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I know it almost happened because Tim Berners Lee said it did: https://www.w3.org/blog/2011/10/steve-jobs/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2011/10/steve-jobs/ "We almo

by tbrock 11y ago

I know it almost happened because Tim Berners Lee said it did: https://www.w3.org/blog/2011/10/steve-jobs/ https://www.w3.org/blog/2011/10/steve-jobs/ "We almost met once. There was a get-together of NeXT developers in France, and we set up demos at tables around the room. Robert Cailliau and I set up the WorldWideWeb.app on one table. Steve arrived, and started making his way around the tables chatting with each project He didn’t get to us before he had to leave." Isn't that incredible?! Even if you aren't a fan of Steve Jobs you have to admit he would have instantly understood the power of what Berners Lee was showing him. I think about that story a lot. Gives me goosebumps.

azinman2 11y ago
Maybe. If this was a read-write version, then it's easy to mentally box it into a network-backed word processor (since that's what it would have been most similar to). The power of the web took quite a few leaps in terms of a distributed effort making it into something new each time. When cast in the original scientific philosophy, it's not clear that this would seem any more important than the prodigies, compuserves, and aols that already existed.
dfc 11y ago
> Even if you aren't a fan of Steve Jobs you have to > admit he would have instantly understood the power of > what Berners Lee was showing him. I see no reason to think Steve Jobs was omniscient. Do you really think he could instantly an accurately assess the future importance of a technology?
- tbrock 11y ago
  Seems to have worked out for him all the countless other times. For examples see Apple Computer, Pixar, NeXt... Berners Lee himself writes about the possibility decades later. Decades later! The inventor of the web browser! Remembering and writing about something that almost happened... but didn't. He's clearly given some thought to the matter. It's not like you remembering the time a co-worker ate vanilla ice cream at lunch time last week. This is Tim Berners Lee reminiscing about an opportunity to show Steve Jobs his wares.
  - maaku 11y ago
    That's a bit of selective remembering. Jobs wanted Pixar to be a hardware company. Not a terrible idea as NVidia has shown us, but definitely the wrong time, and he did not foresee the brand that Pixar Animation Studios would become. NeXT was a 2nd attempt at the overpriced workstation that was Lisa. Both were market failures.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      The kind of market failure that got sold for half a billion.
      - wpietri 11y ago
        It wasn't really NeXT that they purchased; it was Jobs. Sure, they got an OS, and they got some good people. But it was basically an acquihire. NeXT had approximately no commercial success. If Apple had only wanted a next-generation OS to compensate for their failure to develop one internally, they could have bought Be, and for a much lower price. There were no other suitors to acquire NeXT; without Apple's acquisition, they surely would have died out within a couple of years, just like Be did. And I'll note that the OS wasn't that great a deal for Apple; it took them more than 4 years to get a consumer-grade release of it together, far longer than they were predicting at the time. I'd again put that down to the power of Jobs's reality distortion field, not any kind of market success.
        coldtea 11y ago
        >It wasn't really NeXT that they purchased; it was Jobs. Easy to say in retrospect. But at the time Jobs was the guy who was once ousted from Apple and hadn't done that great of a commercial job with NeXT (besides the technology they created). So there wasn't much ground at the time for Jobs to be considered as some kind of "miracle man" that will save Apple. So, while we now can say "they purchased Jobs", I think it was mostly the allure of a turn-key next-generation OS that the needed sorely at that point that made them go into it and for half a billion. Let's not forget that Apple had just killed Copland, and was simultaneously discussing to buy BeOS. >And I'll note that the OS wasn't that great a deal for Apple; it took them more than 4 years to get a consumer-grade release of it together, far longer than they were predicting at the time. Again that's in retrospect. At the moment they didn't think "we're really buying Jobs, who'll do miracles and make the company #1 in the world". They thought: "We need an OS, and this NeXT thing looks like it can be turned into the next OS version soon". >I'd again put that down to the power of Jobs's reality distortion field, not any kind of market success. But they weren't looking for market success. After all they didn't want to buy an existing userbase but an OS to turn into "OS 9 successor" to give their (Apple's) users and attract new ones. So, what they wanted was a good platform for what they do. And given Apple's enterprise, dtp and graphics focus in the 90s, NeXT was pretty damn close.
- Zelphyr 11y ago
  I don't think he was omniscient but there is an interview he did in Wired I believe, around '95, where he laid out the next fifteen years in technology and pretty much nailed it. He wasn't a god. That much is obvious. But he was really smart and the term "visionary" is reasonably earned.
wpietri 11y ago
Sorry, I'm not questioning that they almost met. I'm just not seeing what difference it would have made to the Web. NeXT, for all its technical merit, was a repeated commercial failure. It failed as hardware, it failed as an OS for other people's hardware, and then it failed as developer tools of other people's OSes. The Jobs of 2007, at the helm of a successful company, perhaps could take an obscure technolog7 and get it widely adopted. The Jobs of 1992 had no leverage. The NeXT was full of amazing tech but he couldn't get anybody but a few koolaid-drinkers, myself included, to use it. So if he'd adopted the WWW into the NeXT OS a year or two earlier than everybody else, I think it would have been another cool technology on the NeXT platform that everybody ignored. Mosaic and Navigator made a difference not really for what they were, but because they were available to a large audience of Windows users. If anything, I think the later history of Apple suggests that Jobs's talent wasn't in cutting-edge technology, but in taking established technology, making it user friendly, and marketing the hell out of it. The iPod wasn't the first music player and the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. They were just the first ones built for and marketed to the broad consumer market. There was never really a consumer market for browsers, which is part of what killed Netscape.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >NeXT, for all its technical merit, was a repeated commercial failure. It failed as hardware, it failed as an OS for other people's hardware, and then it failed as developer tools of other people's OSes. Well, we seem to forget that OS X 10.0 is basically NeXT with a new skin. So it might have failed as an "OS for other people's hardware" meaning PCs, but it did phenomenally well with Apple's hardware. And even the "failed" NeXT company got sold for a cool half billion, an order of magnitude better than e.g. BeOS ($11 million). And NeXT's itself market performance was OK enough to allow it to live and reach several versions all these years up to 1997 until it was bought.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    They failed to live up to any of their hype or any of their market goals. It didn't revolutionize education. It didn't sell much hardware, despite multiple hardware versions. It didn't gain significant market share as an OS. It didn't gain significant market share in Windows developer tools. When Apple bought them, the NeXT market was negligible enough that they basically stopped making anything for it. They definitely had some success in niche markets, I think they turned a modest profit one year, and I don't think their investors lost any money. But it's not like they made a ton for the level of risk they took. Yes, Jobs managed to make lemonade out of his multiple failures. But NeXT was never a commercial success.
hoodoof 11y ago
Watch Cringley's interview of Jobs in which Jobs specifies precisely how much of the Xerox Parc technology that he saw but didn't grasp the importance of including networking and object oriented programming. Steve Jobs was for a long time seen as someone with brilliance who tripped up on his own misguided and dogmatic world view, not the current picture of him as the ultimate visionary who sees and knows all.

by tbrock 11y ago

azinman2 11y ago

Maybe. If this was a read-write version, then it's easy to mentally box it into a network-backed word processor (since that's what it would have been most similar to). The power of the web took quite a few leaps in terms of a distributed effort making it into something new each time. When cast in the original scientific philosophy, it's not clear that this would seem any more important than the prodigies, compuserves, and aols that already existed.

dfc 11y ago

> Even if you aren't a fan of Steve Jobs you have to > admit he would have instantly understood the power of > what Berners Lee was showing him. I see no reason to think Steve Jobs was omniscient. Do you really think he could instantly an accurately assess the future importance of a technology?

tbrock 11y ago
Seems to have worked out for him all the countless other times. For examples see Apple Computer, Pixar, NeXt... Berners Lee himself writes about the possibility decades later. Decades later! The inventor of the web browser! Remembering and writing about something that almost happened... but didn't. He's clearly given some thought to the matter. It's not like you remembering the time a co-worker ate vanilla ice cream at lunch time last week. This is Tim Berners Lee reminiscing about an opportunity to show Steve Jobs his wares.
- maaku 11y ago
  That's a bit of selective remembering. Jobs wanted Pixar to be a hardware company. Not a terrible idea as NVidia has shown us, but definitely the wrong time, and he did not foresee the brand that Pixar Animation Studios would become. NeXT was a 2nd attempt at the overpriced workstation that was Lisa. Both were market failures.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    The kind of market failure that got sold for half a billion.
    - wpietri 11y ago
      It wasn't really NeXT that they purchased; it was Jobs. Sure, they got an OS, and they got some good people. But it was basically an acquihire. NeXT had approximately no commercial success. If Apple had only wanted a next-generation OS to compensate for their failure to develop one internally, they could have bought Be, and for a much lower price. There were no other suitors to acquire NeXT; without Apple's acquisition, they surely would have died out within a couple of years, just like Be did. And I'll note that the OS wasn't that great a deal for Apple; it took them more than 4 years to get a consumer-grade release of it together, far longer than they were predicting at the time. I'd again put that down to the power of Jobs's reality distortion field, not any kind of market success.
      - coldtea 11y ago
        >It wasn't really NeXT that they purchased; it was Jobs. Easy to say in retrospect. But at the time Jobs was the guy who was once ousted from Apple and hadn't done that great of a commercial job with NeXT (besides the technology they created). So there wasn't much ground at the time for Jobs to be considered as some kind of "miracle man" that will save Apple. So, while we now can say "they purchased Jobs", I think it was mostly the allure of a turn-key next-generation OS that the needed sorely at that point that made them go into it and for half a billion. Let's not forget that Apple had just killed Copland, and was simultaneously discussing to buy BeOS. >And I'll note that the OS wasn't that great a deal for Apple; it took them more than 4 years to get a consumer-grade release of it together, far longer than they were predicting at the time. Again that's in retrospect. At the moment they didn't think "we're really buying Jobs, who'll do miracles and make the company #1 in the world". They thought: "We need an OS, and this NeXT thing looks like it can be turned into the next OS version soon". >I'd again put that down to the power of Jobs's reality distortion field, not any kind of market success. But they weren't looking for market success. After all they didn't want to buy an existing userbase but an OS to turn into "OS 9 successor" to give their (Apple's) users and attract new ones. So, what they wanted was a good platform for what they do. And given Apple's enterprise, dtp and graphics focus in the 90s, NeXT was pretty damn close.
Zelphyr 11y ago
I don't think he was omniscient but there is an interview he did in Wired I believe, around '95, where he laid out the next fifteen years in technology and pretty much nailed it. He wasn't a god. That much is obvious. But he was really smart and the term "visionary" is reasonably earned.

wpietri 11y ago

Sorry, I'm not questioning that they almost met. I'm just not seeing what difference it would have made to the Web. NeXT, for all its technical merit, was a repeated commercial failure. It failed as hardware, it failed as an OS for other people's hardware, and then it failed as developer tools of other people's OSes. The Jobs of 2007, at the helm of a successful company, perhaps could take an obscure technolog7 and get it widely adopted. The Jobs of 1992 had no leverage. The NeXT was full of amazing tech but he couldn't get anybody but a few koolaid-drinkers, myself included, to use it. So if he'd adopted the WWW into the NeXT OS a year or two earlier than everybody else, I think it would have been another cool technology on the NeXT platform that everybody ignored. Mosaic and Navigator made a difference not really for what they were, but because they were available to a large audience of Windows users. If anything, I think the later history of Apple suggests that Jobs's talent wasn't in cutting-edge technology, but in taking established technology, making it user friendly, and marketing the hell out of it. The iPod wasn't the first music player and the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. They were just the first ones built for and marketed to the broad consumer market. There was never really a consumer market for browsers, which is part of what killed Netscape.

coldtea 11y ago
>NeXT, for all its technical merit, was a repeated commercial failure. It failed as hardware, it failed as an OS for other people's hardware, and then it failed as developer tools of other people's OSes. Well, we seem to forget that OS X 10.0 is basically NeXT with a new skin. So it might have failed as an "OS for other people's hardware" meaning PCs, but it did phenomenally well with Apple's hardware. And even the "failed" NeXT company got sold for a cool half billion, an order of magnitude better than e.g. BeOS ($11 million). And NeXT's itself market performance was OK enough to allow it to live and reach several versions all these years up to 1997 until it was bought.
- wpietri 11y ago
  They failed to live up to any of their hype or any of their market goals. It didn't revolutionize education. It didn't sell much hardware, despite multiple hardware versions. It didn't gain significant market share as an OS. It didn't gain significant market share in Windows developer tools. When Apple bought them, the NeXT market was negligible enough that they basically stopped making anything for it. They definitely had some success in niche markets, I think they turned a modest profit one year, and I don't think their investors lost any money. But it's not like they made a ton for the level of risk they took. Yes, Jobs managed to make lemonade out of his multiple failures. But NeXT was never a commercial success.

hoodoof 11y ago

Watch Cringley's interview of Jobs in which Jobs specifies precisely how much of the Xerox Parc technology that he saw but didn't grasp the importance of including networking and object oriented programming. Steve Jobs was for a long time seen as someone with brilliance who tripped up on his own misguided and dogmatic world view, not the current picture of him as the ultimate visionary who sees and knows all.