18 ms·

It's interesting to envision the what-if universe where licensing OS X (and other software) became Apple's main business model. I wonder if in this universe,

It's interesting to envision the what-if universe where licensing OS X (and other software) became Apple's main business model. I wonder if in this universe, Apple is basically the Google of our time (everything is a cloud service, massive ad tracking, using metadata as their revenue generation), or if they would be more like the MS of our time (playing a game of catch-up with Google). While I don't really blame Dell for not taking this deal (it seemed like a pretty raw deal for Dell), I wonder how much more popular Unix would be nowadays had this gone through. OS X was (and is) almost certainly the largest desktop *nix distro out there, and if it were installed on every Dell computer (and presumably later other manufacturers as well), I wonder if Unix might have become the "standard" for desktop OS's.

bityard 5y ago
> I wonder if Unix might have become the "standard" for desktop OS's Microsoft is pouring buckets of money and human capital into WSL2. Today, it's their way to drag cloud developers away from the Mac and Linux ecosystems into the corporate-blessed Windows ecosystem. But tomorrow, maybe developers and server admins will demand more Linux compatibility and, who knows, maybe they will reach a point where the only way to improve performance is to "port" Windows services and applications to the Linux kernel. The open source community has already proven that much of it can be done via Wine. One of those things that doesn't look terribly likely now but might prove obvious in retrospect.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Are they really, is there anything to back up the claim WSL2 is a huge team internally? Because the way I see it WSL1 was much more novel and likely required a dedicated team to manage the kernel API to windows API shim layer, but now with WSL2 it's just a gussied up hyper V integration.
  - sz4kerto 5y ago
    Probably not a huge team, but I guess the number of people involved has easily 3 digits, as MS needs to pay the developers, marketing people, manage the releases through Windows Updates, collect feedback, check compatibility etc. At the scale of MS a "major" Windows feature can't be cheap, even if it looks simple. Seriously, look at how difficult it is for them to port the old style control center or improve notepad.exe.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      You’re right that at MS scale teams are bigger, but also dollars are even proportionally much easier to come by.
  - AaronFriel 5y ago
    My hunch is that the monumental amount of work to make virtualized GPU support and zero-copy hardware accelerated graphics work from WSL2 to the desktop (a technology called "VAIL", which hasn't shipped yet) is in order to support Android apps on Windows, and that's always been the goal of this team and a series of high profile projects. WSL2 is actually the third iteration of this technology, not the second, and I believe has the same original goal and they've dedicated a large amount of engineering effort to that goal. Here's my case: Windows 10 Mobile had "Project Astoria", which involved working with app developers to port apps to Windows Phone. This involved library support and translation layers to enable APKs to run on Windows. WSL1 abandoned the approach of requiring developers to modify apps, and used "pico processes" with kernel driver and Windows kernel's support for alternative subsystems to Win32 to map Linux syscalls to Windows equivalents. This enabled binary compatibility for most apps, but fell short. WSL2 switched to the lightweight Hyper-V integration (now using the host compute system APIs to manage lightweight containers/VMs) but added deep driver integration with graphics to enable machine learning and hardware accelerated graphic workloads to work within Linux using vGPU drivers and RAIL respectively. And soon VAIL, to enable full fidelity graphical applications (i.e.: Android apps) to run on Windows without compromise. That's a lot of engineering time on 3 high complexity projects over a span of at least 6 years, publicly. Link to a talk on X11/Wayland and VAIL: https://xdc2020.x.org/event/9/contributions/611/attachments/702/1298/XDC2020_-_X11_and_Wayland_applications_in_WSL.pdf https://xdc2020.x.org/event/9/contributions/611/attachments/...
    - easton 5y ago
      VAIL and WSLg are available now in stable builds of Windows 11. I think VAIL was originally designed to be able to connect to containers that ran Win32 apps so that they looked natural, but since containerizing Win32 apps and their 30 years of legacy cruft was considered too good of an idea to finish, it was repurposed for this.
      - AaronFriel 5y ago
        I think I disagree on both points. VAIL is not available yet, that I have seen, and I don't believe it was intended originally for Win32 apps. I don't think VAIL has shipped yet, and getting that working correctly and securely, as it involves sharing memory between the WSL2 VM with a Linux kernel and the host Windows kernel, seems to me the most likely blocking issue for why they haven't yet released Android app support on Windows. See this comment on the readme of the WSLg repo: > Please note that for the first release of WSLg, vGPU interops with the Weston compositor through system memory. If running on a discrete GPU, this effectively means that the rendered data is copied from VRAM to system memory before being presented to the compositor within WSLg, and uploaded onto the GPU again on the Windows side. As for originally being intended for Win32 apps, I do wonder if "Vail" and "VAIL" are different projects within the OS division. The Linux/X11/Wayland and vGPU interop part of VAIL requires different expertise and deep knowledge of the Linux graphical stack.
  - easygenes 5y ago
    Not only that, but it severely underperforms vs e.g. the VMware Hypervisor, even on the latest Windows. (Good luck disabling Hyper-V so that you can even run a different hypervisor on Windows these days, btw)
- dmitrygr 5y ago
  > "port" Windows services and applications to the Linux kernel. In every category imaginable, the NT kernel is better designed. Async IO, better power management, pageable kernel memory, stable driver API. I'd much rather KDE shell on NT kernel. I get that Linux is popular, but no objective evaluation would claim that Linux kernel is better in any metric other than "how open source is it?" Spend some time to read the NT docs and get familiar with the design and you'll see. This may be a hard pill to swallow, but in many areas linux's design is still very much "my first kernel" (I will give credit where it is due though, it is slowly being patched piece by piece, slowly). Whereas NT was written by a team who's done it a few times and avoided a lot of pitfalls (eg: synchronous by default IO, really??)
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    NT kernel is not only providing a stable API but also a stable ABI. Making guarantees that software will continue to work in the future.
  - otabdeveloper4 5y ago
    > synchronous by default IO, really?? Yes really. Synchronous, multi-threaded is the sane default from any perspective. (Performance, safety, developer convenience, flexibility, you name it.) P.S. I've been making high-performance "web-scale" services for more than a decade.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    Even Windows doesn't agree with that. They started with a syscall wrapper for running Linux binaries, and ended up running a full Linux kernel next to the NT one because that was faster. There are absolutely parts of Linux with all the architecture and engineering rigor of a favela. Real big "I want a new room and have two sheets of corrugated steel, a neighbor's wall, and an afternoon" energy. There are also major parts of it that have benefited from decades of 'this tweak that won't be driver ABI compatible increases efficiency in this use case by measurable but single digit perf'. And yes, there's politics to getting that merged, but the barrier is way lower in Linux. You try a lot of that in how Microsoft builds software and at best you put a target on your back because you just made a lot of work for another team. At worst that amount of differently siloed work just kills the idea in the first place.
- samuellavoie90 5y ago
  Microsoft's next step might be to 'Extend'; add feature to wsl2 that aren't available outside of windows. (To lock in WSL2 Users, and since they have the manpower they can outpace any other linux distro on features)
  - avtar 5y ago
    I don't know who out there might want to deploy their production services using WSL2. The appeal of using WSL is to develop and test apps in Linux distributions that might be in use in production.
  - nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
    > Microsoft's next step might be to 'Extend' Damn, gramps, let it go - 90s are over.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - nicce 5y ago
    I started to use so much WSL that I finally ditched Windows totally. I doubt that they can add something so special to keep users which Linux community can’t
  - soylentnewsorg 5y ago
    Every person I know who dual-booted or ran *nix in a vm has now switched over to WSL, including myself. It works ok, I got a korn shell, I can access all the windows data. This move killed cygwin and a lot of dual-boot linux installs within a year of availability. here's the thing though - everyone i know just needs the basic korn shell and basic unix like features for their laptop. no one is writing apps targeting wsl, no one's running it on a server. the features we use wsl for have been the same since 1988, and we're not interested in the new ones.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Exactly because of this kind of experience, and my own at the time, I deeply believe if Microsoft had been half as serious with Windows NT POSIX compatilitly as they are now with WSL, Linux would never had taken off. I got into Slackware Linux, as means to do university work at home, and when I started working it was Windows NT, Aix, HP-UX and Solaris. We had a couple of Linux based servers but they were used as toys, like smuggling a couple of networked games into the office.
- dingosity 5y ago
  meh. install windows 10. install WSL(2). install apache in WSL(2). start edge. point the edge browser at WSL(2). Notice the default network settings disallow edge from talking to WSL(2). or start up something that uses mDNS. or try to use non-latin characters on the terminal. I'm sure MSFT is putting a lot of money in WSL2. but it's hard to argue they're serious about it.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Today, it's their way to drag cloud developers away from the Mac and Linux ecosystems into the corporate-blessed Windows ecosystem No, its their way to avoid corporate (now and becoming cloud) developers already on Windows from being dragged off the Windows ecosystem. Its defensive, not (primarily) expansive.
moonchrome 5y ago
Or they would be bankrupt ? Mac OS lost to Windows and if Apple was about software instead of hardware they would probably miss iPhone and iPod just like Microsoft.
- tombert 5y ago
  Entirely possible, or bought out by a company like Sun Microsystems; it might have been a way for Sun to try and penetrate the desktop market instead of mainframes and servers. Pulling on this thread, if the iPhone didn't exist (because Apple was solely software), I think there's a chance that the big player in the mobile space today would probably be Blackberry. They were doing extremely well before the iPhone, and if Apple hadn't disrupted the entire smartphone industry, I don't really see why that would haven't continued. I wonder if that means that smartphones would still have keyboards?
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Sun was playing with OpenSTEP and gave up on it. Java and Java 2 EE are deeply related to those endeavours.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Yes, around that time it was possible to build OPENSTEP apps in either Java or Obj-C.
    - tombert 5y ago
      Wouldn't that kind of confirm my point though? In this theoretical universe where Apple is going bankrupt because there's no iPhone, but they do have a decent operating system they're wholly dedicated to (in addition to Sun's previous interest in the system before), might have made it attractive to an executive at Sun. I'm not saying it would have worked out any better for Sun, just that they were one of the bigger players in the tech world in the late 90's/early 2000's, and I could see trying to break into the desktop space seeming valuable to them at the time.
cronix 5y ago
Does it count as "popular" if you aren't even aware you're using it? I suspect 95+% of Apple product users do not know the GUI is interacting with 'nix, and even fewer have opened a terminal and interacted with it directly. The GUI is not 'nix. It's an interface to it. Edit: removed asterisks before *nix as it triggered markdown
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  it's a bigger issue for developers. The fact that I can do *nix style development, then run some script that wraps it up in a nice .app bundle and ship that off to users means that its popularity very much matters.
smoldesu 5y ago
If Apple had switched to an OS-licensing model, I think it would fix both of the issues I see with MacOS right now: a lack of communication between the users and designers, and their lack of incentive to work with other manufacturers.
kazinator 5y ago
> I wonder how much more popular Unix would be nowadays had this gone through. Half a phone convo: Hi, this is Steve Jobs. If you engage in licensing with Apple, I will port my Unix-based OS to your brand of generic PC hardware. What? Yes, I sorta know I can already do that without you licensing anything from me. Why am I talking to you? Good question, you see ... Yes, I know about Linux. But anyway, so how about it?
LordKano 5y ago
My favorite Apple related What-If is What If Gassee hadn't been so greedy when Apple was interested in buying the BeOS?
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  My favorite what if, too. BeOS was much more innovative than NEXT at the time.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  This would certainly have destroyed Apple, right? BeOS despite its cult followers was really almost useless and JLG would not have initiated the projects that made Apple a success after acquiring Next.
  - linguae 5y ago
    I agree in the sense that BeOS wouldn't have saved Apple, though this has less to do with the merits of BeOS and more to do with Apple's circumstances. Even with the purchase of NeXT, there was still a considerable time period between December 1996 (when the purchase of NeXT was announced) and March 2001 (when Mac OS X 10.0 was released) where Apple's customers still had to use the aging classic Mac OS (and even then Mac OS X didn't start getting widespread adoption among Mac users until the Jaguar/Panther eras). More to the point, Apple's operating system strategy wasn't the only issue Apple faced. NeXT's OpenStep API and OPENSTEP operating system weren't enough by themselves to turn around Apple; it was Steve Jobs' leadership and the successful launches of products such as the iMac G3 (1998), the iBook G3 (1999) that kept Apple afloat until Mac OS X was released. I don't know if Apple would have survived had Gil Amelio remained in power or had Jean-Louis Gassée took control.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  Oh yeah. I think about that all the time. I’m thrilled that we have unix with nice GUI that runs Photoshop. That was always my dream machine as a kid. But boy, was BeOS awesome. The most responsive OS I ever used. The priorities were set straight: user input is king, so is audio and video. And the aesthetics matched my taste remarkably well. I always thought NeXT was hideous by comparison.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
> playing a game of catch-up with Google It's not like something came out of Google recently. If anything, Google is desperately trying to catch-up with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud and Apple in consumer etc. They are entering a long path of gradual decline.
fortran77 5y ago
> MS of our time (playing a game of catch-up with Google). MSFT market cap today is 2.22T GOOGL is 1.86T They're not exactly playing "catch up". It's more like "keep up"
b20000 5y ago
apple would never become the google of our time, they know what they are doing. also, microsoft is not playing catch up. how is that office product coming along? does it work yet?
DeathArrow 5y ago
Microsoft actually developed and sold an Unix distribution called Xenix. I'd imagine that if it was a great demand for it it would have replaced Windows.
tdrdt 5y ago
Around that time I was forced to use MacOS 9 at work. It was terrible. The OS was very unstable and I had to reboot serveral times a day. This was one of the reasons a lot of companies were using Windows because it was way more productive (except for Windows ME). So I can imagine large companies would not trust OS X at that time and it would have been a big risk for Dell.

bityard 5y ago

> I wonder if Unix might have become the "standard" for desktop OS's Microsoft is pouring buckets of money and human capital into WSL2. Today, it's their way to drag cloud developers away from the Mac and Linux ecosystems into the corporate-blessed Windows ecosystem. But tomorrow, maybe developers and server admins will demand more Linux compatibility and, who knows, maybe they will reach a point where the only way to improve performance is to "port" Windows services and applications to the Linux kernel. The open source community has already proven that much of it can be done via Wine. One of those things that doesn't look terribly likely now but might prove obvious in retrospect.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
Are they really, is there anything to back up the claim WSL2 is a huge team internally? Because the way I see it WSL1 was much more novel and likely required a dedicated team to manage the kernel API to windows API shim layer, but now with WSL2 it's just a gussied up hyper V integration.
- sz4kerto 5y ago
  Probably not a huge team, but I guess the number of people involved has easily 3 digits, as MS needs to pay the developers, marketing people, manage the releases through Windows Updates, collect feedback, check compatibility etc. At the scale of MS a "major" Windows feature can't be cheap, even if it looks simple. Seriously, look at how difficult it is for them to port the old style control center or improve notepad.exe.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    You’re right that at MS scale teams are bigger, but also dollars are even proportionally much easier to come by.
- AaronFriel 5y ago
  My hunch is that the monumental amount of work to make virtualized GPU support and zero-copy hardware accelerated graphics work from WSL2 to the desktop (a technology called "VAIL", which hasn't shipped yet) is in order to support Android apps on Windows, and that's always been the goal of this team and a series of high profile projects. WSL2 is actually the third iteration of this technology, not the second, and I believe has the same original goal and they've dedicated a large amount of engineering effort to that goal. Here's my case: Windows 10 Mobile had "Project Astoria", which involved working with app developers to port apps to Windows Phone. This involved library support and translation layers to enable APKs to run on Windows. WSL1 abandoned the approach of requiring developers to modify apps, and used "pico processes" with kernel driver and Windows kernel's support for alternative subsystems to Win32 to map Linux syscalls to Windows equivalents. This enabled binary compatibility for most apps, but fell short. WSL2 switched to the lightweight Hyper-V integration (now using the host compute system APIs to manage lightweight containers/VMs) but added deep driver integration with graphics to enable machine learning and hardware accelerated graphic workloads to work within Linux using vGPU drivers and RAIL respectively. And soon VAIL, to enable full fidelity graphical applications (i.e.: Android apps) to run on Windows without compromise. That's a lot of engineering time on 3 high complexity projects over a span of at least 6 years, publicly. Link to a talk on X11/Wayland and VAIL: https://xdc2020.x.org/event/9/contributions/611/attachments/702/1298/XDC2020_-_X11_and_Wayland_applications_in_WSL.pdf https://xdc2020.x.org/event/9/contributions/611/attachments/...
  - easton 5y ago
    VAIL and WSLg are available now in stable builds of Windows 11. I think VAIL was originally designed to be able to connect to containers that ran Win32 apps so that they looked natural, but since containerizing Win32 apps and their 30 years of legacy cruft was considered too good of an idea to finish, it was repurposed for this.
    - AaronFriel 5y ago
      I think I disagree on both points. VAIL is not available yet, that I have seen, and I don't believe it was intended originally for Win32 apps. I don't think VAIL has shipped yet, and getting that working correctly and securely, as it involves sharing memory between the WSL2 VM with a Linux kernel and the host Windows kernel, seems to me the most likely blocking issue for why they haven't yet released Android app support on Windows. See this comment on the readme of the WSLg repo: > Please note that for the first release of WSLg, vGPU interops with the Weston compositor through system memory. If running on a discrete GPU, this effectively means that the rendered data is copied from VRAM to system memory before being presented to the compositor within WSLg, and uploaded onto the GPU again on the Windows side. As for originally being intended for Win32 apps, I do wonder if "Vail" and "VAIL" are different projects within the OS division. The Linux/X11/Wayland and vGPU interop part of VAIL requires different expertise and deep knowledge of the Linux graphical stack.
- easygenes 5y ago
  Not only that, but it severely underperforms vs e.g. the VMware Hypervisor, even on the latest Windows. (Good luck disabling Hyper-V so that you can even run a different hypervisor on Windows these days, btw)
dmitrygr 5y ago
> "port" Windows services and applications to the Linux kernel. In every category imaginable, the NT kernel is better designed. Async IO, better power management, pageable kernel memory, stable driver API. I'd much rather KDE shell on NT kernel. I get that Linux is popular, but no objective evaluation would claim that Linux kernel is better in any metric other than "how open source is it?" Spend some time to read the NT docs and get familiar with the design and you'll see. This may be a hard pill to swallow, but in many areas linux's design is still very much "my first kernel" (I will give credit where it is due though, it is slowly being patched piece by piece, slowly). Whereas NT was written by a team who's done it a few times and avoided a lot of pitfalls (eg: synchronous by default IO, really??)
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  NT kernel is not only providing a stable API but also a stable ABI. Making guarantees that software will continue to work in the future.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  > synchronous by default IO, really?? Yes really. Synchronous, multi-threaded is the sane default from any perspective. (Performance, safety, developer convenience, flexibility, you name it.) P.S. I've been making high-performance "web-scale" services for more than a decade.
- monocasa 5y ago
  Even Windows doesn't agree with that. They started with a syscall wrapper for running Linux binaries, and ended up running a full Linux kernel next to the NT one because that was faster. There are absolutely parts of Linux with all the architecture and engineering rigor of a favela. Real big "I want a new room and have two sheets of corrugated steel, a neighbor's wall, and an afternoon" energy. There are also major parts of it that have benefited from decades of 'this tweak that won't be driver ABI compatible increases efficiency in this use case by measurable but single digit perf'. And yes, there's politics to getting that merged, but the barrier is way lower in Linux. You try a lot of that in how Microsoft builds software and at best you put a target on your back because you just made a lot of work for another team. At worst that amount of differently siloed work just kills the idea in the first place.
samuellavoie90 5y ago
Microsoft's next step might be to 'Extend'; add feature to wsl2 that aren't available outside of windows. (To lock in WSL2 Users, and since they have the manpower they can outpace any other linux distro on features)
- avtar 5y ago
  I don't know who out there might want to deploy their production services using WSL2. The appeal of using WSL is to develop and test apps in Linux distributions that might be in use in production.
- nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
  > Microsoft's next step might be to 'Extend' Damn, gramps, let it go - 90s are over.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- nicce 5y ago
  I started to use so much WSL that I finally ditched Windows totally. I doubt that they can add something so special to keep users which Linux community can’t
- soylentnewsorg 5y ago
  Every person I know who dual-booted or ran *nix in a vm has now switched over to WSL, including myself. It works ok, I got a korn shell, I can access all the windows data. This move killed cygwin and a lot of dual-boot linux installs within a year of availability. here's the thing though - everyone i know just needs the basic korn shell and basic unix like features for their laptop. no one is writing apps targeting wsl, no one's running it on a server. the features we use wsl for have been the same since 1988, and we're not interested in the new ones.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Exactly because of this kind of experience, and my own at the time, I deeply believe if Microsoft had been half as serious with Windows NT POSIX compatilitly as they are now with WSL, Linux would never had taken off. I got into Slackware Linux, as means to do university work at home, and when I started working it was Windows NT, Aix, HP-UX and Solaris. We had a couple of Linux based servers but they were used as toys, like smuggling a couple of networked games into the office.
dingosity 5y ago
meh. install windows 10. install WSL(2). install apache in WSL(2). start edge. point the edge browser at WSL(2). Notice the default network settings disallow edge from talking to WSL(2). or start up something that uses mDNS. or try to use non-latin characters on the terminal. I'm sure MSFT is putting a lot of money in WSL2. but it's hard to argue they're serious about it.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Today, it's their way to drag cloud developers away from the Mac and Linux ecosystems into the corporate-blessed Windows ecosystem No, its their way to avoid corporate (now and becoming cloud) developers already on Windows from being dragged off the Windows ecosystem. Its defensive, not (primarily) expansive.

moonchrome 5y ago

Or they would be bankrupt ? Mac OS lost to Windows and if Apple was about software instead of hardware they would probably miss iPhone and iPod just like Microsoft.

tombert 5y ago
Entirely possible, or bought out by a company like Sun Microsystems; it might have been a way for Sun to try and penetrate the desktop market instead of mainframes and servers. Pulling on this thread, if the iPhone didn't exist (because Apple was solely software), I think there's a chance that the big player in the mobile space today would probably be Blackberry. They were doing extremely well before the iPhone, and if Apple hadn't disrupted the entire smartphone industry, I don't really see why that would haven't continued. I wonder if that means that smartphones would still have keyboards?
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Sun was playing with OpenSTEP and gave up on it. Java and Java 2 EE are deeply related to those endeavours.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Yes, around that time it was possible to build OPENSTEP apps in either Java or Obj-C.
  - tombert 5y ago
    Wouldn't that kind of confirm my point though? In this theoretical universe where Apple is going bankrupt because there's no iPhone, but they do have a decent operating system they're wholly dedicated to (in addition to Sun's previous interest in the system before), might have made it attractive to an executive at Sun. I'm not saying it would have worked out any better for Sun, just that they were one of the bigger players in the tech world in the late 90's/early 2000's, and I could see trying to break into the desktop space seeming valuable to them at the time.

cronix 5y ago

Does it count as "popular" if you aren't even aware you're using it? I suspect 95+% of Apple product users do not know the GUI is interacting with 'nix, and even fewer have opened a terminal and interacted with it directly. The GUI is not 'nix. It's an interface to it. Edit: removed asterisks before *nix as it triggered markdown

blacktriangle 5y ago
it's a bigger issue for developers. The fact that I can do *nix style development, then run some script that wraps it up in a nice .app bundle and ship that off to users means that its popularity very much matters.

smoldesu 5y ago

If Apple had switched to an OS-licensing model, I think it would fix both of the issues I see with MacOS right now: a lack of communication between the users and designers, and their lack of incentive to work with other manufacturers.

kazinator 5y ago

> I wonder how much more popular Unix would be nowadays had this gone through. Half a phone convo: Hi, this is Steve Jobs. If you engage in licensing with Apple, I will port my Unix-based OS to your brand of generic PC hardware. What? Yes, I sorta know I can already do that without you licensing anything from me. Why am I talking to you? Good question, you see ... Yes, I know about Linux. But anyway, so how about it?

LordKano 5y ago

My favorite Apple related What-If is What If Gassee hadn't been so greedy when Apple was interested in buying the BeOS?

DeathArrow 5y ago
My favorite what if, too. BeOS was much more innovative than NEXT at the time.
jeffbee 5y ago
This would certainly have destroyed Apple, right? BeOS despite its cult followers was really almost useless and JLG would not have initiated the projects that made Apple a success after acquiring Next.
- linguae 5y ago
  I agree in the sense that BeOS wouldn't have saved Apple, though this has less to do with the merits of BeOS and more to do with Apple's circumstances. Even with the purchase of NeXT, there was still a considerable time period between December 1996 (when the purchase of NeXT was announced) and March 2001 (when Mac OS X 10.0 was released) where Apple's customers still had to use the aging classic Mac OS (and even then Mac OS X didn't start getting widespread adoption among Mac users until the Jaguar/Panther eras). More to the point, Apple's operating system strategy wasn't the only issue Apple faced. NeXT's OpenStep API and OPENSTEP operating system weren't enough by themselves to turn around Apple; it was Steve Jobs' leadership and the successful launches of products such as the iMac G3 (1998), the iBook G3 (1999) that kept Apple afloat until Mac OS X was released. I don't know if Apple would have survived had Gil Amelio remained in power or had Jean-Louis Gassée took control.
tambourine_man 5y ago
Oh yeah. I think about that all the time. I’m thrilled that we have unix with nice GUI that runs Photoshop. That was always my dream machine as a kid. But boy, was BeOS awesome. The most responsive OS I ever used. The priorities were set straight: user input is king, so is audio and video. And the aesthetics matched my taste remarkably well. I always thought NeXT was hideous by comparison.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago

> playing a game of catch-up with Google It's not like something came out of Google recently. If anything, Google is desperately trying to catch-up with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud and Apple in consumer etc. They are entering a long path of gradual decline.

fortran77 5y ago

> MS of our time (playing a game of catch-up with Google). MSFT market cap today is 2.22T GOOGL is 1.86T They're not exactly playing "catch up". It's more like "keep up"

b20000 5y ago

apple would never become the google of our time, they know what they are doing. also, microsoft is not playing catch up. how is that office product coming along? does it work yet?

DeathArrow 5y ago

Microsoft actually developed and sold an Unix distribution called Xenix. I'd imagine that if it was a great demand for it it would have replaced Windows.

tdrdt 5y ago

Around that time I was forced to use MacOS 9 at work. It was terrible. The OS was very unstable and I had to reboot serveral times a day. This was one of the reasons a lot of companies were using Windows because it was way more productive (except for Windows ME). So I can imagine large companies would not trust OS X at that time and it would have been a big risk for Dell.