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by SoftTalker 323 days ago
Even Jobs wasn’t perfect. NeXT machines were technically amazing and also beautiful but they never really found many customers. He also thought the Segway would transform society but it ended up being sort of a joke and best known for being used by fat mall cops.
1 comments
nine_k 323 days ago
NeXT software though became the base of OS X.

BTW Mac Pros did not find many customers either. I bet Silicon Graphics did not sell very many boxes; it was important who bought these boxes.

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SoftTalker 323 days ago
Yes but the software wasn’t selling until it was forced upon the Apple customer base. You could buy NeXTSTEP for an Intel PC in the 1990s but nobody did.
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nine_k 323 days ago
The right people bought NeXT though. Carmack and his team developed Doom on NeXT computers [1], and the result has profoundly changed the mass-market PC scene.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Engine

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linguae 323 days ago
In addition, NeXT had a successful pivot to selling a web server framework named WebObjects, which had many big-name customers such as Dell (which infamously abandoned WebObjects once Apple purchased NeXT due to the optics of having an Apple competitor’s web store backed by an Apple product).

It’s conceivable that had Apple not purchased NeXT, even though NeXT probably would’ve ended up getting purchased by another company, its technology would’ve likely lived on. Perhaps a 1998 or 1999 NeXT could have open-sourced the OpenStep API and WebObjects as a Hail Mary move…talk about a completely different “what if” path for the Linux desktop and server!

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pjmlp 322 days ago
You're missing OpenSTEP from that picture.

On which NeXT and Sun collaborated on, and thanks to that collaboration, and WebObjects (Java port), Java and Java EE came to be.

Patrick Naughton on what actually influenced Java's semantics and object model,

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

Distributed Objects Everywhere genesis, and its evolution into Enterprise JavaBeans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

While in parallel, NeXT refactored WebObjects into Java as well.

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