111–120 of 267 posts
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10 shares of AAPL in 1996 isn't that large of a windfall today. The stock has had 3 splits 2:1,2:1,7:1 in that time frame. 10 shares in 1996 would have had a cost of $7.50 and a present market value of ~$32,000.
Well, $7.50 in 1996 dollars is apparently worth $11.67 today in 2016. $32,000 doesn't sound like too bad a return.
The standard snark is that NeXT bought Apple for -$400 million.
This is great. I mean, the fact that NeXT tech was preserved and made popular is great.
Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and Linux - because that would be NEXTSTEP's legacy.
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Considering the contributions NeXT technology has made to OS X and iOS, no that's an oversimplification.
Jobs brought in a great team from NeXT - like Jon Rubinstein, who oversaw the development of the iMac and the iPod, and later came as close to rescuing Palm, Inc. (with the Pre) as was possible.
> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, 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.
I have no doubt in my mind that this was the plan for Apple as well. Whoever managed that deal on the Apple side must have been on their toes. Of course, the investment paid off handsomely for MS, but I'm quite sure that this wasn't their intent.
So while I think it is true that Apple required the cash infusion they got, they managed the situation masterfully. Whether or not they could have secured funding some other way, we'll never know because they took MS's money.
> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, 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.
>> 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.
The totality of Nextstep (kernel, os, obj-c runtime/component model, frameworks, gui layer, tooling, expert teams who built and maintained these things, etc, etc) was much greater than Palm or QNX, let alone something yet unbuilt 'based on Linux'.
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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…
I don't understand the Taligent reference. Taligent happened while Jobs was out of Apple -- it was a competitor to NeXT back when everything was about "object-oriented desktops", and Jobs didn't like them, much like he didn't like OpenDoc, for pretty good technical reasons. It's not surprising that Taligent went nowhere, same as OpenDoc.
I did like the concept of People, Places, and Things. It is a shame that little pieces of a good idea can be lost because of the overall failure.
>> 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.
I think the fact that Palm's technology was designed for mobile and NeXT's wasn't turned out to be a huge advantage in the long run. If Apple had planned to build the iPhone in 1996, they probably would have bought Palm and ended up with something a far cry short of the iPhone as we know it, for obvious reasons. Palm's OS was designed for what mobile hardware was capable of in the 90s, whereas NeXT's OS was designed…
Palm OS wasn't even suitable for 90s mobile hardware. It was a buggy mess.
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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.
NeXTStep 3.0 used the NS namespace; 2.0 and earlier was NX.
> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, 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.