Well, NeXT got bailed out by being bought by Apple. I don't think you can really call it success. I mean you can call it that but it's not by any yardstick I'd use. It's like you're in last place in the race and your Mom hands you a trophy.
If Apple's successive post-Jobs CEOs (Sculley and Amelio) hadn't maneuvered the behemoth into a blind alley, NeXT would indeed have faded eventually. But with full access to Apple's resources, the NeXT team were able to turn things around. Sitting on the top shelf in my office, gathering dust (I turn it on every couple of years) there's a cube. A nice shiny silver cube that runs something that looks eerily like NeXTStep, if you squint at it, with a classic MacOS emulation bag on the side. If that's not a statement by Steve Jobs (and a trophy of success, to have the elbow-room to make such a statement) I don't know what is!
Citation? This is an interesting factoid, so I googled for about 10 minutes, and couldn't find any numbers on how many total newtons were sold, and how much apple lost on them. Really interested in any supporting data you might have.
The link you provided, btw, states, "Although the exact scale of the Newton losses remains unconfirmed, some sources say that the company sunk a billion dollars into the Newton and recouped only about one quarter of that amount in sales."
"Some Sources" might have merit if that was the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times (though, in both cases, those "sources" might have ulterior motives") - but they aren't useful in this context.
Also, as a later poster indicated, losing $750mm over the lifetime of a multi-year project, is a lot (lot) different than losing $1B/year.
I'm still intrigued, and would love if (anyone) could track down some data on the Newton, and it's losses. Or even how many units it actually sold.
The Newton was hardly a money-maker, but IIRC, Apple invested somewhere north of $500 million over the course of the Newton project, and sold about $150 million in units. Many of its sales were the last models, notably the MP2100, largely because these units had such impressive processors for their time (162MHz StrongARM). That is, the Newton got Steved just when it started picking up.
More importantly, as part of the Newton project, Apple invested $1.5M in ARM, and made some $800M in profit from that investment. That ARM investment and early Newton-driven design is still reaping dividends in Apple's current low-power devices.
Wow. That is fascinating.
OT: I wish their was a way to delete my fucking account. This site is a bunch of armchair CTO's who don't know their eye sockets from their assholes.
Not sure how that would have gone with all the geeks that went for Mac OS X without an Apple background, just because it is UNIX.
It was also "unixy" enough without having all the Unix baggage.
That has had me rethinking your what-if. I don't think the unix is a big deal - the Be and Haiku terminals feel unixy, and BeOS offered a big subset of the unix system calls even into v3 (time of Apple purchase).
By v4.0 (two years after), BeOS had become a remarkable system for single-user, close-to-the-metal computing. The user experience was very fast and stable. The system gave a skilled developer easy access to video and audio.
I've been trying out haiku again this morning. They've done good work. It now boots on my thinkpad, but, like OSX or Windows, feels sluggish in a way that Be never did. It needs some serious performance tuning. They need to get their out-of-the-box development experience sorted out too. OSX has done an excellent job of that.
And as someone that will gladly do C++ development, it felt really nice to have an OS done in it.
But I feel Apple would have needed a different type of marketing to attract developers back then.
When I was at CERN they were selling us "It is BSD/NeXT with a nice UI" story.
Thanks for the link, by the way.
Yeah - I've always been unable to describe that weird connection to the platform, what you call the Amiga feeling.
Going to boot back into haiku now and see if I can get blender working :)
While Apple saved NeXT, it was a near thing for both companies. Without the 'loan' Jobs was able to secure from Microsoft, it's doubtful Apple would still exist as a separate entity. Whether it was Sun, Oracle, or another company, it would probably remain today as an object framework and not much else.
Remember at the time that Apple had been running at a loss for the last year or two before this and had started to cut R&D funding. This is when Apple was struggling to hold onto about 2-4% of the personal computing market, dropping from about 10% just a year or two before. They had experienced a precipitous drop across the board, in technology, sales, and financials.
It was quite feasible to entertain thoughts of takeovers, hostile or otherwise, from Sun and Oracle. Either of them (and MSFT) had the ability to make it happen at the time. Oracle priced the effort at about $700m but expected a worst case scenario of about $1.5-2b. The motivation was mainly a "FU" move by Ellison to put Jobs back in control of Apple, but floated as a way of accelerating their JavaStation and client computing vision.
This was also when Apple laptops were burning people before burning people was cool. :-)
It's similar to the break Microsoft got when IBM inadvertently handed it the PC OS business. It was a great opportunity, but not every company would have leveraged that opportunity to dominate computing for two decades.
If Jean Louis Gassee got the same opportunity for BeOS that Jobs got for NeXT, do you think he would have gone on to create the world's most valuable corporation?
When I was at CERN Apple was giving sessions selling UNIX heart of Mac OS X as a way to attract UNIX fans to the platform, which many enjoyed given the OS's pedigree.
Not sure if the same would have worked wit BeOS as base, although I really enjoyed it as OS and follow Haiku's development.
Apple watchers from the time often joked that NeXT bought Apple for negative $400 million. Buying NeXT is what turned Apple from a perpetually "beleaguered" niche computer company (remember that word?) to one of the most valuable companies on the planet.
The modern Apple, Inc. is much more NeXT Inc. than it is Apple Computer, Inc.