

The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X - elblanco
http://www.macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml

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wmf
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.

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mortenjorck
Indeed, this might at least be better titled "The Day They Almost Decided To
Put BeOS On The Mac Instead Of OS X"

But that's a genuinely fascinating alternate-history concept -- Windows NT was
never likely, but from the story, it seems as if Be almost made it, foiled
only by its founder's hubris. What if Jean-Louis Gassée had settled for one of
Apple's numerous offers? It seems he had it in the bag for months, holding out
for more until he got too greedy and Apple turned to Jobs.

If Gassée hadn't been blinded by the dollar signs, what would have become of
BeOS in Apple's hands? Would an alternate-universe, Be-based OSX have still
saved the company? Would Jobs have gone down with his NeXT ship, and simply
laid low for the 2000s? We'd have no iPod, no iPhone; Apple in 2010 would be
either a Sun or an SGI.

Or maybe it couldn't have happened any other way. Maybe Jobs knew Gassée would
push his luck too far and timed NeXT's overtures to Apple. Maybe he had done
all the research, knew all the angles, and had planned this from the start.
Maybe, just maybe, there was no force of nature that could stop Jobs' return
to Apple.

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cookiecaper
>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 the
decision to go with Be would have doomed Apple to failure. Things would
probably be much different today with the actual products, but there's no
reason to believe that Apple wouldn't have released an MP3 player or a phone,
or that it wouldn't be stylish.

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mediaman
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 hired by Steve in 1998.

~~~
cookiecaper
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 instead of the NeXT
people.

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dasil003
_what's to say that the BeOS people wouldn't have done something comparable_

Statistics. Lots of people have the resources, but very few do anything
comparable to Jobs at Apple (Maybe Flip?). There's certainly no reason to
think Apple would have gotten into Mp3 players and mobile phones.

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jacobolus
> _“Amelio now admits that Apple overpaid for NeXT”_

Really? The result seems to have been worth the price to Apple shareholders.

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gwern
Personally, I'm wondering how 200m for Be is extravagant and unthinkable and
absolutely absurd, but 427m for NextStep is absolutely fine.

~~~
wmf
That point was made repeatedly by BeOS fanboys in the wake of the deal, but as
the article says, "the BeOS still needed three years of additional expensive
development before it could ship (it didn't have any printer drivers, didn't
support file sharing, wasn't available in languages other than English, and
didn't run existing Mac applications)." In retrospect, Apple gave NeXTSTEP a
pretty thorough multi-year overhaul as well, so maybe BeOS would have been
fine.

~~~
gwern
> In retrospect, Apple gave NeXTSTEP a pretty thorough multi-year overhaul as
> well, so maybe BeOS would have been fine.

I was going to say... And 200 million dollars pays for a lot of development.
(How much do localization and printer drivers cost?)

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

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bediger
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.

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leej
great movie idea!

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jister
if ("Windows" == "controversial") views > more

