41–43 of 43 posts
> “Amelio now admits that Apple overpaid for NeXT” Really? The result seems to have been worth the price to Apple shareholders.
"now" = 1999 when the book was written. The "Apple is doomed" perma-meme was still going in those days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NEXT had an existing customer base and a larger hardware operation, it's valuation was higher.
Didn't NeXT sell their hardware operation before they sold themselves to Apple? They did have a customer base, and it probably was larger than Be's, though.
> NeXT withdrew from the hardware business in 1993 and the company was renamed NeXT Software Inc; subsequently 300 of the 540 staff employees were laid off.[1] NeXT negotiated to sell the hardware business including the Fremont factory to Canon.[1] Canon later pulled out of the deal. Work on the PowerPC machines was stopped along with all hardware production. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/NeXT#1993.E2....
Wonder how many of those customers followed NeXT to Apple, and whether that and the greater maturity was worth a fifth of a billion dollars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 overhau…
I was going to say... And 200 million dollars pays for a lot of development. (How much do localization and printer drivers cost?)