Comment by sircastor

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.