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Its kind of crazy, I have no idea why anybody would think NeXT was worth $400 million. Who except Apple was gone buy them? A user focused OS that is mostly cos
by panick21_ 2y ago
Its kind of crazy, I have no idea why anybody would think NeXT was worth $400 million. Who except Apple was gone buy them?
A user focused OS that is mostly costume is more of a liability then anything else. Keeping that maintained and up to date with technological progress is a huge effort.
And all the big companies already had their own. The up and coming companies all didn't need user first OSs.
- WoodenChair 2y agoIt’s about how much money did it take for them to want to sell instead of continue as an independent business. In 1996 WebObjects was starting to get traction. After a decade it seemed like there was perhaps a viable future for the company.
- panick21_ 2y agoThere is a difference between a 'viable future' and 400 million $. The reality is the most proprietary software companies of that area didn't make. Specially companies with their own programming, language, compilers and so on. First a devastating economic crisis and then the rise of open source. So maybe they could have survived, but likely nowhere close to that value.
- rbanffy 2y agoIt most certainly wouldn’t. Would be a very tight window, and it’d be going against the likes of BEA and soon to be killed by open source solutions. The best bet was to vertically integrate with a large hardware manufacturer that’d bundle their OS. WebObjects was, however, doomed anyway. And this, kids, is why everything now is a subclass of NSObject.
- WoodenChair 2y ago> The reality is the most proprietary software companies of that area didn't make. You're using 20/20 hindsight instead of putting yourself in the shoes of someone in 1996. The term "open source" was not even in wide use in 1996. But actually even with hindsight your analysis is flawed. 1996 is right at the start of the .com bubble. A company whose software (WebOjects) was being used to power real world .coms (it was even being used by large companies like UPS and Dell) almost certainly would have risen tremendously in value (even as a private company). Now, if they would have been acquired before the 2000 crash is another discussion.
- KerrAvon 2y agoYeah, but Apple didn’t care about WebObjects; it needed an operating system. And OpenStep on PC hardware was slow, crashy, unpolished, and generally much less pleasant to use than the fastest Macs at the time. Apple bought it because it had a fully working graphics architecture (BeOS couldn’t even print!), and vastly overpaid for it because Gil Amelio was an idiot. Irony: the graphics architecture had to be fully rewritten from scratch for Mac OS X because Adobe didn’t want to support Display PostScript anymore. Have I mentioned that Gil Amelio was an idiot?
- WoodenChair 2y ago> Yeah, but Apple didn’t care about WebObjects; it needed an operating system. I never said Apple bought NeXT for WebObjects. I said that NeXT had value outside of the deal in the marketplace because WebOjects was starting to get traction.
- icedchai 2y agoDo you remember how unstable the original Mac OS was? I remember working with a guy doing web development work on his circa-1996 PowerPC Mac. It would crash at least daily, resulting in a reboot. Perhaps it was Netscape's fault.
- lproven 2y agoThis is true and it was a joke at the time. "The best thing about using a Mac is that you can rely that something in your life is going to go down on you every single day."