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20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
- wl 10y agoThe standard snark is that NeXT bought Apple for -$400 million.
- monocasa 10y agoSame with Pixar/Disney/-$7.4B.
- rootbear 10y agoYeah, Pixar totally "bought" Disney Animation and, to a lesser extent, the theme parks. I'm told John Lasseter has been deeply involved in them. That would be going home for him, he worked at Disneyland as a youth.
- acchow 10y agoSure, but Disney is a lot more than Disney Animation... Isn't i mostly Marvel and Star Wars anyway?
- Ronleflore 10y agoDisney is mostly ESPN, based on profits.
- cookiecaper 10y agoDisney is about 30% ESPN, 30% Parks & Resorts, and then everything else. The animation/film unit is actually only less than 10% of their revenue iirc. Disney is in big trouble as cordcutters proliferate.
- monocasa 10y agoTO be fair, you could consider the animation/film unit to be the marketing wing of Parks & Resorts for the purposes of this discussion. Why would anyone go to the parks without Mickey, Leia, and Iron Man?
- adventured 10y agoThat's no longer the case. ESPN has seen its profitability roughly slashed in half in the last four years. Simultaneously they're rapidly bleeding subscribers while they've overpaid for sports rights at exactly the wrong time. ESPN is at about $9.5b to $10b in sales for 2016 and $1b in operating income. Those numbers will decline until operating income is closer to $300m-$500m in the next few years. By comparison, Disney did $9.3b in net income for 2016 ($14.2b operating income). ESPN is down to being closer to 10% to 15% of Disney's profits and 18% on sales. As a business it's a looming disaster of value destruction from the former peak.
- nine_k 10y agoThis is great. I mean, the fact that NeXT tech was preserved and made popular is great.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoTo an extent... but their swansong vision of portable OPENSTEP was quickly shut down by Apple, which is a crying shame because if OPENSTEP was still around it would be keeping Microsoft competitive on the desktop front - instead of today's languished desktop developer story which remains frozen in 1998 (for Win32) or 2005 (for .NET). Now that Swift is open-sourced, I wonder if we'll see a good Cocoa port to Win32 and Linux - because that would be NEXTSTEP's legacy.
- nine_k 10y agoI happily used an openstep-inspired (or directly derived?) desktop environment named WindowMaker in Linux somewhere around 1999. I also remember LiteStep for Windows being available around that time. So there were attempts at using that approach on other platforms. (Funnily, my current Xfce setup still visually resembles my OpenStep-like setup of that time.)
- code_duck 10y agoI used Window Maker for years - still have it installed as the desktop of choice on older machines. It's fast, simple, reliable and direct.
- 72deluxe 10y agoYes and it makes for a great UI on a VNC server on a Raspberry Pi running as a SSH box, for example. Lightweight.
- aerique 10y agoI switched to i3 a couple of years ago but I've used WindowMaker the longest of any window manager in my 25 years of Unix usage.
- chmaynard 10y agoWhen I joined Apple Software Engineering in 2001 as a writer, the first thing I noticed was that former NeXT people ran the company, made the important decisions, and believed fervently that the new Apple would be wildly successful. Oh, how right they were.
- nothis 10y ago>Oh, how right they were. Well, there's a sentence you don't hear often, nowadays!
- NEDM64 10y agoYes, if you live in the Matrix that doesn't acknowledge Apple's victories and praises Google and Microsoft failures.
- riprowan 10y agoCan't tell if sarcastic or serious.
- hellofunk 10y agoIt's accurate, regardless.
- nullnilvoid 10y agoYou mean Apple bought back Steve Jobs, right?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ebbv 10y agoConsidering the contributions NeXT technology has made to OS X and iOS, no that's an oversimplification.
- rvense 10y agoJobs brought in a great team from NeXT - like Jon Rubinstein, who oversaw the development of the iMac and the iPod, and later came as close to rescuing Palm, Inc. (with the Pre) as was possible.
- generj 10y agoMy father's most regretted financial move is ignoring his weird thought to buy 10 shares of Apple stock at this time.
- DINKDINK 10y ago10 shares of AAPL in 1996 isn't that large of a windfall today. The stock has had 3 splits 2:1,2:1,7:1 in that time frame. 10 shares in 1996 would have had a cost of $7.50 and a present market value of ~$32,000.
- manarth 10y agoWell, $7.50 in 1996 dollars is apparently worth $11.67 today in 2016. $32,000 doesn't sound like too bad a return.
- soperj 10y agoForgot about the $546 it nets you in dividends each year.
- DINKDINK 10y agoGood point.
- DINKDINK 10y agoIt's meaningless what amount of currency needed for the equivalent value in 1996. You're trading that day. The percentage increase in value is astronomical 426500% increase, but "Not buying 10 shares in 1996" is hardly missing out on 'fuck-you' money.
- uiri 10y agoThat $0.75/share price is already adjusted for the splits. So the stock price back in 1996 would have been around $20/share. So that's $200 in 1996 that would be ~$32k today. A 15000% return is still nothing to sneeze at and that's before you count the dividends they started issuing after Jobs died.
- bluedino 10y ago>> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, but made the iPhone, iPad and more possible as well. What prevents Apple from making the iPhone and iPad? They could have bought Palm, QNX, did something based on Linux... What was the key? BSD? Objective-C? I don't see those being that important. The one thing NeXT did enable them to do was the PowerPC to Intel switch.
- rohitv 10y agoSteve Jobs.
- bluedino 10y agoTrue. And at least they got a working OS out of the deal instead of futzing with Copland or Taligent for who knows how long. Imagine if our iPhones ran BeOS.
- afandian 10y agoWe can dream!
- protomyth 10y agoI love BeOS and had NeXTSTEP 3.3 (& later OpenStep) and BeOS running in my office. There was no real comparison, NeXTSTEP was better in every way except doing video demos. It was easier to program and had a decent UNIX. NeXTSTEP was multi-user. BeOS was superior to quite a lot of the other OSes at the time though. We will really never know, but I suspect there were some serious problems when Palm bought the code and couldn't build a phone / PDA OS out of it.
- EliRivers 10y ago"I’d argue that this is probably the single most important tech acquisition of all time." Microsoft buys the pieces that eventually become MS-DOS? Going back further, pharma companies buying tech that they turned into mass produced antibiotics and gave us the sulfa drug revolution? Apple buying NeXT hardly compares to the acquisition of steel smelting.
- pedalpete 10y agoI'd suggest the author's definition of 'tech' meant 'computers'. I don't believe Microsoft acquired QDOS, just the IP. Furthermore, bringing Jobs back to Apple resulted in Apple going from nearly bankrupt a top 5 Market Cap Company in the world (http://dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm http://dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm)
- EliRivers 10y agoI'd suggest the author's definition of 'tech' meant 'computers'. I wouldn't be surprised. It's a common affliction around here.
- Fnoord 10y agoIt was no doubt an important acquisition, but 'the most important'? Someone who makes such a bold claim has gotta be someone who really knows computer history extremely well. This is just one of those 'what if' scenarios. If Apple didn't buy NeXT someone else would've innovated a good capacitive touchscreen device. Maybe it would've been Nokia. They were busy with experimenting with that long before the first iPhone got released, see the Nokia 770 and Maemo (or actually check its successor, the Nokia N800). Perhaps Elop would never have become the CEO of Nokia. Perhaps Nokia would've still be around. Perhaps not? We'll never know. Everything's connected.
- Apocryphon 10y agoIt would be great if someone wrote an article about the alternate histories where Apple chose other strategies. For instance, what an Apple-Be merge would have resulted in, what kind of products and tech. And how NeXT would have lasted without Apple.
- iblaine 10y agoWow, I haven't heard someone mention BeOs in over a decade. That was a pretty OS, but I'd take that black NeXT case any day. Those NeXT boxes were so cool.
- donatj 10y agoBeBoxes were beautiful although maybe in a way only a mother could love.
- jghn 10y agothe das blinkenlights were so badass though
- Apocryphon 10y agoThere's stories on HN about Haiku from time to time. That project's still going on in the background.
- Esau 10y agoJust a few days ago, in fact: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200633
- zippergz 10y agoThere have been a few late nights where I found myself searching eBay and other places for a used BeBox. Sadly, they're hard to come by (and expensive). I used to have a bunch of NeXT hardware and it is indeed cool. I got rid of it in a move a few years ago because it was just taking up space in my closets, but I still miss it....
- pfarnsworth 10y agoI was applying for jobs back in 1997, and during that time they had a huge career fair called the Brass Ring fair. Employers from around Silicon Valley would have booths and hire people on the spot. I distinctly remember Apple's booth being completely barren, they were practically dead to most engineers. How the tables have turned since then. The big question is, Apple's path appears to be following the path after Steve Jobs left the first time, with the muddied product picture, no innovation, etc. I hope history doesn't repeat itself twice.
- johansch 10y agoSurely there must be a few suitable candidates at Apple waiting for Tim to screw up enough? I think Apple will need its own Nadella soon.
- johansch 10y ago(Let's just hope the Cook era doesn't last as long as the Ballmer era - 14 years. It's been 5 years with Cook now...)
- PacketPaul 10y agoIt will. No company remains dominant forever.
- 3chelon 10y agoSad but true. It's a cyclical world.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoExactly. Some people never imagined Apple being more successful than MS.
- riprowan 10y agoI remember teaching classes in 1992, when Apple was clearly the engineering leader. How the tables were turned by 1997.
- rootbear 10y agoI was working at Pixar at the time and a couple of us went out to lunch when the news broke to figure out What It All Meant. We passed Steve's office on the way out and one of our party, who had worked with him since early Apple days, congratulated him. The big question was whether they would keep the Unix plumbing visible and useful, or would it be buried under some API layer of no use to us Unix graybeards. Fortunately, the plumbing wasn't hidden in the walls.
- wineisfine 10y agoThat's great to hear. Have you read Jobs' biography and do you think everything said about Pixtar around those times are accurately portrait?
- rootbear 10y agoSadly, I haven't gotten to it yet. That's embarrassing to admit, but my time for pleasure reading has gotten frustratingly short.
- wineisfine 10y agoIt actually reads like a solid fiction book, except that it isn't. You can skip a few dozen "romance" pages here and there and then it's really worth your while.
- wineisfine 10y agoI read that the NeXT, let's call it, "adventure", is the reason Apple went with a Linux distribution as basis for their new OS and thus, we're all using OSX now?
- binarycrusader 10y agoLinux distribution? I think you mean *BSD distribution.
- FreeFull 10y agoAs far as I know, Apple has never used Linux for anything in any capacity. OSX's kernel is XNU, and it's a hybrid of BSD code and Mach.
- wineisfine 10y agoSo OSX has nothing to do with unix/linux?
- dglancy 10y agomacOS (and older OSX releases) are UNIX (see http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm for certifications). Linux is not UNIX (its not certified - not many are - see http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/index.html http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/index.html) and could best be described as POSIX like.
- wineisfine 10y agoThanks for the explanation. I thought Unix and Linux had something to do with eachother, but looking at the downvotes, I was wrong :D
- bradjohnson 10y agoThere's the recursive acronym for GNU: "GNU's Not Unix!" due to GNU/Linux's Unix-like qualities. I think you can be forgiven for comparing the two :)
- msimpson 10y ago"I’d argue that this is probably the single most important tech acquisition of all time." However, it was not Apple's first choice. They first attempted to acquire Be Inc. (BeOS) but Jean-Louis Gassée held out for $275 million and lost the deal in a surprise move when Apple, instead, bought NeXT.
- nateguchi 10y agoNow that would be an interesting alternate timeline! / MacBook Pro with Blinkenlights bar /
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hasenj 10y agoThe Mac would not have been a huge success probably in that scenario.
- jacobush 10y agoYou never know... Amiga diehards would have gone 100% Apple. Whether that's a good thing or not I don't know... :-)
- jandrese 10y agoI don't know. A BeOS foundation for MacOS would have made it even better at multimedia production. The tradeoff of course is that it probably would have been late to the whole Internet thing that was becoming something of a big deal around that point. BeOS's network stack was different enough from Berkeley sockets that porting network apps was a challenge. It lacked a version of Netscape at a time when even FreeBSD had a native version for example. In the late 90s this was not acceptable. Apple's engineering culture wasn't one of embracing open standards either, they could have very well stuck with the Be network paradigm and made it a headache to port any POSIX application. Be's heavily multitasking kernel would have been quite a boon for Apple when off the shelf processors started going wide though. They could have been really reaping the benefits from C2Ds and beyond.
- hyperpallium 10y agoIf only Scott Forstall had started a visionary company, that could be acquired revitalize Apple.
- Apocryphon 10y ago"Forstall is reportedly working as an advisor with Snapchat."
- hota_mazi 10y ago> What came out of this deal not only saved Apple and the Mac, Er... interesting revisionism, here. That acquisition didn't do much to save Apple from the financial hole it had dug for itself. Bill Gates is really what saved Apple back then.
- mikekchar 10y agoMicrosoft gave a similar infusion of cash to Corel at around the same time. Through very adept dealing they managed to leverage that investment, essentially forcing the board to accept a buyout from Vector (a VC company partly owned by Paul Allen). MS took a huge loss on the deal ($125 million spent, sold their shares to Vector for $13 million), but Vector made an absolute killing. I have no doubt in my mind that this was the plan for Apple as well. Whoever managed that deal on the Apple side must have been on their toes. Of course, the investment paid off handsomely for MS, but I'm quite sure that this wasn't their intent. So while I think it is true that Apple required the cash infusion they got, they managed the situation masterfully. Whether or not they could have secured funding some other way, we'll never know because they took MS's money.
- itomato 10y ago> I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success."
- scholia 10y ago> The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. Nice quote otherwise, but this bit is not actually true. Microsoft got into apps via Word and Multiplan on DOS. Excel and Word for the Mac were its first graphical applications.
- tlow 10y agoYour comment is not relevant or appreciated. Not only are you not adding to the discussion, this comment is simply a personal opinion coupled with an undependable generalizations about "many people" without even addressing the topic of discussion. Isaacson's book is not generally accepted as the de facto Steve Jobs biography. That is all.
- corndoge 10y agoYour comment is not relevant or appreciated. Not only are you not adding to the discussion, this comment is simply a personal opinion coupled with an undependable generalization about what "many people" consider relevant or appreciate without even addressing the topic of discussion.
- tlow 10y agoYou are a troll. Congrats on your attempt to be clever. I believe that this line is actually quite on topic: "Isaacson's book is not generally accepted as the de facto Steve Jobs biography. That is all."
- dang 10y agoThis comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please (re)-read them and post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13226087 and marked it off-topic.
- tlow 10y agoI'm sorry but I cannot find any reference in the provided links that substantiate that claim. Furthermore, the comment is indeed on-topic. Could you please provide more specific information on how this breaks the HN guidelines linked to?
- 10y ago
- m_mueller 10y agoI copy from a comment of mine from last week. In case you wanna procrastinate on a fascinating story about how Apple transitioned to NextStep's stack without completely annihilating their already weak developer base, here's a few links: You get a corporate drama, a human drama and a tech drama all wrapped up in one series of presentations: Jobs' return (as a consultant) 1997, promoting technologies from NeXT. Watch basically everyone asleep at the wheel except Jobs, the man with a plan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QrX047-v-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QrX047-v-s WWDC Q&A - 'the art of saying no' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iACK-LNnzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iACK-LNnzM Jobs' hostile takeover in July by doing a (probably illegal?) stock dump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#Apple_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Amelio#Apple_Computer Announcing a Deal with Microsoft as de facto CEO in August, booed by the crowd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOs6hnTI4lw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOs6hnTI4lw Internal meeting in September 1997 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMQhOm-Dqo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMQhOm-Dqo iMac introduction 1998 - Apple is back https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxwmF0OJ0vg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxwmF0OJ0vg Macworld 1998 - Apple is essentially saved as a company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYiqVzPjAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYiqVzPjAc OSX Strategy reveal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5dWDg6f9eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5dWDg6f9eo 1999 - OSX Server launch https://youtu.be/NuCYHrSig94?t=48m40s https://youtu.be/NuCYHrSig94?t=48m40s 2000 - OSX launch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko4V3G4NqII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko4V3G4NqII
- yuhong 10y agoI was for a while thinking of the case where Apple bought NeXT but Gil Amelio and later Ellen Hancock stayed as CEO, and CHRP actually happened. While PC margins was declining, I was thinking that Apple could mostly focus on the higher-end PC and workstation markets, especially as OpenStep/Rhapsody was a UNIX.
- m_mueller 10y agoAccording to Jobs they were at times 90 days away from bankruptcy. If that's true I'm thinking nothing but Jobs' full steam turnaround, including getting Microsofts' investor money could have saved the company. Doesn't seem to me like Armelio had either the energy nor the connections to do that.
- shams93 10y agoIf only I had had money to buy Apple stock in 98 lol, be well retired now, instead of going to graduate school taking out a loan to buy tons of Apple stock would have been a far smarter move
- beautifulfreak 10y agoIn the early 90s, I remember reading in NeXTWorld Magazine many articles about the speed of development under NeXTStep. Ten times faster, according to John Carmack, who was creating Doom. Every developer agreed. Each issue showcased apps with surprising and elegant capabilities, really new features available nowhere else. The proposition was that NeXT Cubes were really worth the price, that they enabled magical solutions, and that there was still time left to join the other pioneers. Alas, I could only afford the magazine subscription. (In 2016 dollars, NeXT Cubes cost from $11,000 to $17,000.) When the Apple-NeXT merger was announced, people who had been following the NeXT saga, who had been aware of the benefits of NeXTStep and OpenStep, could easily imagine something great happening, and were especially glad when things worked out well in the end. (Here’s an archive of old NeXTWorld magazines. The PDF scans are actually easier on the eyes. http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/ http://www.nextcomputers.org/NeXTfiles/Articles/NeXTWORLD/)
- itomato 10y agoNeXT also made a promo film with an app development shootout between NeXT and Solaris :https://youtu.be/UGhfB-NICzg https://youtu.be/UGhfB-NICzg
- brians 10y agoSo where's the $15k super machine for today? I'd absolutely look to pay that for something with a similar advantage over a MacBook Pro.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mandeepj 10y ago> 20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT Some say 'Next bought Apple'
- therealmarv 10y agoOnly wished they did not adopted Finder.
- rahoulb 10y agoNeXT didn't have a Finder; the current Finder is a NeXT style file browser and nothing like the Finder on classic MacOS.
- rbanffy 10y agoI like the narrative NeXT bought Apple for one Steve Jobs and got back 400 million in change
- jlebrech 10y agoand this guy missed out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e#1991.E2.80.932002:_Be_Incorporated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gass%C3%A9e#1991.E2...
- coldcode 10y agoPainful to me, I left Apple in May of that year, thinking them toast.