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Er... interesting revisionism, here. That acquisition didn't do much to save Apple from the financial hole it had dug for itself.
Bill Gates is really what saved Apple back then.
My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
My dad remembers his broker calling him up at various times and trying to get him to buy Apple because it was basically worthless (which is also why he didn't buy it). Wouldn't have taken much to make a lot of money. Of course, most people, even if that lucky, would have sold early iPod era thinking "This can't continue" and wouldn't have made the profits they would if they held until the last year or two.
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Thanks. Maybe I can get to it over the Holidays.
I found Becoming Steve Jobs by Schlender & Tetzeli to be a much more informative read than Isaacson's official biography, particularly on the intersection of Jobs/Next/Pixar/Apple.
"I’d argue that this is probably the single most important tech acquisition of all time." However, it was not Apple's first choice. They first attempted to acquire Be Inc. (BeOS) but Jean-Louis Gassée held out for $275 million and lost the deal in a surprise move when Apple, instead, bought NeXT.
Now that would be an interesting alternate timeline! / MacBook Pro with Blinkenlights bar /
>> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, but made the iPhone, iPad and more possible as well. What prevents Apple from making the iPhone and iPad? They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux... What was the key? BSD? Objective-C? I don't see those being that important. The one thing NeXT did enable them to do was the PowerPC to Intel switch.
Steve Jobs, the team he assembled, and a willingness to cut. Apple at the time was running the Newton which, although I loved programming it, was a totally wrong direction. It just wasn't connected as Mr. Jobs explained in his Q&A[1]. He built a much better OS than the Mac at that time. Palm couldn't build the iPhone with Palm and had to build WebOS. QNX is amazing, but its UI and client developer library wasn't ther…
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This is demonstrably false. MacOS Copland was scrapped in favor of a descendant of NeXTSTEP that became MacOS X. Hundreds (thousands?) of API calls in both Desktop iOS development are prefaced NS_ ... that is NeXTSTEP
This is ridiculous pedantry, but the "NS" prefix actually means "Next / Sun". It was introduced in OpenStep [1], which was supposed to become Sun's GUI layer on Solaris until Java happened. Before the OpenStep revamp, the class prefix used in NeXTSTEP was "NX". I think there are still some lingering NX* classes/functions you might see in AppKit stack traces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
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This is ridiculous pedantry, but the "NS" prefix actually means "Next / Sun". It was introduced in OpenStep [1], which was supposed to become Sun's GUI layer on Solaris until Java happened. Before the OpenStep revamp, the class prefix used in NeXTSTEP was "NX". I think there are still some lingering NX* classes/functions you might see in AppKit stack traces. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep
That's an amazing factoid. "NS" standing for NeXTSTEP would then be a popular misconception, then. It also introduces an interesting hypothetical of what if Sun ended up adopting OpenStep, if Java was not developed in time or fell through or whatever.
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Thanks. Maybe I can get to it over the Holidays.
I found Becoming Steve Jobs by Schlender & Tetzeli to be a much more informative read than Isaacson's official biography, particularly on the intersection of Jobs/Next/Pixar/Apple.
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Can you please mention from which author since I imagine there are more than one?
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is generally considered the definitive biography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_(book)
Johny Ives says of Isaacson's book, "My regard couldn’t be any lower."
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Same with Pixar/Disney/-$7.4B.
Yeah, Pixar totally "bought" Disney Animation and, to a lesser extent, the theme parks. I'm told John Lasseter has been deeply involved in them. That would be going home for him, he worked at Disneyland as a youth.