[abanana]

> Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away... They just...

This is historical revisionism, and there's a lot of it around, where Apple is concerned. Since those days, Apple has done a great job of controlling the narrative in the media, and has managed to bury a great deal of what was written back then.

Microsoft was in the middle of one of their antitrust investigations, where they were accused of monopolising the market for computers. They had demonstrated others in the courtroom, running non-Microsoft OSes and office suites, including an Amiga and a Mac. But Commodore had already gone bust, so there was only Apple left.

Then came the news that the previous post was referring to - Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. By all accounts of the time, Microsoft absolutely shat themselves, expecting the biggest fine in antitrust history. They could not allow Apple to fail, so investing was their only option. Nowadays, even that investment is sometimes framed as yet another amazing feat that could only be carried out by the deity that is Steve Jobs. Jobs even had to drop their still-ongoing OS look-and-feel lawsuits against Microsoft as part of the deal.

[kalleboo]

The Microsoft deal was originally negotiated by Gil Amelio, and while the monetary investment is what got the headlines and is what people remember, the most important part of the negotiations to Apple was that Microsoft committed to keep developing Microsoft Office for the Mac, which they had been threatening to cancel due to the platforms insignificance. Without Office, the Mac had no future.

[abanana]

Yeah that was a big part of it, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it more important than preventing immediate bankruptcy.

"We'll give you a wodge of cash and we'll keep supplying Office for Mac, so you can continue to supply the market with a rival to our OS at a volume that's insignificant to us, but just significant enough to prevent Windows from falling under the DoJ's definition of a monopoly".

[flomo]

Not sure what point exactly you are making. But the Wall Street Journal had a bunch of stuff about Apple engaging what was later known as 'Enron-style accounting'. They were a big company, and they did have a serious cashflow problem. So they needed a bailout from someone. (which happened to be Microsoft rather than wall street)

Also disagree with GP's point - Apple is definitely not Next. Next was an enterprise software company. If they were more successful they would be in the same category as Oracle.

[bobanrocky]

What? Next an enterprise software company is one of the weirdest takes i’ve ever heard in my 3 decades in the industry. They were a workstation manufacturer with impressively cute UIs and an interesting software stack over MachOS

[linguae]

NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was the native API for the OPENSTEP (note the capitalization) operating system and was also available for Sun Solaris and even for Windows. I have a CD named OPENSTEP Enterprise, which is installable on Windows NT and Windows 95. There was also Portable Distributed Objects, which was NeXT’s take on distributed objects, which was big in the 90s (like CORBA). Finally, NeXT had a web server named WebObjects that had major customers such as Chrysler in 1996.

At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.

[pjmlp]

Yes, and the collaboration with Sun heavily influenced how Java ended up looking.

Besides interfaces (protocols), the Java runtime has plenty of Objective-C influences, even JAR files are similar to bundles.

Also as I mention in another comment, J2EE started as an Objective-C framework, later rewriten into Java, as OpenSTEP efforts ramped down.

[flomo]

All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).

Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)

eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.

[pjmlp]

J2EE was born out of a Objective-C framework based on collaboration between Sun and NeXT, actually.

[flomo]

I can believe that, but I recall some tradepress article about more than 100 companies selling non-java 'web middleware' who got bowled over by J2EE, and otherwise Next would have just been another one of those. That was Sun's strategy, not Next's.

WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.

[flomo]

Three decades ago, they would relentlessly snailmail spam us with these weekly industry tabloids like 'ComputerWorld' and 'PCWeek'. These were always fun to read at lunch, even if they were all obvious advertisements, but certainly better info than vaguely remembering something from your stoner phase and then sticking your junk out.