolbox on top of a microkernel, API additions cut to the bone. (One of the problems with that plan, though, is that product marketing wants all the features you can cram in, so you have to be willing to tell them “no” too.)
Anyway, Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock also didn’t know how to manage software projects, so instead of fixing what they had, they decided to buy outside tech. Which means we got the iPod, the iPhone, etc. But, in context, they were total dumbfucks; they could have gotten there with what they had.
That is why even if you were right, within Steve Jobs there would not Apple.
World need to have a mix or proper mix of important things. The reason why communism fall always not because it’s ideal but because it is wrong in human level. You need a mix. A proper mix.
Gil Amelio was not a great CEO by any measure, but he deserves credit for helping save Apple. He uttered the first "no". "No", we are not going to ship this Copeland thing, it's hopeless, we either have to buy another OS and build from that, or sell the company because we're out of time.
See postings to usenet on comp.sys.next.*
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.advocacy/c/OLc8T6KO...
Apple has pulled off a number of surprisingly successful "brain transplant" transitions for the Mac platform, including moving from 68K to PowerPC to intel to ARM. In each case, the user experience remained largely the same and old apps continued to run via emulation.