
Gassée: Thank God Apple chose NeXT over my BeOS - Anon84
http://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-steve-jobss-next-over-my-beos/
======
thaumaturgy
Gassée is just full of shit here. I was a die-hard BeOS fan even before R5. It
really was a remarkable operating system, way, way ahead of its day.

But Gassée fumbled it when courting Apple [1], and then sold it to Palm, who
promptly killed it. It has taken years for a dedicated group of followers to
rebuild it from scratch, and by the time they finished doing that, computer
hardware had advanced so much that there was very little demand for a high-
performance operating system in the desktop market.

So, I guess he can claim to be glad that his baby died a lonely and ultimately
unremarkable death thanks largely to his own mishandling of it, but it sounds
like sour grapes to me.

[1]: I remember reading an article a while back about the meeting between
Amelio, Gassée, and Jobs. Reportedly, Gassée thought BeOS was a shoe-in,
despite asking an astronomical figure for the sale, so he showed up to the
meeting completely unprepared. Steve, in typical Steve fashion, showed up
fully prepared and blew Gassée right out of the water. I've spent fifteen
minutes searching for that article, and I can't find it [2] -- and it might be
apocryphal anyway, according to a post on Slashdot
([http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129504&cid=108...](http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=129504&cid=10804161)).
Still, Gassée and Jobs have had an uneasy relationship in the past
([http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Handicapped.txt)).

[2]: Woo, found it! <http://macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml>

edit: aside from that, it was great to see and hear Bill Atkinson, and Gassée
had some funny quotes.

~~~
flomo
> computer hardware had advanced so much that there was very little demand for
> a high-performance operating system in the desktop market.

That was kinda the problem. BeOS was built around the 1990s mentality that PC
hardware was quite limited, and a light fast OS was more important than
security, robustness, etc. It ran like greased lightning, but really wasn't a
whole lot more advanced than other contemporary consumer OSes.

Next, on the other hand, was always intended to be a workstation OS (with
'enterprise frameworks') and was a much better fit for the hardware of the
2000s. With MS moving to the NT line, it would have been a huge mistake for
Apple to adopt a single-user OS like Be.

~~~
bodyfour
Well said.

Back in the day, I actually used both the NeXTcube and a BeBox (although
neither as a primary environment)

The NeXT environment enamored everybody who was introduced to it... for a day
or two. Them almost everybody moved away from it because it was so... damn..
slow. The base cube only had 8MB of RAM (a decent amount in those days!) which
wasn't nearly enough for the big heavy frameworks it used. NeXT had to
retrofit all of the cubes with 40MB SCSI drives _just for swap_. The display
postscript system was elegant (it provided a common display engine for both
the screen and the NeXT-brand laser printer, for instance) but ate up precious
cycles of the 68030. The magnetic-optical drive that supposedly was the future
of personal storage had horrible performance (although the drives mercifully
gave out after a few years anyway)

In short, the NeXTcube's we had were the machines everybody loved but few
wanted to actually _use_.

The BeBox by contrast was nothing if not zippy! There were too many missing
bits for it to really be my main environment, but you really felt that you
were using the future of operating systems. After years of using UIs that
always had at least _some_ lag the BeBox's instantaneous response was almost a
shocking experience.

When Apple was quite publicly looking for an OS to buy I was certainly rooting
for Be. It seemed to fit their needs perfectly: it already ran on PowerPC and
its responsiveness would have been great for the multimedia creators that were
Apple's bread-and-butter. When they went with NeXT instead I thought it was
just another of Apple's classic missteps. I couldn't see why they were
hitching their wagon to an OS that was last decade's news.

Clearly I was wrong, even if you ignore the Steve Jobs factor. The hardware
advances underway quickly made the amazing responsiveness of BeOS moot; now
every OS feels like the snappy BeBox did in 1995. As memory sizes grew the
NeXTstep frameworks came into their own (probably if the NeXTcube could have
had 1GB of RAM it would have been fine!)

To put it simply, Be built an OS in 1996 that was perfect for 1996. NeXT build
an OS in 1989 that was suited for the 2000s.

I don't mean that last bit as a pure complement, by the way. The "too far
ahead of its time" is a cliche about failed tech products. Building something
that only works with hardware 10+ years in the future is hardly a recipe for
success. It's only through the accidents of history that NeXTstep got its
chance to shine years after its original failure. 99% of products in that
position only get to be footnotes.

~~~
jonhendry
"(probably if the NeXTcube could have had 1GB of RAM it would have been
fine!)"

That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long.

NeXTSTEP was quite nice with a 16MB 25MHz 68040, and a decent hard drive, as
seen in the NeXTStation from 1990. Even the price was competitive if you
didn't mind the 2-bit greyscale monitor.

NeXTSTEP 3.3, running in color on a Pentium Pro (or better), or even better a
1994 HP PA-RISC workstation, was SWEET.

~~~
bodyfour
> That 68030/optical disk/40MB swap drive era didn't last very long.

And rightly so. But given that the hardware was built (at great expense!)
specifically to run that OS, I think it's fair to consider their performance
together.

Certainly the gap between "the hardware the OS needs" and "what is readily
available" shrunk as time went on. The slabs with more RAM were substantially
better than the cubes had been. I think calling NeXTstep with 16MB "quite
nice" is still being generous though - my recollections of 16MB NeXTstep was
"swaps less". With 32MB it started to get pretty reasonable but, gosh, that
was $1000+ of RAM back then.

I knew people who ran NeXTstep on Intel but they tended to turn into early
linux adopters. X11+fvwm (or, later, AfterStep) was more responsive on their
hardware.

By the time NeXTSTEP 3.3 came out (and NeXT basically left the OS game,
instead focusing on OpenStep and WebObjects) the performance gap was a lot
smaller, at least if you could afford a really nice computer. When it
reemerged as a product 5 years later as OS/X 10.0 that gap had evaporated.
Suddenly it was living in its moment, 12 years after its debut.

And hell, now the OS that I used to curse for its unreasonable hardware
demands comfortably runs on my cell phone. Technology is funny that way.

------
kylec
I, too, think that getting Steve back was the right move, with NeXTSTEP as an
added bonus. I'm just sad that BeOS died an undignified death - a few years
ago I bought a BeOS CD off eBay and was very impressed with the OS. It was
more responsive on a 100MHz machine than Windows XP was on a 2GHz machine.
Yes, I know there's Haiku, but they're really just catching up to where BeOS
was 15 years ago. Imagine what BeOS would be like today if it continued to be
developed and improved.

~~~
DanBC
I too miss the alternative OSs. It'd be great to see what BeOS could have
been, along with OS/2.

~~~
agildehaus
Haiku shows a lot of promise despite how few developers they have. You should
really give it a spin, especially when they hit beta.

If they finish their Wifi implementation (it works, even with WPA2 now, just
doesn't have a complete GUI), bring their Webkit browser up-to-date, and get a
bit more stability it would be a pleasant system to use on a day-to-day basis.

I honestly think if it had the momentum of a larger community, it could easily
be open source's triumph on the desktop.

------
WiseWeasel
I loved Gassée's Freudian slip at 0:10:44:

"... now I'm a vulture capi... er, venture capitalist."

His story of getting himself fired from Apple by Scully a bit prior to that
was also quite amusing and revealing of his frank nature.

I also loved Bill Atkinson's story at 18:17 paraphrasing Steve Jobs convincing
him to drop out of med school and join Apple:

"You know how fun it is to surf on the front edge of a wave? Now think about
the poor guy dog-paddling on the tail end of the same wave... it's no fun! You
go the same distance, you know, but this guy's just eating the back of the
wave; this guy's surfing. Come to Apple and surf!"

And finally, for those wanting to skip the bulk of the video and go straight
to the part with Gassée discussing NeXT and Be, it's at 58:22.

------
Steko
15 years later and he's still trying to spin his terrible negotiating into a
positive.

Company worth $80 million.

Buyout offer at $125 million.

Hold out for $275 million.

Get nothing and go out of business.

~~~
jstanderfer
This isn't completely accurate is Be Inc. did successfully IPO in 1999 and won
a lawsuit against Microsoft.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, even the investors who didn't cash out at the IPO did eventually end up
with $35 million for the company: $11 million from the 2001 asset sale to
Palm, and $24 million from the 2002 settlement with Microsoft.

------
scg
If you're curious, here's the HackerNews homepage and a few sample apps on
Haiku, the operating system inspired by BeOS: <http://bit.ly/sTLZne>

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Link redirects to
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2038028/public/Screen%20Shot%202011-...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2038028/public/Screen%20Shot%202011-11-12%20at%203.53.45%20AM.png)

I personally don't like going to sites without knowing their address. To
expand shortlinks, try <http://longurl.org/>

~~~
zmanji
Alternatively you can append `+` to the end of any short url and get the same
information.

~~~
X-Istence
Is that true for ALL short URL services?

------
easp
Remember too, NeXT didn't just have a desktop OS, it had an enterprise
application framework, which Apple used to build the Apple Online Store. That
may or may not have been an important factor at the time, but given the
inroads Microsoft was making in enterprise backoffices at the time, it was
probably a consideration for Apple's board and management.

------
frogly
I loved BeOS back in the day. Such a beautiful and clean interface. I loved
the philosophy behind it, and the disdain for 'cruft' as they called it. I
still have the discs lying around somewhere...

~~~
wmf
BeOS's idealism also held it back. They didn't want any ported apps;
everything was supposed to be written from scratch. So no Mozilla, no Java,
etc. Unfortunately, the BeOS market was never large enough to justify writing
large native apps, so they just never happened.

------
mcritz
I keep hearing that Apple acquired NeXT over Be because of every reason aside
from quality of the technology.

Was BeOS worse than NeXTSTEP?

~~~
Nelson69
There is a lot of emotion people have in a question like this.

I think the best answer is BeOS wasn't as complete as NeXT. Specifically it
had a fairly poor network stack (it was being retooled around the time BeOS
became part of palm, no idea if it was finished)

It lacked the kind of print support MacOS and NeXT had. It lacked the same
caliber of internationalization. All fixable stuff but also all stuff
requiring some investment.

It also remains to be seen how well BeOS would actually scale, it was an RTOS
with a UI, it could absolutely do sexy stuff on low powered machines of the
day, that doesn't mean it could run a 12core dual i7 machine well. Maybe it
could, we really don't know.

~~~
lcargill99
iZ Corporation's RADAR runs on BeOS. It's a DAW system of exceedingly high
quality. We can only guess how well it'd scale, but Be looks to me not to be
the sort of software that helps sell hardware.

------
SimHacker
BeOS was missing one important thing that NeXT Step had: Jobs Control.

------
emehrkay
I am at this point in the Steve Jobs book. Apple was considering using Windows
as well. Bill Gates was furious when Apple bought NeXT, he really wanted Apple
to run windows.

~~~
kls
They where not considering it, the CHRP Mac's had a PPC version of NT that ran
on it, I know because I installed that abomination one time just to see. It
was probably the buggiest version of windows I have ever seen.

~~~
philwelch
No CHRP Mac ever shipped. The closest anyone ever came was Motorola with the
StarMax 6000. The CHRP spec evolved into the New World ROM architecture used
from the original iMac to the end of the PowerPC era, though.

There was indeed a PPC version of NT that was designed for CHRP. But, separate
from that, Apple also seriously considered using a custom version of NT with a
Mac-like GUI to replace the Mac OS. It was one of many options under
consideration along with Be, NeXT, and Solaris.

~~~
kls
Sorry my post does look to reflect that they did, but yes the full CHRP never
shipped, but the portions that allowed NT to run on the PPC did. There was a
working version of NT that ran on Apples and the clones.

------
Mpdreamz
Didn't apple choose NeXT largely in part of beOS notoriously hard to skin
nature?

~~~
spooneybarger
hard to skin nature?

~~~
sharmajai
I think hard to change the visual look and feel is what he means.

