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Sadly, I haven't gotten to it yet. That's embarrassing to admit, but my time for pleasure reading has gotten frustratingly short.
It actually reads like a solid fiction book, except that it isn't. You can skip a few dozen "romance" pages here and there and then it's really worth your while.
My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
I remember being in college and Apple stock was at $7. I had some money in an E-Trade account, but Apple was in such dire straits that I figured a better use for $7 was to buy lunch at Chick-Fil-A. There was a good chance the lunch would be around longer than Apple would! I don't even want to think about how much a couple thousand $$ of Apple stock would have been worth at its peak.
"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.
/ MacBook Pro with Blinkenlights bar /
My father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
Crystal balls that see the future are certainly in short supply. But if I had one there's a lot better ways to make money than using it to buy 10 shares of Apple 20 years ago.
I was working at Pixar at the time and a couple of us went out to lunch when the news broke to figure out What It All Meant. We passed Steve's office on the way out and one of our party, who had worked with him since early Apple days, congratulated him. The big question was whether they would keep the Unix plumbing visible and useful, or would it be buried under some API layer of no use to us Unix graybeards. Fortuna…
That's great to hear. Have you read Jobs' biography and do you think everything said about Pixtar around those times are accurately portrait?
I was applying for jobs back in 1997, and during that time they had a huge career fair called the Brass Ring fair. Employers from around Silicon Valley would have booths and hire people on the spot. I distinctly remember Apple's booth being completely barren, they were practically dead to most engineers. How the tables have turned since then. The big question is, Apple's path appears to be following the path after St…
It would be great if someone wrote an article about the alternate histories where Apple chose other strategies. For instance, what an Apple-Be merge would have resulted in, what kind of products and tech. And how NeXT would have lasted without Apple.
>> 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.
Err, Steve Jobs and having an actual vision?
>They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux...
Well, Palm was worth more than Apple at the time, so no. And if Palm wasn't, BlackBerry, Nokia etc surely were, and they didn't make the iPhone.
And Microsoft was putting one half-assed PC/tablet hybrid after another for a decade before the iPad, and only had crap to show for it.
It would be great if someone wrote an article about the alternate histories where Apple chose other strategies. For instance, what an Apple-Be merge would have resulted in, what kind of products and tech. And how NeXT would have lasted without Apple.
Wow, I haven't heard someone mention BeOs in over a decade. That was a pretty OS, but I'd take that black NeXT case any day. Those NeXT boxes were so cool.
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As far as I know, Apple has never used Linux for anything in any capacity. OSX's kernel is XNU, and it's a hybrid of BSD code and Mach.
So OSX has nothing to do with unix/linux?