[setpatchaddress]

I don’t know specifically what this person was told, but there was low confidence before the turn of the century on the classic Mac OS side that the NeXT people would developer a consumer-grade OS capable of replacing classic Mac OS[footnote]. So there was ongoing speculative development on various things.

However, by Mac OS 9, Mac OS X was clearly where all of Apple’s resources would go, whether it was any good or not. Most classic work at that point moved to building bridges to OS X via Carbon. Mac OS 8.5 was the last chance to build major new features into classic Mac OS. None of the ongoing work then or later was on the scale of Copland or putting a new kernel under the OS or anything of that sort. Mac OS 9 was known to be a dead end internally, and nothing like that would have been funded.

Footnote: This skepticism was well-placed: arguably it didn’t actually happen until Mac OS X 10.4. (You can argue that 10.3 was usable — or say “but UNIX” — but I don’t want to hear from you unless you actually tried to support that version on the machines of your less tech-savvy family members.)

[adamgordonbell]

That mirrors what Hansen says in the interview. That the classic mac side had low confidence in the OS X team right up until the end.

What is your connection to this time at Apple? It sounds like you might have been involved.