Wednesday, December 22, 2021

25 Years of Apple + NeXT

Steve Hayman (Hacker News, MacRumors):

In retrospect, the tech involved in the merger wound up being so one-sided that many people say “NeXT actually bought Apple for negative $400,000,000.” A few years later, something like 70% of Apple’s VPs were ex-NeXT people.

[…]

NeXT was struggling. Our founder, Steve Jobs, seemed to be spending all his time at his other company, Pixar, and although we just just eked out our first quarterly operating profit (mostly based on selling WebObjects, a Java application server) we weren’t exactly setting the world on fire.

Here’s the sort of thing NeXT was selling at the time – a press release from three weeks before the merger, touting CyberSlice, a revolutionary new system for (get this!) ordering pizza from your computer.

[…]

Everybody at NeXT was so unclear that this merger was going to work that we all handed out our NeXT business cards for as long as those phone numbers and emails still worked.

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