Look I'm not going to bat for NeXTSTEP as a user nirvana, but at the time Apple bought it it was hugely advanced compared to BeOS, which still had not reached R3. A few things that NeXT could do that Be could not do at the time: run on an Intel PC, burn CD-Rs, and print.

BeOS R4–the first revision that did useful things users actually wanted–came out two years after Apple agreed to acquire NeXT. The current BeOS at the moment was "DR8" as in "developer release".

The fundamental thing Apple got out of the NeXT acquisition was an adult OS management team. The software acquired was totally irrelevant (at the time). What was important was new people in charge, who unlike the previous Apple management, could actually make decisions. The decisions were often bad, but they were decisions!

If Amelio and Hancock had been competent, they would have actually set up a management structure internally and started focusing on shipping Copland-based software instead of shopping externally. Strip it down and get it out the door and build on that. It could absolutely have been done.

Of course, you wouldn’t have the iMac or iPod or iPhone. And Apple might not have survived. The world would be very different.

(That all said, OpenStep was truly dire in 1997. Yes, it could print, although they ended up having to write an entirely new graphics stack from scratch anyway. It actually took six years from 1997 to turn moribund OpenStep into a viable consumer OS (I could not recommend anything before Jaguar to end users — the Finder, among other things, was unusable up to that point).

The tale of major incumbents' completely bungled OS/Platform projects of the 80s and 90s really is one of the great epics of the field.

A short - and playing it a little fast and loose for narrative like a Malcolm Gladwell piece - telling of the circumstances:

Apple failed utterly with Taligent, and Copland, and mismanaged A/UX into the ground, so it's the mid 90s and they're shipping a hyper-extended version of a one-off from 1984 that had to be hacked for even cooperative multitasking, looking around for a platform to jump on to. With IBM's help in two of those cases. They even, reportedly, batted around giving up and becoming a shell on top of NT or Solaris by porting Quickdraw during their flail in the early 90s. Then they bought NeXT, took one more (and it was at least the third after A/UX and the MAE product which was really more of an emulator, but so was Classic) pass at "Let's slap a Mac-like shell and compat layer on top of a UNIX and call it a day" and got successful selling mostly handheld appliances running basically that stack.

IBM failed utterly with their share of Taligent and the A/UX/AIX merger planning, and mismanaged OS/2 into the ground, until IBM, once of "IBM and the Seven Dwarves" dominance, became a midsize player in the PC market they created, until they gave up and sold the businesses to a Chinese clone maker and retreated to high-end niche markets. (Their spun out printer division, the legacy of their once dominant typewriter business, would also later also be bought out by a Chinese cartridge cloner, so it's almost a theme for them.)

DEC dithered on ...literally everything because they didn't understand the world after minicomputers, so all their talent left as they crumbled (which is also a large part of how AMD64 happened, there is an awful lot of Alpha lineage in the K8 design). Eventually their corpse was consumed by a PC cloner, who were themselves consumed by HP.

The UNIX vendors were too busy infighting to get much done, and all the UNIX-brand-UNIX vendors license cost overhead was too high to put up credible consumer offerings anyway, until eventually a hobby project from some kid in Finland ate their entire software business while Intel (possibly accidentally, Itanium is the culmination of a series of failures - 432,860,960 - for them too) ratfucked their long term hardware projects to death.

...And so Microsoft, then famous for 8-bit BAISCs, slowly abandoning their own successful but mutant UNIX offering (Xenix), managing to sell Seattle Computer Products' DOS to IBM after Digital Research/Gary Kidall (CP/M) didn't want to deal with IBM, and the surprising success of their awful DOS shell, ran away with nearly the entire mainstream OS market for decades by gathering everyone competent from the VMS and OS/2 lineages (they put Dave Cutler and Moshe Dunie in charge) and having them write NT. Running mostly on Intel's inescapable accidental success extension-of-an-extension-of-an-extension legacy architecture.

It's a weird field we're in.

Spot on man. I think we've all learned that the best tech stack will not win without also having a good sales, marketing, and management team to support it. And if you are completely incompetent at those things it doesn't matter how good your tech is, you will turn into a hilarious failure we'll all be laughing at later. (Though we'll have a lot of fun making YouTube videos where we run all your shit through emulation.) I know people always shat on Microsoft's engineering, though the truth is I think they tried to do the best they could with what they had and they also understood how important backwards compatibility was, and they had to work within that limitation. But I think that maybe they were just a bit jealous that their management was so far ahead of everyone else (really only Apple after Jobs came back could rival them)!

I'm not sure that attributing the successes to "sales or marketing" had as much to do with it as timing and position. Management _failures_ certainly dominated the era, there were vast numbers of unforced errors due largely to managerial empire building, feature creep/novelty seeking, and ambition exceeding the scale of tractable development practices. The note up-thread about "What was important was new people in charge, who unlike the previous Apple management, could actually make decisions. The decisions were often bad, but they were decisions!" is, IMO, a great read on the situation. I've posted in earlier HN threads about my belief in the "Next bought Apple with Apple's money" idea, and the replacement (or reversion since a lot of them were Apple folks to start with) of Apple's management with Next folks in short order. They were making largely the same kinds of decisions that almost bankrupted Next, but under more favorable circumstances.

Even as someone who has run Linux most of the time for like 15 years, the underlying tech in NT is in many ways by far the best design of the OSes that survived to modern maturity. I just hate almost everything they've done with the upper layers of the stack since 7.

R3 could actually run on Intel PCs; it was the first release to have that option available. The other two you are probably right about, I'm not actually an expert in BeOS history pre-R5 :)

I ran NEXTSTEP 3.2 and I think, 3.3, on both 486 DX2/66 and original NeXT hardware. At one job I ran on a 25Mhz Mono slab as my daily and only machine. I did Web surfing, email, used VarioData for the home-built sales/contact system, etc.

There were some pieces that were slow, but overall it was a fantastic experience. The "Shelf" was great; I would store commonly-used docs there, reference materials etc.

NetInfo did have some good ideas, and I suppose it could have been improved, but the market wanted a standards-based solution. I think macOS was the first commercial operating system to ship with a RFC2307 LDAP client. Jaguar (10.2) had a NetInfo to LDAP bridge and subsequent versions removed NetInfo entirely, although I think NOOP stubs may still remain in libSystem.