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Around this time in 1995 or so OpenSTEP was running pretty well on Sun hardware but Sun management were busy fighting turf wars with each other to the point of

Around this time in 1995 or so OpenSTEP was running pretty well on Sun hardware but Sun management were busy fighting turf wars with each other to the point of completely dropping the ball on the project and just letting it go. So the more interesting question is what would have happened if Sun had bought NeXT or OpenSTEP from NeXT. They had great hardware and big company power back then. The iPod had some software involvement, but was almost entirely a hardware play. It used an unusually capable small hard drive that Apple bought all of and in the early versions made use of Firewire for ease of use and quick transfers. All of the software for controlling it was contracted out to a company outside Apple that specialized in embedded applications which are really different from applications on home computers or workstations.

panick21_ 5y ago
I honestly wouldn't want Sun to adopt OpenSTEP. Building your whole user space on Objectiv C is a pretty bad idea in my opinion. But then again, not like they had anything much better. It had gotten a large amount of work but Im not sure if I am Sun at that point, I would want to make it my default.
linguae 5y ago
In 1996 Sun bought Lighthouse Design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design), a NeXT software house, and then largely abandoned it when Sun went all in on Java. I don't think a Sun acquisition of NeXT (either just the technology or the entire company) would have went well for the future of NeXT given Sun's commitment to Java during the rest of the 1990's.