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You know, it occurs to me in retrospect that Apple overpaid for NeXT, which is something people said at the time, but I kind of ignored. No one else would have
by KerrAvon 4y ago
You know, it occurs to me in retrospect that Apple overpaid for NeXT, which is something people said at the time, but I kind of ignored. No one else would have bought them at anywhere near that price. The black hardware had failed. OpenStep was cool but the OS didn’t run super well on PC hardware. NeXT should have been $150M tops. Apple eventually had to rewrite all of the software anyway to make use of it.
Sure, Jobs himself was priceless. But, yeah, Apple did overpay for NeXT at the time.
- jdkee 4y ago"Sure, Jobs himself was priceless. But, yeah, Apple did overpay for NeXT at the time." Not if you view the transaction as a package deal.
- msh 4y agoIf a deal makes you the most valuable company in the world, how can that deal be overpriced?
- xenadu02 4y agoYou know how YC investors pick teams, not products? Apple at the time bought a team, not the technology. They also bought credibility by bringing a founder back on-board. Apple's biggest problem at the time was bad management, followed by credibility. They solved both problems and got some technology (ObjC, what would become Darwin, etc) as a free bonus. The complete NeXT takeover of management made it more like a reverse acquisition in any case and the results speak for themselves.
- lproven 4y agoISTM that everyone misses a vitally important key part of NeXT. Yes, there was the OS, but there were other OSes, notably BeOS, and NeXTstep/OpenStep ran on other OSes, notably Solaris. Yes, there was Steve Jobs. But NeXT had a core thing that nobody else did: the state-of-the-art development tools. Apple needed to get Mac developers on-board with the new OS. Sun had a great OS. Be had a great OS. Apple itself had A/UX. OSes abounded; there was lots of choice. Jobs' vision was very important. But without the NeXT developer tools, notably Interface Builder and Objective-C, the deal would not have saved Apple.
- pjmlp 4y agoYet they weren't sure the Mac community was that keen into Objective-C, hence the Java Cocoa bridge as plan B.
- astrange 4y agoMost of the stuff below the UI layer was the same. One thing that changed was IOKit, rewritten in C++, but there actually wasn’t a good reason for that and I think everyone agrees sticking to ObjC would’ve been better…
- m463 4y agobut NeXT lives on in macos with the NS API for example, NSString, NSApplicationMain, etc.