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Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

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Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#171

Post by flomo »

mrandish wrote: post #130

I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical mispercepti…

> "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim

Macintosh was in fact not successful for many years, and Apple survived by chanting "Apple II Forever!" at their legacy edu market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50

Also the fail Apple III was Jobs' machine.

Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#172

Post by flomo »

jorisw wrote: post #21
zitterbewegung wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features…

> and Mac OS would have been replaced by something The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded. But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand. Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books

They did a serious technical evaluation of MS WinNT. They also obviously knew about Linux. Sources: same as yours.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#173

Post by pjmlp »

flomo wrote: post #141
linguae wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was…

All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from). Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.) eta: I guess its f…

J2EE was born out of a Objective-C framework based on collaboration between Sun and NeXT, actually.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#174

Post by pjmlp »

linguae wrote: post #139
bobanrocky wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Next an enterprise software company is one of the weirdest takes i’ve ever heard in my 3 decades in the industry. They were a workstation manufacturer with impressively cute UIs and an interesting software stack over MachOS

NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was…

Yes, and the collaboration with Sun heavily influenced how Java ended up looking.

Besides interfaces (protocols), the Java runtime has plenty of Objective-C influences, even JAR files are similar to bundles.

Also as I mention in another comment, J2EE started as an Objective-C framework, later rewriten into Java, as OpenSTEP efforts ramped down.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#175

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #96
yardie wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. They just had very bad supply chain management. A bunch of old Macs sitting in warehouses not selling and too many people on payroll without any clear objectives. As Steve put it, "the ship was sinking and Gil (D'Amelio) was wo…

> Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. So? No shortage of "multi-billion dollar companies" that became footnotes. Blackberry. Nokia. SGI. ... Let's be overly dramatic, cause it's more accurate to how bad they had it.

Nokia is hardly a footnote, they even own UNIX birthplace nowadays.

People only know Nokia Mobiles, however Nokia Neteworks never went away and is more than healthy, owning plenty of key telecommunications infrastructure world wide.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#176

Post by pjmlp »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #155
m0llusk wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craig Federighi is still there, right? He had a lot to do with bringing together NeXT frameworks and enterprise database interfaces. If Tim Cook's successor is truly engineering oriented then we might see them work together to get the old buggy going forward again.

It's batshit that people still talk like apple is lost technically when apple silicon has absolutely crushed, airpods are the default headphone of the world, and macbooks are the best overall package available at all price points. And why? because they arent interested in VR and the glass aesthetic is kind of janky? Absolutely minor issues.

Apple fans live in a bubble, crushed what?

Apple doesn't do servers, they decided to get out of that market.

Apple decided it doesn't care about workstation market any longer.

The desktop market worldwide is about 10%.

The mobile devices market worldwide is about 30%.

Sure it crushed, in the few countries where Apple rules like North America.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#177

Post by pjmlp »

mrandish wrote: post #130

I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical mispercepti…

Until the second coming of Steve Jobs, there were hardly any Apple gear on sale in Portugal.

There was a single importer, Interlog, that you had to physically travel to Lisbon, or order by phone from one magazine ad.

The market was all about C64, Spectrum, Atari, Amiga and PC.

The only place I saw Macs live was a single department on the campus as alternative to UNIX and Windows for Workgroups everywhere, and the secretary on the IT department.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#178

Post by pjmlp »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #164
mrandish wrote: post #130

I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical mispercepti…

It's also just absurd that they assert NeXT is largely forgotten, while writing for an audience very likely to include people fully aware of NeXT.

My graduation thesis was porting a visualisation framework from Objective-C/NeXTSTEP into C++/Windows 95, because my supervisor wanted a way out for his research.

His cube was collecting dust on the office corner.

This is how much hope people had on NeXT before the Apple deal came to be.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#179

Post by pjmlp »

WillAdams wrote: post #52
felixding wrote: post #42

In case you don't know yet, there is a project that tries to bring the NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

I wish that all of these sort of efforts would be folded into GNUstep: gnustep.org and that we would arrive at something useful and easily installed and widely accepted.

They don't even support Objective-C latest, as GCC only supports what NeXT was obliged to upstream.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#180

Post by pjmlp »

robotresearcher wrote: post #134
pjmlp wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read books like the one mentioned above, even if biased, you will see that he did not do pretty well with NeXT, it was actually a mess. Outside the impressive hardware and NeXTSTEP, NeXT was bleeding most of the time, had it not been for a few generous VCs that had Steve Jobs in high regard, NeXT would not have survived until the moment of Apple's acquisition proposal.

> did not do pretty well with NeXT Having your company acquired by Apple, having them base vital parts of their business on your technology, and having your leadership merged into theirs could be seen as a successful outcome. Did the NeXT investors make out OK?

Out of sheer luck, BeOS could have been the lucky one instead.

Those VCs had enough money for us to worry about them.

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