[cameroncooper]

It would be interesting to see what would have happened had Apple bought Be instead of Apple, but I think it's pretty clear Apple made the "right" move. NeXT had really good software, and of course, Steve Jobs (and let's not forget about the rest of the NeXT team with people like Avie). Hard to imagine Jean-Louis Gassée (or anyone else really) being able to turn the company around like Steve did.

[hankman86]

Exactly. In acquiring NeXT, Apple bought leadership and culture. And we can argue forever if Apple’s engineers could have shipped the first OSX release earlier or in a better state, had they instead acquired Be. But I doubt it. Because - again - they bought themselves a high-performance culture, which they might not have gotten from Be. Porting BeOS to Apple hardware / existing software would have likely required an equally Herculean effort.

Oh and they got Steve Jobs of course who made quick work of pushing out the old Apple leadership. And good that he did.

[cmrdporcupine]

BeOS already ran on existing Apple PowerPC hardware of the time:

http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/su...