The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

http://www.macspeedzone.com/archive/art/con/be.shtml

by elblanco • 16 years ago

92 42 16 years ago

wmf4• 16 years ago

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.

pyre3• 16 years ago

I agree. Sensationalist title that isn't even the real title of the article.

wmf4• 16 years ago

To be fair, it is right up at the top of the page.

elblanco5• 16 years ago

Dunno, that's the real title of the article up at the top of the page.

mortenjorck2• 16 years ago

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.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

>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.

elblanco5• 16 years ago

I remember this time period fairly distinctly as I almost purchased a BeBox. I decide to wait since it was probably all just going to end up in some future Apple product anyways, so the BeBoxes were already obsolete.

There was quite a bit of press concerning Gassée's and Apple's desire to tie the knot, but history turned out all different in the end. And I remember thinking that it was a huge failure for the world all caused by Gassée's desire for more money.

kls2• 16 years ago

Actually at the time Apple was working towards what was termed the Common Hardware Reference Platform or CHRP in which the main goal was to be able to run the new NT being developed, on Apple hardware. It actually happened too, for a brief time there was a NT 4 PPC version that ran on the CHRP platform. The thinking was we will give it our all and if all best efforts fail we will just become a high-end windows platform. The management at the time really did not understand the dynamics of their customer bases.

To this day, I am dumbfounded as to how they survived. That first iMac landed at a crucial time and took off like wildfire. As well someone started listening to the right people because if I remember correctly there was some pretty open Steve hating on the board, how he ascended to power again is another one in a million shot.

leej• 16 years ago

great movie idea!

jacobolus2• 16 years ago

> “Amelio now admits that Apple overpaid for NeXT”

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

wmf4• 16 years ago

"now" = 1999 when the book was written. The "Apple is doomed" perma-meme was still going in those days.

jacobolus2• 16 years ago

Yes, I realize. I was pointing out that his assessment may have been a bit off. :-)

lsb• 16 years ago

It's from a book in 1999. As of 1998, the share price hadn't soared as much as they'd hoped.

watmough• 16 years ago

Yep, in 1996 I hired on with an oil co in Scotland. One of my first tasks was to migrate everything from gawdawful Performa 6100s to Windows 95 boxes and laptops.

Being in IT, I was lumbered with one of said Performa's. It was awful. Unstable, slow. It was sad, since 4 years before in 92, I'd had a dream box Mac IIcx on my desk. Pre-Internet of course.

Thank goodness for NeXT and NeXTStep. OS X has done nothing but get better and better with every release.

gwern3• 16 years ago

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

wmf4• 16 years ago

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.

kls2• 16 years ago

NEXT had an existing customer base and a larger hardware operation, it's valuation was higher.

tybris• 16 years ago

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

lallysingh• 16 years ago

Ugh, I remember what they promised in Cairo. What was promised wasn't realistic; making it inappropriate to consider NT as having failed by not meeting expectations.

bediger2• 16 years ago

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.

jister• 16 years ago

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

The Day They Almost Decided To Put Windows NT On The Mac Instead Of OS X

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