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The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

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Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#21
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it is right up at the top of the page.

I looked at the and it says "Apple Confidential: The Acquisition of NeXT". Since the actual title at the top of the page isn't bold or a larger text size I tuned it out thinking it was an advertisement.

I didn't know HN guidelines required one to hunt through the HTML source of a page to get the title.

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI. And why in your hypothetical alternate universe where Apple went with Be instead of NeXT is this a given? You don't know that there'd be no iPod or iPhone, and you don't know that Apple would end up like SGI or Sun. Why do you assume that Jobs and NeXT are so important? Surely history turns on small hinges, but that doesn't necessarily mean…

> there's no reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone, or that it wouldn't be stylish. I agree completely, and I have no doubt there was plenty of good talent at Apple before the Jobs II era. But it's that certain, genuinely rare element that Jobs brought to the company that turned its experiments from good products into iconic successes. To take this fun exercise down the rabbit h…

I did a case study on this in a design class. The design talent at apple didn't change much, but the quality of finished designs coming out did. This had more to do with slashing all the changes between what a designer wants and what the finished product is. When you don't let every middle manager have their say and force a change, then end result is better. And Jobs with his dominating personality was able to make this happen

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#23

> “Amelio now admits that Apple overpaid for NeXT” Really? The result seems to have been worth the price to Apple shareholders.

Personally, I'm wondering how 200m for Be is extravagant and unthinkable and absolutely absurd, but 427m for NextStep is absolutely fine.

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI. And why in your hypothetical alternate universe where Apple went with Be instead of NeXT is this a given? You don't know that there'd be no iPod or iPhone, and you don't know that Apple would end up like SGI or Sun. Why do you assume that Jobs and NeXT are so important? Surely history turns on small hinges, but that doesn't necessarily mean…

Jobs, and the team he hired, including Jon Ive, were the driving force behind the iMac, iPod, and iPhone designs. If Apple felt no need to hire Jobs because they had Be, why would it be reasonable to presume they would still create the same game-changing products that were primarily created by the team Jobs hired, who were not employed at Apple prior to his arrival? Even Tim Cook, Apple's widely respected COO, was hi…

Right, right, but what's to say that the BeOS people wouldn't have done something comparable if they had been given the same resources?

I don't argue at all that what would have been the equivalents of the iPhone and iPod would be very different without Jobs and his people, but I don't think that there's any necessity to presume that these projects would have been failures if they had been executed by the BeOS people instead of the NeXT people.

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#25
post #23

> “Amelio now admits that Apple overpaid for NeXT” Really? The result seems to have been worth the price to Apple shareholders.

Personally, I'm wondering how 200m for Be is extravagant and unthinkable and absolutely absurd, but 427m for NextStep is absolutely fine.

That point was made repeatedly by BeOS fanboys in the wake of the deal, but as the article says, "the BeOS still needed three years of additional expensive development before it could ship (it didn't have any printer drivers, didn't support file sharing, wasn't available in languages other than English, and didn't run existing Mac applications)." In retrospect, Apple gave NeXTSTEP a pretty thorough multi-year overhaul as well, so maybe BeOS would have been fine.

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone, or that it wouldn't be stylish. I agree completely, and I have no doubt there was plenty of good talent at Apple before the Jobs II era. But it's that certain, genuinely rare element that Jobs brought to the company that turned its experiments from good products into iconic successes. To take this fun exercise down the rabbit h…

I did a case study on this in a design class. The design talent at apple didn't change much, but the quality of finished designs coming out did. This had more to do with slashing all the changes between what a designer wants and what the finished product is. When you don't let every middle manager have their say and force a change, then end result is better. And Jobs with his dominating personality was able to make t…

Have you published this case study? I am interested in reading it.

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be either a Sun or an SGI. And why in your hypothetical alternate universe where Apple went with Be instead of NeXT is this a given? You don't know that there'd be no iPod or iPhone, and you don't know that Apple would end up like SGI or Sun. Why do you assume that Jobs and NeXT are so important? Surely history turns on small hinges, but that doesn't necessarily mean…

Or, looking at it the other way, why assume that Apple is so important? Couldn't Jobs have made the NeXT iPod?

NeXT was contractually obliged to not compete with Apple, which pretty much meant they had to stay out of the consumer and home markets, and focus on business and education. That's why their products were very expensive hardcore UNIX workstations (with the best GUI that had ever been put on a UNIX).

If Apple had chosen Be, then Jobs would have had to wait until the combined Apple+Be was well and dead before moving back into the personal computer market.

On the other hand, had NeXT stayed independent, they would have been able to continue their relationship with Sun and the merger of OPENSTEP and Java, and the combined product could have started weakening the Windows monopoly long before OS X became competitive due to the Intel transition. (It's not too hard to imagine the NeXT/Java development environment seriously catching on in enterprise environments circa 1999.)

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs, and the team he hired, including Jon Ive, were the driving force behind the iMac, iPod, and iPhone designs. If Apple felt no need to hire Jobs because they had Be, why would it be reasonable to presume they would still create the same game-changing products that were primarily created by the team Jobs hired, who were not employed at Apple prior to his arrival? Even Tim Cook, Apple's widely respected COO, was hi…

Right, right, but what's to say that the BeOS people wouldn't have done something comparable if they had been given the same resources? I don't argue at all that what would have been the equivalents of the iPhone and iPod would be very different without Jobs and his people, but I don't think that there's any necessity to presume that these projects would have been failures if they had been executed by the BeOS people…

what's to say that the BeOS people wouldn't have done something comparable

Statistics. Lots of people have the resources, but very few do anything comparable to Jobs at Apple (Maybe Flip?). There's certainly no reason to think Apple would have gotten into Mp3 players and mobile phones.

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#29
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone, or that it wouldn't be stylish. I agree completely, and I have no doubt there was plenty of good talent at Apple before the Jobs II era. But it's that certain, genuinely rare element that Jobs brought to the company that turned its experiments from good products into iconic successes. To take this fun exercise down the rabbit h…

I did a case study on this in a design class. The design talent at apple didn't change much, but the quality of finished designs coming out did. This had more to do with slashing all the changes between what a designer wants and what the finished product is. When you don't let every middle manager have their say and force a change, then end result is better. And Jobs with his dominating personality was able to make t…

By promoting Ive, didn't Jobs actually affect a fairly large change in design talent? According to wikipedia:

"He is internationally renowned as the principal designer of the iMac, aluminum and titanium PowerBook G4, MacBook, unibody MacBook Pro, iPod, iPhone, and iPad"

Re: The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

#30
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at the and it says "Apple Confidential: The Acquisition of NeXT". Since the actual title at the top of the page isn't bold or a larger text size I tuned it out thinking it was an advertisement.

I didn't know HN guidelines required one to hunt through the HTML source of a page to get the title.

I thought that my response was an implicit agreement that I was wrong and missed the actual title of the article. Instead I get an intellectually disingenuous response implying that I 'noticed' the of the page because I decided to look at the HTML source for some strange reason.
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