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NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
*no comment* writes "the folks over at OSviews have a nicely done article that explains the evolution of NeXTSTEP into Mac OS X. 'With the beginning of 1996, Apple realized that with the next generation PC's running Windows NT to be released within the decade, they would need a new, modern operating system to run on their machines. ... Amongst Apple's other options were to license Solaris from Sun, NT from Microsoft, or to purchase a small net services company called NeXT. Apple chose the latter.'" OSNews had another nice Mac-oriented look at NeXTSTEP last year; the Wikipedia entry is also worth looking through.
And of course, the choice of NeXTStep had nothing to do with Next also being owned by Steve Jobs!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
It means that I, for one, would not be using a Mac right now. The UNIX-ness is important to me.
I think they should have bought both, though -- maybe they would have come out with Spotlight sooner.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Well, Hank, I was the guy who wrote the report at Apple that recommended we buy NeXT. It was a simple choice, really, between Be and NeXTStep. NeXT had a much more complete offering, with actual commercial developers who had written really good stuff for it. Even better, it had had a number of releases, and had a mature system for handling version upgrades. Be, as many people will recall, tended to need an application recompile for every new version, and there way no obvious simple way to solve the problem. NeXT had a mature and battle tested kernel, and a real BSD layer, neither of which could really be said of Be at the time.
We considered a lot of other OSes. We looked at NT, but it looked like it would never be practical to port to a big-endian processor. We looked at Solaris, and it was a serious contender. There was no decent UI layer, though, by the standards we used to judge such things. Remember that things like KDE and GNOME were quite young and immature at the time.
Getting back Steve was a plus for the company, but wasn't a part of our deliberations as technical folks. NeXT Looked like the best technical choice, really. Linux was simply too young in 1996 to be a serious cnsideration, even though Apple had an internal mkLinux project.
Who knows what it might have been today, given a new shot at choosing. But back then, there was nothing that stood up to NeXT given the constraints of Apple's business.
Failed? It's hard to see Apple as a "failed" company with successes like the iMac, the iPod, iTMS and recent financial figures. I confess I haven't checked stock price and financial statements, but I understand anecdotaly that Apple is doing quite well, "niche" or not.
Don't make someone bust out the old argument of market share and comparisons to companies like Lexus, etc. etc. You're just not a "success" unless you become some sort of a monopoly, is that it?
I'd better go enjoy my G5 since Apple has so miserably failed and is, true to predictions since about 1990, about to close its doors.