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Ex-Sun guy. Sun was terrible at mergers and bought/killed products on a regular basis. The culture difference between Apple/Sun is so big... There's absolutely

Ex-Sun guy. Sun was terrible at mergers and bought/killed products on a regular basis. The culture difference between Apple/Sun is so big... There's absolutely no way this would have worked. I would have loved to have a proper Sparc. Those machines were amazing and their UI/UX sucked so bad. Sun never found an opportunity it couldn't botch.

walrus01 5y ago
I have to agree because I don't think apple would have successfully turned sunos into a unix-based macos9 successor. If you look at the earliest versions of OSX it's NeXT with a macos9 skin on top of it. But it's recognizably NeXT.
linguae 5y ago
A sad example of a Sun acquisition that went nowhere was Lighthouse Design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design), a software company that specialized in productivity software for NeXTSTEP. One of the company's most famous products was Concurrence, a presentation tool that Steve Jobs used and influenced the design of Apple Keynote. In an alternative timeline, Lighthouse Design could have been the premier developer for Mac OS X. Sun bought Lighthouse Design at a time when it invested in NeXT's OpenStep API; in fact, there was a port of OpenStep to Solaris. However, Java ended up taking off around 1995-96, and Sun's strategy changed from supporting OpenStep to promoting Java. Lighthouse Design's software didn't fit in this strategy, and sadly the software has been abandoned, even though Sun was in a great position to polish and update the software when Mac OS X was released. I understand why Lighthouse Design was sold, though. Before Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the future for NeXT-based software companies appeared bleak, and these companies faced the challenging prospects of (1) porting their software, implemented using NeXT's then state-of-the-art APIs and tools, to platforms that were more commercially viable yet lacked such tooling, and (2) competing with the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft; WordPerfect, Lotus, and Claris tried but to no avail; how was Lighthouse Design going to compete against Microsoft? Being a productivity software company was tough in the 1990s; if you targeted mainstream platforms (Mac and Windows) then you had to compete against Microsoft, and if you targeted non-mainstream platforms (OS/2, NeXTSTEP, BeOS), then while you're shielded from competing against Microsoft Office, you're gambling on the success of these platforms (and had these platforms became commercially widespread, Microsoft would have just ported Office to them, anyway).

walrus01 5y ago

I have to agree because I don't think apple would have successfully turned sunos into a unix-based macos9 successor. If you look at the earliest versions of OSX it's NeXT with a macos9 skin on top of it. But it's recognizably NeXT.

linguae 5y ago

A sad example of a Sun acquisition that went nowhere was Lighthouse Design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design), a software company that specialized in productivity software for NeXTSTEP. One of the company's most famous products was Concurrence, a presentation tool that Steve Jobs used and influenced the design of Apple Keynote. In an alternative timeline, Lighthouse Design could have been the premier developer for Mac OS X. Sun bought Lighthouse Design at a time when it invested in NeXT's OpenStep API; in fact, there was a port of OpenStep to Solaris. However, Java ended up taking off around 1995-96, and Sun's strategy changed from supporting OpenStep to promoting Java. Lighthouse Design's software didn't fit in this strategy, and sadly the software has been abandoned, even though Sun was in a great position to polish and update the software when Mac OS X was released. I understand why Lighthouse Design was sold, though. Before Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the future for NeXT-based software companies appeared bleak, and these companies faced the challenging prospects of (1) porting their software, implemented using NeXT's then state-of-the-art APIs and tools, to platforms that were more commercially viable yet lacked such tooling, and (2) competing with the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft; WordPerfect, Lotus, and Claris tried but to no avail; how was Lighthouse Design going to compete against Microsoft? Being a productivity software company was tough in the 1990s; if you targeted mainstream platforms (Mac and Windows) then you had to compete against Microsoft, and if you targeted non-mainstream platforms (OS/2, NeXTSTEP, BeOS), then while you're shielded from competing against Microsoft Office, you're gambling on the success of these platforms (and had these platforms became commercially widespread, Microsoft would have just ported Office to them, anyway).