AlBDamned said:
Er no - not exactly. Jobs was actually surviving on Pixar money and NeXT was going down the toilet - it was just the software that saved it.
It seems that this part of history will continuously be overlooked... no matter how many time I point it out.
The seeds of NeXT's
failure were sewn in the first couple months of NeXT. Nothing, and I mean
nothing, that NeXT would do after that would have made any difference.
When Jobs started NeXT he took quite a few people with him from Apple (including many people from the Macintosh development team and the developers of WriteNow). When Apple found out about this they sued Jobs and NeXT. After about six months the suit was settled, and it was that settlement that crippled NeXT.
At the time the most notable part of the settlement was that NeXT couldn't hire anyone else from Apple for a period of around 18 months. But that wasn't the killer clause...what killed NeXT was that NeXT would not be allowed to compete in Apple's core market, the desktop.
Why was that so bad?
This forced NeXT into the workstation market. They were joining (late) a competitive market which was shrinking do to the increasing power of desktop systems. Even when NeXT was pricing their systems equal to or lower than Apple's, they couldn't point them at the desktop market.
And even after dropping hardware, NeXT couldn't take on Windows with NEXTSTEP because Windows was a desktop operating system. The only system NeXT could attack of Microsoft's was Windows NT.
Basically, had NeXT not been forced out of the desktop market by the settlement, NeXT's fortunes would have been much different.
Sadly, people look back at these restrictions that NeXT was forced to work under and (without knowing about the restrictions) blame NeXT management for the companies failures.
If the people at the head of NeXT were the reason for NeXT's failures, then how in the world did these same people save Apple (most everyone in a position of power at NeXT had replace people at Apple in those positions within 2 years of Apple acquiring NeXT).
Further, the restriction was on the operating system and hardware. NeXT had dropped the hardware (on Black Tuesday back in 1993) and was planning on dropping the operating system next. They had just spent a few years (1994-1996) helping to make Solaris into a NEXTSTEP replacement and were planning on dropping the OS after OPENSTEP 4.x.
One way to see that NeXT was getting ready to take this step was in the fact that OpenStep Solaris had been made to look and feel just like NEXTSTEP 3.x. NeXT had been reworking NEXTSTEP 4 with a completely new user interface (see below). But when they finally released (the renamed) OPENSTEP 4.0, it looked exactly like NEXTSTEP 3.3... and OpenStep Solaris.
What NeXT was planning was to drop OPENSTEP (letting their NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP users move to Sun, who was not restricted by the Apple settlement) and concentrate on Enterprise Objects and WebObjects.
Apple knew that the only reason that NEXTSTEP hadn't been successful was because they wouldn't let it. And they most likely also knew that if Sun was allowed to finish it's transition to OpenStep Solaris that they would be forced to compete directly against what was basically going to be an unrestricted version of NEXTSTEP (that could be sold in the desktop market).
Buying NeXT gave them the OS beginning they needed and stopped Sun from completing the move to OpenStep Solaris*.
So yes, NeXT may have been
going down the toilet, but it was Apple who's hand was on the handle.
*
Sun did release both OpenStep Solaris 1.0 and 1.1 (which can be run on Solaris 2.4 and 2.5 systems). And Sun has kept documentation on their site about their version of OpenStep (Quick Start to Using the OpenStep Desktop, Using the OpenStep Desktop, OpenStep Development Tools, OpenStep User Interface Guidelines, and Porting NEXTSTEP 3.2/3.3 Applications to OpenStep on Solaris)