> I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next. I'm paraphrasing an old blog post of

> I still wonder what would have happened had Jean-Louis Gassée been less greedy and Apple acquired BeOs instead of Next. I'm paraphrasing an old blog post of mine, but... In today's world, spoiled with excellent development tools, everyone has forgotten that late-1980s and early-to-mid 1990s dev tools were awful: 1970s text-mode tools for writing graphical apps. Apple acquired NeXT because it needed an OS, but what clinched the deal was the development tools (and the return of Jobs, of course.) NeXT had industry-leading dev tools. Doom was written on NeXTs. The WWW was written on NeXTs. Apple had OS choices – modernise A/UX, or buy BeOS, or buy NeXT, or get bought and move to Solaris or something – but nobody except NeXT had Objective-C and Interface Builder, or the NeXT/Sun foundation classes, or anything like them. The meta-irony being that if Apple had adapted A/UX, or failing that, had acquired Be for BeOS, it would be long dead by now, just a fading memory for middle-aged graphical designers. Without the dev tools, they'd never have got all the existing Mac developers on board, and never got all the cool new apps – no matter how snazzy the OS.