Gassée: Thank God Apple chose NeXT over my BeOS

http://9to5mac.com/2011/11/11/gassee-thank-god-apple-chose-steve-jobss-next-over-my-beos/

by Anon84 • 15 years ago

97 73 15 years ago

9to5mac.com

mcritz• 15 years ago

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

Was BeOS worse than NeXTSTEP?

spooneybarger2• 15 years ago

Worse is subjective. It was 'less ready for prime time'.

It was amazing technology. It is still the most reliable desktop I ever had. It could play more videos/music etc at once with my 32 megs on a dual 66 ppc than my macbook pro w/ 4 gigs on memory and some 2.8ish dual core processor does today. Anecdote-

I used to blow people ( including myself away ) by downloading large video and music files from the internet and then launching them and playing on a loop. I got up to play in the 20-30 range at once without any lack of responsiveness and with no stutter etc.

4ad4• 15 years ago

BeOS was a real time OS, all other client operating systems were not, and still aren't, real time. The responsiveness of BeOS and its multimedia capabilities were due to this design choice.

It felt better when you were using the GUI, and maybe this is all that matters to most users, but the implementation was significantly poorer compared to NeXTSTEP.

A real time OS has some advantages as a desktop OS, everything is instant and without lag, but the total throughput of the system is significantly lower. To make a stupid car analogy, a RTOS is a Ferrari while a conventional OS is a massive off-road vehicle. Personally I think a RTOS is the way to go for a desktop OS.

cubicle67• 15 years ago

Memory's pretty hazy here, so someone correct me where I'm wrong

One of the major deficiencies in Apple's OS at the time was lack of real multi user capabilities; like Windows pre XP. NeXT, coming from BSD, had this built in but BeOS was pretty much a single user OS

i3862• 15 years ago

No the problem wasn't multiuser support it was multitasking (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_multitasking).

kls7• 15 years ago

Most people at the time felt that BeOS was the better choice. BeOS was ready and could have replaced MacOS the next day, it was already being marketed as a replacement for MacOS and I think that is why Gassée tried to kill the deal, I think he truly thought that people where going to buy a Mac and switch to BeOS. The only thing that BeOS was missing was apps, had he been able to convince more flagship app makers like Photoshop to develop their apps for BeOS he may have succeeded, it really was the only thing that was missing. Meanwhile NeXT was reworked over the next couple of years just to get it running on the hardware and then the first versions of OSX where horribly slow. So Apple spent lost 2 years and had a slower product by going with NeXT when BeOS was ready to go, most people at the time did not see the logic. Today history has plaid out and the truth is they where not just buying an OS they needed much more.

lobster_johnson2• 15 years ago

> BeOS was ready

BeOS was arguably less ready than NeXTSTEP, lacking a network stack and printing (as has been pointed out elsewhere), and had very few apps and very few users, whereas NeXT was already deployed and in use by a lot of people.

> and could have replaced MacOS the next day

Not at all. One of the main points that MacOS had to support Mac application. There is no way that Apple ever would have released a Mac operating system (be it Copland, Rhapsody or MacOS X) without a "yellow box" MacOS System 8 layer.

Didn't happen with NeXTSTEP either -- a lot of stuff, like QuickTime and Finder, had to be ported over first.

Nelson69• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

tambourine_man2• 15 years ago

Almost nothing runs great on that many cores.

Certainly not Xnu.

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

The one thing I seem to recall, and this is fuzzy, is that BeOS had issues with large applications, like Firefox. I don't know if that was true or not.

kylec• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

agildehaus• 15 years ago

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.

frogly• 15 years ago

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...

rbanffy• 15 years ago

I really hated the small title bars. Never got used (admittedly, never tried that much) to them. We had a BeOS machine at the office in 1998, a beautiful IBM Aptiva S.

wmf• 15 years ago

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.

thaumaturgy• 15 years ago

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...). Still, Gassée and Jobs have had an uneasy relationship in the past (http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...).

[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.

gvb• 15 years ago

The headline only quotes half of the money quote. The half they don't quote puts the "thank god it didn't happen" in a pretty different light: "because I hated Apple’s management."

This is either sour grapes because the deal fell through or else the deal fell through because he let personal issues get in the way of business. I lean strongly towards the latter, given Gassée history and the unreasonable price tag he put on BeOS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e#1980s:_A...

drumdance• 15 years ago

In fairness, Jobs hated Apple's management too. In the biography he refers to them as bozos.

msbarnett2• 15 years ago

It's probably not sour grapes. At the time, Apple's management was widely considered to be an incoherent mess. They'd run the company damn near into the ground, and Jobs threw most of the people Gassée would have had to deal with out when he was brought in, in favor of NeXT personnel.

Tloewald• 15 years ago

I was an early BeOS convert, but it couldn't even print (pretty important for a potential Mac audience). The point Gassee is making obliquely is that if BeOS had been acquired by Apple, Apple's management would have stayed in charge. by acquiring NeXT, which was also a better OS than BeOS all things considered, Apple got Steve Jobs who fired the board and shortly afterwards got rid of Amelio.

During the BeOS negotiations rumor had it that the sticking points were - aside from money -largely cultural and managerial. None of the former Apple people at BeOS wanted anything to do with Apple management and they were negotiating for things like not having to be in Apple's org chart. This was NOT a recipe for success.

gcb• 15 years ago

Your 2nd paragraph is an excellent insight on nerd negotiation skills.

Too many times i was also fooled bymyself in thinking negotiations, be it companies or even buying a car, followed a logical progression.

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

I have to admit to still having a strong dislike for Gassée because of the way Be and BeOS played out. I've been trying to let go of those feeling, however, because they won't change anything.

pvg• 15 years ago

It really was a remarkable operating system, way, way ahead of its day.

As was NeXTSTEP. The difference being it was, by that point, a mature OS and framework set with a wide variety of actual deployed applications, cross-platform support, tooling. BeOS, in comparison, was a clever and incomplete tech demo. And Apple had no shortage of those (Copland, Taligent, SOM, OpenDoc, PowerTalk, etc, etc, etc). Buying another one would have been catastrophic.

jonhendry3• 15 years ago

" mature OS and framework set with a wide variety of actual deployed applications, cross-platform support, tooling."

And had been used in important roles in industry, particularly the financial industry.

flomo2• 15 years ago

> 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.

bodyfour2• 15 years ago

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.

tambourine_man2• 15 years ago

I must be the only one, but BeOS felt faster in 90s hardware than OS X does on this 32 GB Mac Pro.

I love OS X and Unix but it has always felt dog slow to me. It was infuriating in PPC days but it's still frustrating even in current hardware.

As someone who has worked on Macs with kilobytes of RAM and was flabbergasted by BeOS, waiting for my computer to respond seems unacceptable.

scg• 15 years ago

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_Michon2• 15 years ago

Link redirects to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2038028/public/Screen%20Shot%202011-...

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

zmanji• 15 years ago

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

Mpdreamz• 15 years ago

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

spooneybarger2• 15 years ago

hard to skin nature?

sharmajai2• 15 years ago

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

i3862• 15 years ago

No. NeXT was cheaper, they got the original visionary back to Apple and NeXT had a revenue stream (From my understanding Be Inc didn't have one to speak of).

jbellis• 15 years ago

NeXT was not cheaper; Gassee wanted 275M for BeOS, and they bought NeXT for 429.

Steko• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

_delirium• 15 years ago

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.

emehrkay• 15 years ago

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.

kls7• 15 years ago

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.

philwelch3• 15 years ago

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.

SimHacker• 15 years ago

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

easp• 15 years ago

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.

WiseWeasel• 15 years ago

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.

Gassée: Thank God Apple chose NeXT over my BeOS

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