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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

#31

Post by inovica »

cookiecaper wrote: post #24
mediaman wrote: post #13

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…

My take on it is that at the time Apple didn't have a visionary and whatever you think of Steve Jobs (like or loath) he is a visionary and when he turns his attention to something he demands perfection. The iPod was game-changing and the iPhone I believe has been more so (as nobody was doing what the iPhone has, but they're all copying it now). Large companies with corporate layers usually end up dumbing down products and it takes a focused (and powerful) person or team to push these things through. How Apple will fair without Steve Jobs is anyones guess - it depends if he has managed to implant the desire for perfection as a culture there now... Time will tell

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

#32

Post by lallysingh »

tybris wrote: post #18

To be honest, if Windows NT had lived up to its promise it would have been the greatest OS of all time.

Ugh, I remember what they promised in Cairo. What was promised wasn't realistic; making it inappropriate to consider NT as having failed by not meeting expectations.

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

#34

Post by pavlov »

mediaman wrote: post #13
cookiecaper wrote: post #12

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…

Jonathan Ive was already employed by Apple before 1997. The Newton eMate, a sort of proto-netbook running the Newton OS, was designed by him.

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

#35

Post by elblanco »

pyre wrote: post #30
elblanco wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You were probably just nostalgic for the simplicity of late 90's web code.

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

#36

Post by kls »

gwern wrote: post #23
jacobolus wrote: post #9

> “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.

NEXT had an existing customer base and a larger hardware operation, it's valuation was higher.

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

#37

Post by kls »

wmf wrote: post #2

This is a good story (it contains some details that I don't think were publicly revealed back in 1996) but the title is misleading since NT plays a very minor part. Edit: I'm not sure which embarrasses me more; the fact that this old story got 30 points or that my trivial comment got 16 points.

Actually at the time Apple was working towards what was termed the Common Hardware Reference Platform or CHRP in which the main goal was to be able to run the new NT being developed, on Apple hardware. It actually happened too, for a brief time there was a NT 4 PPC version that ran on the CHRP platform. The thinking was we will give it our all and if all best efforts fail we will just become a high-end windows platform. The management at the time really did not understand the dynamics of their customer bases.

To this day, I am dumbfounded as to how they survived. That first iMac landed at a crucial time and took off like wildfire. As well someone started listening to the right people because if I remember correctly there was some pretty open Steve hating on the board, how he ascended to power again is another one in a million shot.

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

#38

Post by bediger »

kls wrote: post #36
gwern wrote: post #23

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.

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.

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

#39

Post by bediger »

tybris wrote: post #18

To be honest, if Windows NT had lived up to its promise it would have been the greatest OS of all time.

Isn't that anthropomorphizing NT a bit? I mean, it's an OS, not a being. And the "promise" turned out to be mostly hype, at least in the 1995-1996 time frame. "A better Unix than Unix", "The Best Designed Operatings System", stuff like that is almost totally illogical, just an emotional appeal really.

If you read Helen Custer's "Inside Windows NT" you might have been excused for thinking you were reading about Mach 2.5, but I'm not sure what relation the OS described by "Inside Windows NT" (1st ed) had to the real Windows NT 3.1. So I'm still confused about what "promise" NT had.

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

#40

Post by jonhohle »

elblanco wrote: post #19
cookiecaper wrote: post #12

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…

Apple at the time was heading fast for the way of Commodore. Tied to past greatness and completely unable to move their technology into the present. The OS was being left behind, the systems had all the stylish elegance of a car battery, and all efforts were focused on turning Apple, a great place for artists and designers, into IBM. In short, Apple was failing fast. Jobs came in, and after wrestling with quickly inc…

This: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:15-inch-titanium-powerbook... replaced the Pismo and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBook_redjar.jpg was a new product line
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