Comment by andrewstuart
2 years ago
People look back with fondness at BeOS but the reality is that NextSTEP was a MUCH better operating system. Built on a Unix foundation meant it really was ready to be the basis of the next 50 years of Apple operating systems including on mobile. BeOS was cooked up from scratch and never had this solid basis.
Apple (obviously) made exactly the right move by choosing NextSTEP over BeOS.
Chances are the browser you are using is running on NextSTEP even as you read this.
There's something to be said for throwing everything out and starting from scratch every once in awhile. How many decades old is Unix now? How many is Windows, even?
You lose the years of battle tested code, sure, but you'd also lose decades of baggage, tech debt, obsolete code for things no one has had to worry about for 20 years, etc.
From the perspective of the company, you also have a moat in the form of a proprietary system that doesn't have to compete with anything else because little software your customers depend on will run on anything else. Your business decisions become the Word Of God to people and companies with no real alternative.
BeOS never got successful enough to do that, but A Particularly Loud stock would argue this can work fairly well.
BeOS followed Apple's incompatible walled garden philosophy but it came out at the same time as the Web, Netscape, Java, Flash, RealPlayer, etc. Suddenly portability and interoperability were huge and BeOS was totally unprepared for it.
I think you underestimate the amount of functionality in something like the Linux kernel and how much work it would take to recreate even a small percentage of it.
I was a huge BeOS fan at the time, but in retrospect it was more like a vertical slice demo of an operating system. There was so much missing features and technical debt that fleshing it out would have been 90% of the work.
I’m of the opinion, that BeOS had a strong enough base, but it didn’t have the maturity NextSTEP had. I think if Apple had chosen BeOS it would’ve taken much longer to bring the operating system up to speed.
Even as it was, with the three or four years that Apple took to turn NextSTEP (or OpenSTEP) into Mac OS X, OS X was still not really ready for prime time. It took a year or two of running Mac OS 9 in parallel, or running the emulation layer to bring OS X up to par.
I think the downvotes are a bit harsh, but I think it's hard to say that Apple definitively made the right move (beyond getting Jobs back and him creating a direction beyond just computers).
Many people said that NeXT was further along than BeOS, but it was still four years from Apple buying NeXT to Mac OS X shipping. People talked about printer support being ahead in NextSTEP, but OS X had terrible printer support for a while - basically until they bought the CUPS team. Display PostScript was ahead of its time, but being "behind" wasn't really a problem for Windows there and realistically the hardware of 2000-2008 wasn't exactly great for OS X's graphics needs (and Apple needed to re-implement it as Display PDF/Quartz to get around licensing costs).
BeOS was blindingly fast on 90s and 2000s hardware and Apple definitely could have used that as a differentiator. Realistically, without non-computer products, would Apple have survived? I say this as someone who ran System 6 through OS 9 as well as every version of OS X. OS 9 was lovely, but technically flawed and just way out-classed by Windows. OS X was so slow it was nearly unusable.
I think claiming that there's something unique about Unix making it portable to mobile isn't really backed by any evidence. Be had already created BeIA for "internet appliances" which were low-resource machines. In fact, one could argue that Be's thrifty use of resources would have been a better fit for mobile than OS X.
Apple's real benefit to buying NeXT was getting Jobs, not getting NextSTEP. BeOS probably would have gotten out the door faster and with less pain. You might like OS X as it has evolved, but back in 2001 it was just pure pain while BeOS was joyful. But buying Be might have meant no iPod and no iPhone. It's hard to know how history would have gone, but it seems a bit of a stretch to claim NextSTEP was a much better OS, that it's uniquely good for mobile, or that it set Apple up for the next 50 years.
I am a big fan of NeXT and I agree that OPENSTEP (the name of NeXT's operating system at the time of purchase) was superior to BeOS. However, I don't think OPENSTEP vs. BeOS was the main factor that led to Apple's revitalization. After all, there was still a more than four year time period between the purchase of NeXT (December 1996) and the release of Mac OS X 10.0 (March 2001). The fact is despite OPENSTEP's solid Unix underpinnings and its sophisticated object-oriented API (OpenStep [note the spelling difference], which became Cocoa), Apple still had a lot of work to do to make NeXT Macintosh; simply porting OPENSTEP to the PowerPC and calling it a day would have disappointed many Mac users and developers, even if OPENSTEP was technically superior to System 7.
Apple's first attempt at making OPENSTEP Macintosh, Rhapsody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system)), which was essentially OPENSTEP with the Classic environment (then called Blue Box) and a Copland-inspired interface, was rejected by large Mac developers since they'd have to rewrite their software using the OpenStep API; existing Mac software would have to use Blue Box, which didn't take advantage of any of the features that differentiated Rhapsody from the classic Mac OS. Apple responded to this criticism by creating the Carbon API, which is closer to the classic Macintosh API and made it easier for Mac developers to port their existing software to the new OPENSTEP-based operating system, which was renamed Mac OS X. Had Apple purchased BeOS, it still would have required much work making BeOS more Mac-like, including the development of a Carbon-style API to ease the porting of Macintosh applications.
I believe the biggest reason Apple survived the four-year cycle from OPENSTEP to Mac OS X 10.0 is because Apple made compelling products such as the original iMac and well-received Power Macintosh and PowerBook models once Gil Amelio was fired. These Macs still ran the rather creaky Mac OS 8/9, but this was at a time where there were still many people out there who never owned a computer; personal computing was still an expanding market in 1998 and 1999. Of course Mac OS X's development kept developers interested in Apple, but the sales of iMacs and other Macs of the time kept the lights on at Apple until Mac OS X shipped, and even then it took until the days of Jaguar (2002) for the majority of existing Mac users to switch from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS X.
I think in an alternative timeline where Be was purchased instead of NeXT, Apple could have still survived had it released compelling products in 1997 and 1998, but it would've been harder without Steve Jobs since he provided excellent leadership, especially with trimming down Apple's sprawling product line and focusing on well-designed hits like the beige Power Macintosh G3, the iMac, the Wallstreet PowerBook G3, and other well-received Macs. The worst case scenario would've been either Apple's bankruptcy or acquisition by Sun or HP by 2000.
Another thought: Looking back, I find it quite amazing that the time between the purchase of NeXT and the release of Mac OS X 10.0 (December 1996 to March 2001) is longer than the amount of time Apple spent working on Copland (1994-1996), though it's not as long as the time Apple/Taligent worked on Pink (1988-roughly 1995).