You're absolutely right about the focus, the narrowing of product lines and a return to consumer products, giving Apple a path to the iPod and financial success

You're absolutely right about the focus, the narrowing of product lines and a return to consumer products, giving Apple a path to the iPod and financial success. Apple needed a story, a reason to exist, and then needed to bring that story to their chosen market. Apple could not afford to cover every bet, to run the table. The Sculley strategy had failed. And none of that shift was technology. NeXT vs BeOS would not have made a difference on the relevant time scale. But we love to nerd out of the tech, and Be had some wonderful stuff. Love their filesystem, their interrupt handling, dang the PowerPC could destroy Intel in context-switch latency speed... What an awesome Jeff Goldblum ad campaign that would have been! Pour one out for BeOS. And Dylan. And Newton soup... But as I consider tech details, again most of the good ideas did not die. ARM handheld hardware, dynamic but typed TypeScript, tuple-space data message passing noSQL soup. After a while, you see the bits and get that familiar feeling.