Ironically when Apple acquired NeXT, it was essentially a reverse take over, since almost every significant executive and technical position of the merged company was from NeXT.
It was NeXT that saved Apple with their tools (including Interface Builder and the use of Objective-C) that gave Apple the technological lead that allowed them to grow into the company they are today.
Scott Forstall was the NeXT guy that headed the iOS (née iPhone OS)team and we know how that turned out.
I think BeOS was a serious contender as the next generation MacOS. But BeOS didn't have Steve Jobs. Buying NeXT meant bringing Jobs back at the helm of Apple.
It could have gone the other way too, like how Boeing's purchase of McDonnell Douglas, and McDonnel Douglas's takeover of key Boeing positions ended up eroding Boeing's culture of engineering excellence.
It was also market timing too. The iPhone was not Forstall's first attempt at a device like this. He was part of the team that was trying to develop something similar back in the era of the Apple Newton in the late 90s. And all of that were seeded from two of the three form factors (tab, pad, and board) that Xerox Parc experimented with back in the 70s, along with the mouse, the GUI, and OOP.
Compared to NeXTStep, BeOS was a wildly incomplete tech demo of a relatively incremental improvement to the classic MacOS formula. It was only a “serious contender” in the media and in the headcanon of Apple’s fan base.
BeOS was also multi-platform (PPC and later IA-32), like NeXTStep. Anyway, yes, it was rough around the edges, but it was way more accessible; the hardware was a lot less expensive, and when sold as a standalone OS, was also reasonably priced for a hobbyist. There were a lot of great ideas in there, especially compared to the Windows, MacOS, and the various other *nixes of the time.
I'm not saying Apple made the wrong choice to be reverse-acquired by NeXT, obviously, they've done pretty well. But an alternate universe where Apple acquired BeOS is well within the imagination.
In an alternate universe where Apple acquired Be, we'd see another Copland-esque slow moving catastrophe as the skeletal and unproven Be technology was cobbled together with everything needed to execute a plausible transition plan for the existing System 7 platform. This had every prospect of turning the Macintosh into another Amiga: even if a BeOS technology transition was a miraculous success, Apple's prospects as a company would be largely unchanged, because the real problems at Apple wasn't technology, it was a lack of leadership.
Would a Be acquisition do anything about the hundreds of engineers fritting away at dead ends like Pippin, OpenDoc and NewtonOS? Would it have stopped Apple from selling awful flawed hardware like the Power Macintosh 5000 and 6000 series? Unlikely. It's easy to forget just how ridiculous the Apple Computer of 1996 was. It was a company destined to — and deserved to — be consigned to the history books.
As valuable as the NeXT technology was to Apple, its importance is utterly dwarfed by the actions of Steve Jobs to rip away at the junk and rebuild the company in every sense of the word.
Compared to NeXTStep, BeOS was a wildly incomplete tech demo
So true. Even though the market share of NeXTStep never got very high, it was a robust, battle-tested operating system that ran on multiple processor architectures with real software like FreeHand and Lotus Improv, an amazing spreadsheet for the time that would hold up pretty well today.
And interestingly enough, one of the main BeOS guys ended up at Apple and worked on APFS.
I tried both back in the day, and tech demo is exactly right (a really cool tech demo, to be sure! but still). The OS came with a simple task manager-type app that had two buttons on it that could be used to disable either processor (to demonstrate how it affected system performance, I guess?). Thought I, "Hmm, surely they wouldn't let you turn off both.." But nope; everything immediately halted.
By comparison, NeXTStep was quite polished, certainly by the time it was available for x86, which is when I used it.
Agree; while they had some very nice ideas (like taking their filesystem capabilities and tracker and make it into basic email), they did some things that would be fatal: like locking their ABI into gcc 2.95 C++ ABI. Which was immediately a problem, when gcc 3.0 came out. Ugh.
My friend had an Newton and I was in awe. It made Palm look like a pocket calculator.
Got killed when Jobs left out of spite.
But that was back when Apple could make very simple hardware do amazing things.
NeXT was mind blowing when you look back. All of that just turned into OSX, iOS, etc. Don’t know that my computer is really any more empowering now. I still mostly just use a browser, mail client, and terminal.
Yes indeed it was. I ran OS X in beta on a G4 for a year as my main OS. It was that innovative and great. Like magically having the “Linux on the desktop” dream come true overnight.
It was clunky and slow at the time but it was so awesome it hardly mattered.
Reminds me of the Simpsons when the Newton is used to make a note to beat up Martin and the hand writing recognition is slightly off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6qxixgQJ4M
When 2007 rolled around, broadband internet was widely available; search, mapping, social media had caught on. People were ready to take the internet with them in their pocket.
It was NeXT that saved Apple with their tools (including Interface Builder and the use of Objective-C) that gave Apple the technological lead that allowed them to grow into the company they are today.
Scott Forstall was the NeXT guy that headed the iOS (née iPhone OS)team and we know how that turned out.