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Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediate

Multitasking was needed and Be could have filled the Darwin gap but what they really needed was a leadership kick in the head. Steve was hired, almost immediately led a coup that ended up with Gil gone, the board disbanded and him with near pure control over the company. He fired, chopped, focused, and brought operations to the point where they were not lighting their cash on hand on fire. The business turnaround story is amazing, forget the creative factor and all that, the only reason Apple is still around is that he walked in and rapidly course corrected a company that wasn’t even his anymore. He wasn’t anything when Gil bought NeXT, his title was just “Advisor” to the CEO. A hilarious title. The magic of the next purchase was that it saved Apple way more money than it cost by effectively letting in a “Good” virus that infected the company’s management and cut the cruft fast. ‘97 Steve had had 10 years of startup OPs pain under his belt.

icedchai 7y ago
Classic MacOS had multitasking (cooperative...), but it was missing memory protection. The same was true of earlier 68K-based OSes (Atari, Amiga.)
- btilly 7y ago
  The problem with cooperative multitasking is that a SINGLE poorly behaved process in the background locks up the whole operating system. This leads to a horrible user experience. As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again. Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.
  - icedchai 7y ago
    Yes, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking, but no memory protection, and the situation wasn't really any better. A single rogue process could bring down the whole system by overwriting parts of the OS.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      Guru Meditation :)
- lproven 7y ago
  It wasn't unique to the 68K world. Windows/286 (from long before Windows 3) could multitask too, but not very stably. No memory protection. Acorn RISC OS -- the original ARM OS -- had _both_ cooperative and (for command-prompt windows) pre-emptive multitasking, but again, no memory protection. A big part of the problem was that the 68000 had no MMU. Nor did the 68010 or the 68020. One only came onboard as standard with the 68030 -- analogous to Intel's 80386DX -- and then it was too late: to rework all the existing OSes would have been both a huge amount of work, and badly broken backwards-compatibility with the large existing software libraries. Whereas the PC industry more or less rebooted the OS stack (eventually), with a new, graphical OS that could use the hardware multitasking features of the 386 if it got one, and do without if it didn't. This was Windows 3, and it evolved into Windows 9x. Meanwhile in the background Microsoft frantically worked on turning OS/2 3, the CPU-independent version, into something saleable. OS/2 3 became OS/2 NT became Windows NT and the rest is history.
gumby 7y ago
I agree -- I like Gasee and BeOS but there's no chance he would have managed to do the same with Apple. The modern Apple, like the original Apple, is Job's creation. In a way that very very few CEOs (who get all the credit regardless) can say.
- sjwright 7y ago
  Indeed. BeOS would have made Macintosh as successful as the Amiga.
  - lproven 7y ago
    A good, pithy summary. BeOS was a beautiful OS, my favourite ever x86 OS. But the _other_ key thing most people miss is that NeXT also had amazing, industry-beating development tools. Be didn't. Both BeOS and NeXTstep were amazing OSes, but NeXT offered 2 other things as well as a great OS: • best-of-breed dev tools, including Interface Builder • Steve Jobs. No contest, I'm afraid. Even if personally I preferred BeOS.
chx 7y ago
https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Transcription at: https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcription-be6df9dd692c https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcri... > The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that’s gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars — 10 billion dollars of product a year? One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.
sjwright 7y ago
Be was a tech demo at best. It looked finished on the surface but had less than 10% of what a complete operating system needs in terms of feature depth, libraries and extensive real word testing. Steve Jobs was utterly critical, but NeXT technology was also insanely valuable.
- kls 7y ago
  Right it was a great single user workstation, but had no where near the underlining stack to compete in a corp environment. Be did one thing and, did that one thing light years better than anything on the market. next was the clear choice for what apple needed to stay competitive.
WalterBright 7y ago
Proof that a good CEO is worth the money.
- usefulcat 7y ago
  Now all we need is a reliable way to identify a 'good' CEO without the benefit of hindsight.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Not just anybody is hired to be a CEO. A candidate has to have a track record of success. That's how.
    - usefulcat 7y ago
      If you know of a reliable way to identify CEOs who can effect the kind of turnaround that Jobs executed at Apple, then, with respect, I tend to think you may be in the wrong business :) My point was that the rarity of that kind of turnaround is strong evidence that that level of CEO performance is not even close to being predictable.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        Most CEOs run their companies successfully. The ones that don't get the boot and are not likely to be recruited for another CEO position. After all, would you?
    - nl 7y ago
      Counter example: John Scully
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        Who'd you hire for the top job - someone with a track record of success, or another with a track record of failure?
kls 7y ago
A big piece to that power play was Bill Gates backing Job with capital. It was a win win for both of them, Steve used it to wrangle political control of the company and Gates used it to stave off an impending anti-trust litigation. Had Steve not had the capital from Gates a year after rejoining, the story would have been much different.

icedchai 7y ago

Classic MacOS had multitasking (cooperative...), but it was missing memory protection. The same was true of earlier 68K-based OSes (Atari, Amiga.)

btilly 7y ago
The problem with cooperative multitasking is that a SINGLE poorly behaved process in the background locks up the whole operating system. This leads to a horrible user experience. As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again. Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.
- icedchai 7y ago
  Yes, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking, but no memory protection, and the situation wasn't really any better. A single rogue process could bring down the whole system by overwriting parts of the OS.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Guru Meditation :)
lproven 7y ago
It wasn't unique to the 68K world. Windows/286 (from long before Windows 3) could multitask too, but not very stably. No memory protection. Acorn RISC OS -- the original ARM OS -- had _both_ cooperative and (for command-prompt windows) pre-emptive multitasking, but again, no memory protection. A big part of the problem was that the 68000 had no MMU. Nor did the 68010 or the 68020. One only came onboard as standard with the 68030 -- analogous to Intel's 80386DX -- and then it was too late: to rework all the existing OSes would have been both a huge amount of work, and badly broken backwards-compatibility with the large existing software libraries. Whereas the PC industry more or less rebooted the OS stack (eventually), with a new, graphical OS that could use the hardware multitasking features of the 386 if it got one, and do without if it didn't. This was Windows 3, and it evolved into Windows 9x. Meanwhile in the background Microsoft frantically worked on turning OS/2 3, the CPU-independent version, into something saleable. OS/2 3 became OS/2 NT became Windows NT and the rest is history.

gumby 7y ago

I agree -- I like Gasee and BeOS but there's no chance he would have managed to do the same with Apple. The modern Apple, like the original Apple, is Job's creation. In a way that very very few CEOs (who get all the credit regardless) can say.

sjwright 7y ago
Indeed. BeOS would have made Macintosh as successful as the Amiga.
- lproven 7y ago
  A good, pithy summary. BeOS was a beautiful OS, my favourite ever x86 OS. But the _other_ key thing most people miss is that NeXT also had amazing, industry-beating development tools. Be didn't. Both BeOS and NeXTstep were amazing OSes, but NeXT offered 2 other things as well as a great OS: • best-of-breed dev tools, including Interface Builder • Steve Jobs. No contest, I'm afraid. Even if personally I preferred BeOS.

chx 7y ago

https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE https://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Transcription at: https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcription-be6df9dd692c https://austenallred.com/steve-jobs-insult-response-transcri... > The hardest thing is, how does that fit into a cohesive larger vision that’s gonna allow you to sell 8 billion dollars — 10 billion dollars of product a year? One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.

sjwright 7y ago

Be was a tech demo at best. It looked finished on the surface but had less than 10% of what a complete operating system needs in terms of feature depth, libraries and extensive real word testing. Steve Jobs was utterly critical, but NeXT technology was also insanely valuable.

kls 7y ago
Right it was a great single user workstation, but had no where near the underlining stack to compete in a corp environment. Be did one thing and, did that one thing light years better than anything on the market. next was the clear choice for what apple needed to stay competitive.

WalterBright 7y ago

Proof that a good CEO is worth the money.

usefulcat 7y ago
Now all we need is a reliable way to identify a 'good' CEO without the benefit of hindsight.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Not just anybody is hired to be a CEO. A candidate has to have a track record of success. That's how.
  - usefulcat 7y ago
    If you know of a reliable way to identify CEOs who can effect the kind of turnaround that Jobs executed at Apple, then, with respect, I tend to think you may be in the wrong business :) My point was that the rarity of that kind of turnaround is strong evidence that that level of CEO performance is not even close to being predictable.
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Most CEOs run their companies successfully. The ones that don't get the boot and are not likely to be recruited for another CEO position. After all, would you?
  - nl 7y ago
    Counter example: John Scully
    - WalterBright 7y ago
      Who'd you hire for the top job - someone with a track record of success, or another with a track record of failure?

kls 7y ago

A big piece to that power play was Bill Gates backing Job with capital. It was a win win for both of them, Steve used it to wrangle political control of the company and Gates used it to stave off an impending anti-trust litigation. Had Steve not had the capital from Gates a year after rejoining, the story would have been much different.