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> 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 n

• 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.