
A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018) - ingve
https://www.cake.co/conversations/g4CP6zJ/the-secret-call-to-andy-grove-that-may-have-helped-apple-buy-next
======
coldcode
I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I
left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited
talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it
was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was
sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel
were nice, the smart people from NeXT made a huge difference, but Steve was,
Steve.

If I'd know this would happen I would have never left.

~~~
jhbadger
Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and
Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other
option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too,
BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple
needed _something_ from outside.

~~~
agloeregrets
Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they
really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost
immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and
him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and
brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on
hand on fire. The business turnaround story is amazing, forget the creative
factor and all that, the only reason Apple is still around is that he walked
in and rapidly course corrected a company that wasn’t even his anymore. He
wasn’t anything when Gil bought NeXT, his title was just “Advisor” to the CEO.
A hilarious title. The magic of the next purchase was that it saved Apple way
more money than it cost by effectively letting in a “Good” virus that infected
the company’s management and cut the cruft fast. ‘97 Steve had had 10 years of
startup OPs pain under his belt.

~~~
icedchai
Classic MacOS had multitasking (cooperative...), but it was missing memory
protection. The same was true of earlier 68K-based OSes (Atari, Amiga.)

~~~
btilly
The problem with cooperative multitasking is that a SINGLE poorly behaved
process in the background locks up the whole operating system. This leads to a
horrible user experience.

As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew
that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to
reboot. Again.

Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that
you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so
on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still
able to react to you.

~~~
icedchai
Yes, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking, but no memory protection, and the
situation wasn't really any better. A single rogue process could bring down
the whole system by overwriting parts of the OS.

~~~
pjmlp
Guru Meditation :)

------
ksec
Slightly Off Topic.

I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in
Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two )

Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ).
Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but
I think it is still too early to tell.

Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Apple, Tim Cook would
be on the list as well. But their doing on Mac still leaves a bad taste in my
mouth so I am not quite over with it yet.

What other Great CEO are there in Silicon Valley's history?

Edit: Looking at this list just now makes me realise all the CEO I considered
as _great_ are product CEO. Which sort of got me thinking as to why I don like
Tim Cook as much, he is simply not a product person.

~~~
mullingitover
Tim Cook arguably made Apple what it is today. Without him, Apple might've had
great products but failed miserably in the supply chain management side of the
business. It's telling that after Jobs, Apple didn't slide into irrelevance
but instead continued to thrive.

Tech aficionados (myself included) might have qualms about their product
strategy, but overall the business continues to be wildly successful with
regular consumers.

~~~
endorphone
"It's telling that after Jobs, Apple didn't slide into irrelevance but instead
continued to thrive."

Tim Cook is clearly incredibly important to the success of Apple, but from a
product perspective it is a refinement of all the products Steve Jobs launched
that still carry the company. Those products are faster and slicker and have
better cameras -- the innovations afforded to a hyper-profitable company --
but it isn't like Apple has done a 90 degree turn or anything. They aren't a
smartphone/pad/computer company that turned into a smartcar/massage chair
company.

~~~
_rutinerad
> it is a refinement of all the products Steve Jobs launched that still carry
> the company

Not really. You could say that the iPhone still carries the company, but with
the exception of that outlier newer initiatives like Services and
Wearables/Home/Accessories bring in way more money than products that Steve
Jobs launched (Mac and iPad).

~~~
endorphone
Not really? Then you casually say "if you exclude the iPhone" which kind of
undercuts the entire argument, doesn't it?

70% of Apple revenue comes from the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Services revenue is
entirely and absolutely based upon that, and certainly didn't originate post
Jobs.

Even the Watch -- have one and love it -- exists on the back of the iPhone.

So, yeah, really.

Everything Apple has done that has been successful since Jobs is entirely in
the halo of the iPhone, which of course still accounts for the vast bulk of
Apple's profits.

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watertom
After Steve left, and Apple was floundering I wanted Sun to buy Apple. I was
working with Wall Street Companies at the time and I tried my best to make it
happen.

I also worked with Scott McNealy here and there and brought it up to him a
couple of times. Once he said to me, “Apple’s not worth having without Jobs,
and Apple doesn’t need anyone else if they have Jobs.”

So I knew Sun would never buy Apple.

~~~
baebeegeezus
Imagine if Oracle ended up owning Apple. Unthinkable.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
One would hope that Apple+Sun would have been successful enough to never be
acquired by Oracle.

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austincheney
> And that’s when Andy lost some credibility with me. I can’t remember exactly
> what he said about future speeds, but I seem to remember 400 megahertz or
> maybe even more. Oh, please. You’re claiming 10x more than Motorola?

Discarding numbers out of hand, at least those number actually were fictional.
Reminds of a recent comment on HN where people twisted themselves into knots
ignoring numbers they could easily reproduce themselves:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590983](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590983)

~~~
AceJohnny2
I _love_ this story so much because of that paragraph specifically. (I had
read it before but couldn't find it anymore. Happy to see it show up again!)

> _The only thing more insane was Intel’s 80486 running at 66 megahertz! Can
> you imagine? I was a_ physicist, _I should know._

It's so perfect! I'm glad he gives us the benefit of his hindsight.

------
Tepix
Fantastic read. Once again, the chaotic nature of our future unfolding.

These days, the scientists that advise our countries‘ leaders about the
pandemic can make a difference as Chris MacAskill made back then.

~~~
cmacaskill
Thanks! The fascinating thing is I had been a geophysicist for 10 years before
joining NeXT, so all my instincts were to approach this as a scientist. When I
see Dr. Fauci speaking the best known truths despite the political winds, it
resonates with all I know of science -- speak the truth as best you know it
and history will forgive you later.

~~~
ISL
The truth is immutable -- that's what makes it so successful.

~~~
sjwright
The challenge is to ensure that what you say is the truth. It’s often
difficult to talk about science casually without erroneously confusing factual
evidence with our best, tentative conclusions.

------
munificent
It's crazy to think that if:

1\. Apple had bought Be instead of Next.

2\. Then OS X would have been based on BeOS instead of OpenStep.

3\. Which in turn means it would have been written in C++ instead of
Objective-C.

4\. Which means iOS wouldn't have chosen Objective-C.

5\. Which means Swift would never have been created to address its
shortcomings.

Maybe there would have been some alternate-universe Swift to deal with C++'s
shortcomings, but it would likely be a _very_ different language. If nothing
else, the lack of keyword arguments would lend a very different feel.

~~~
chrislund
I wonder then if iOS would’ve ever happened. Probably not, unless they still
somehow got Steve Jobs.

Apple at least incidentally got some of the benefit of BeOS, or really, the
talent behind it: Dominic Giampaolo, who contributed significantly to BeFS,
has been with Apple for some time now working on their file systems. I think
he is/was a principal on APFS. I’m sure there are others!

Also, muni! From robot frog!

~~~
smallstepforman
The Newton team ended up becoming the BeInc team. iPhone might have happened
earlier. BeInc in 1999 focus shifted to internet appliances and had tablets on
their minds. The iOS revolution would have happened 5 years earlier.

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pvg
previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609813)

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ngcc_hk
“ he would ask who on planet earth is the best person to pull off something
impossible and he would do anything to hire them.” Steve

