There's a nice John Siracusa article from 2008 https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blue

There's a nice John Siracusa article from 2008 https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ about how central the cross-platform ambitions were to the Rhapsody vision, and how they failed, souring Apple's relationship with Adobe in the process: > It was a hard sell, to be sure. The sweetener that Apple hoped would push the deal over the top was that applications written using this API could also be compiled to run on Windows. And so the complete pitch to the Adobes and Microsofts of the world was this: rewrite your huge existing applications using these APIs and end up with a single code base for both Mac and Windows. Alternately, just rewrite the Mac versions of your applications using these new APIs. > The answer from the Mac development community was, essentially, "Yeah, uh, no thanks." Remember, this is the Apple of the late 1990s, its power and influence at an all-time low. It's hard to imagine a company like Adobe or (even more laughably) Microsoft betting the future of its flagship software products on 1997-Apple's ability to ship and support a "new" API (its NeXT origins and history counting for little among this crowd). This is after years and years of Apple demonstrating a complete inability to ship a modern replacement for its aging operating system. As for rewriting just their Mac applications using a new API, even that represented a tremendous investment of time and resources for a platform that could very well be on its way out. So yeah, no thanks, Apple. We'll take a pass. Of course the plan for cross-platform Rhapsody is notably similar to late-era, software-only NeXT's cross-platform plans for NeXTSTEP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep .