| I think money wasn't as big a problem as it's been reported. Take this snippet from the wikipedia: "Apple CEO Gil Amelio started negotiations to buy Be Inc., but negotiations stalled when Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassée wanted $300 million;[11] Apple was unwilling to offer any more than $125 million. Apple's board of directors decided NeXTSTEP was a better choice and purchased NeXT in 1996 for $429 million, bringing back Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.[12]" [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS ] It seems to me that BOTH $300M and $429M are greater than $125M and $429M is greater than $300M. Having been both a NeXTStep and BeOS developer, I can assure you that NeXTStep was a MUCH more mature product than BeOS. Was it money? maybe. a little. Was NeXTStep better value for money? maybe. probably. I rankle every time I hear the story about Gassée being greedy. He might have been asking for more than Apple wanted to pay, but I think it's simplistic to say it was only about money. NeXTStep morphed into Rhapsody and MacOS reasonably quickly. And the MetroWerks compiler for BeOS was DEFINITELY buggy. I think there was no discount Gassée could offer that would make up for the longer time-to-market for a BeOS based next-gen Mac OS. |