4 ms·
Agreed, the premise here is in my opinion pretty wrong. While it too would be a little hyperbolic, I’d be much quicker to argue the opposite. Also, how success
by giobox 8y ago
Agreed, the premise here is in my opinion pretty wrong. While it too would be a little hyperbolic, I’d be much quicker to argue the opposite.
Also, how successful other OSes were or weren’t at attracting an install base during the 1990s is very tangentially related to why Copland failed.
Slightly related: I’ve always wondered what Apple might be like today if Gassée had succeeded in selling BeOS to Apple instead of Jobs with NeXTSTEP. Probably a nice headstone in the Silicon Valley graveyard next to Sun, SGI etc, but interesting to consider.
- Apocryphon 8y agoAnd then BlackBerry or Microsoft CE ends up launching the mobile revolution. Oh dear.
- wmf 8y agoNah, those were available for years and never reached anything close to iPhone/Android levels of adoption. It's possible that Android (the "better Danger" version, not the "iPhone clone" version) would have still happened, but it may also have languished without the iPhone to pave the way.
- lproven 8y agoAgreed. The original pre-Google Android was a Blackberry-killer, and I don't reckon that was a good way to go. You can see some early prototype devices here: https://www.androidcentral.com/android-pre-history https://www.androidcentral.com/android-pre-history As usual for Ars, it has a far more detailed history, with pre-1.0 screenshots: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/building-android-a-40000-word-history-of-googles-mobile-os/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/building-android-a-4... You can see that, before the iPhone, it started out as a Blackberry clone, or something like it. And that, IMHO, was far to geeky a toy to change the world as the iPhone did.
- smarks 8y agoYes. To paraphrase Ray Noorda, it'd still be dead, but it would have been a much more interesting death.
- peatmoss 8y agoOh my goodness, just think of the eulogizing of NeXT that we’d be doing here on Hacker News. But who knows, maybe in that alternate timeline Sun succeeds in making a Solaris for the masses, and Linux becomes an obscure footnote. Some flavor of BSD ultimately becomes the oddball alternative to Windows (which dominates) and Solaris which is the runner-up developer favorite.
- scarface74 8y agoDead. Apple almost died the first time mostly because Gassée went for margins instead of market share when he was at Apple.