KEY POINTS:
So, Apple computer did the wrong thing. On December 20 1997, Apple announced that it would spend $400 million to purchase Steve Jobs' company Next Software. Apple intended to adopt Next's NextStep operating system for future versions of the Macintosh computer ...
No, those aren't my words, they were Stewart Alsop's, and they were printed in 1997 in Fortune magazine. His point was that any idea of Steve Jobs 'coming back to save Apple' was sheer nonsense. "He won't be anywhere near the company," Alsop wrote, and that "the only future for the company is to get smaller and smaller until there's nothing left."
Ouch. I'm not criticising Alsop because I - like any IT commentator - could easily make a similar call any time. That's one reason I don't like making predictions.
Anyway, it's interesting what shows up when you go through your drawers, because that's where I found this old photocopied article.
Alsop, who nowadays blogs and calls himself a "venture capitalist and former journalist/pundit" admitted a stake in a computer company called Be which Apple had considered buying before changing its mind and going with Next.
There's more about Alsop here.
Anyway, I guess that interest in the spurned Be Computer didn't help Alsop's clarity of vision - but Alsop was a popular enough commentator of the time, under the column header 'Alsop's Fables', so let's see what reasons he gave.
There were two - that Apple's OS 9 was a seriously flawed operating system, which didn't manage memory very well, and (as a component of point 1, still) it was hard to connect to the internet with a Mac. That's something I never experienced having been online with Macs since about 1991. But it's fair enough about the memory handling.
Alsop pointed out that Next did both those things pretty well, since it was built on Unix, "the preferred operating system of engineers".
Then Alsop raised an interesting point: "But if Apple seriously wants to use Unix as the basis of the future Macintosh operating system, it could work with the version of Unix it licensed years ago for far, far less than $400 million"
This is true - you used to be able to partition your Mac's hard drive into a segment for the normal OS (up to 9) and another for so-called Apple Unix or 'A/UX'. Alsop stated that while Apple's version of Unix wasn't as good as the version used by Next, the better features of Next's implementation weren't those valued by Apple's traditional client base in schools, businesses and homes.
Alsop's second point was that "Anybody who knows Apple Computer [as it was then called] knows the company bought the wrong part of Next." He wrote that there were two parts of Next - the software part, and Steve Jobs. Apple didn't need the software part, it needed a visionary - like Steve Jobs.
Jobs had controversially left Apple and founded Next a couple of years before, but Next, while making stark and beautiful machines running impressive software, just couldn't make headway against the installed base of Apple customers and against the already-huge presence of Microsoft, even in its niche market. But whatever Next did, it helped clarify a forward vision for Apple - at least in Steve Jobs' head, and thank goodness for that.
Of course, one way or another, Apple did get Jobs back a short time later. Alsop pointed out that one thing all the Apple CEOs had failed to do up to that point was to control the engineers, and when Steve Jobs did come back, it seems he heeded this advice as he has ruled them ever since.
If Apple's engineers are as smart as they're supposed to be, they'll appreciate the iron rule. Under Gasée in particular, but even in the original Macintosh development era of the early 1980s, competing factions of engineers had beavered away at cross purposes to each other, wasting precious time and resources. Gil Amelio had, according to Alsop (and others) started to turn this culture around by 1997, and it was Amelio who had the nerve to purchase Next.
But of course, Jobs did come back, and a short time later the revolutionary iMac came out and started the turning of the tide. Alsop stated "The essential problem that Apple has never been able to solve is how to transform promise into reality."
Times have changed.
- Mark Webster mac.nz
