A secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT (2018)

[coldcode]

I think the main long term benefit of buying NeXT was getting Steve back. I left Apple a year or so before this happened (I remember Gil being all excited talking about Apple to the staff right before he realized what a disaster it was and we never saw him again around Infinite Loop) but I left because I was sure doing what they were doing would be the end of Apple. The OS and kernel were nice, the smart people from NeXT made a huge difference, but Steve was, Steve.

If I'd know this would happen I would have never left.

[jhbadger]

Classic MacOS was a disaster once multitasking became a needed feature, and Copland (its in-house replacement) wasn't going anywhere. The only other option would have been to buy Be, to get BeOS. That could have worked too, BeOS was great (and its modern clone Haiku is fun too), but it was clear Apple needed something from outside.

[sys_64738]

Steve laid off a sizable chunk of non-Nexters when his people started to fill the top spots at Apple. The cutting was deep and brutal. Would you have survived?

[macintux]

Definitely. Steve was unique, and his fanatical devotion to simplicity and quality established Apple as a force to be reckoned with.

[ksec]

Slightly Off Topic.

I consider both Andy Grove and Steve Jobs as the greatest CEO ever lived in Silicon Valley. ( Sorry it is hard to pick just one between the two )

Current Generation are Patrick Gelsinger ( VMware ), Jensen Huang ( Nvidia ). Satya Nadella ( Microsoft ) and Lisa Su ( AMD ) are two possible candidate but I think it is still too early to tell.

Sometimes if I think if I did't set the bar so high for Apple, Tim Cook would be on the list as well. But their doing on Mac still leaves a bad taste in my mouth so I am not quite over with it yet.

What other Great CEO are there in Silicon Valley's history?

Edit: Looking at this list just now makes me realise all the CEO I considered as great are product CEO. Which sort of got me thinking as to why I don like Tim Cook as much, he is simply not a product person.

[mullingitover]

Tim Cook arguably made Apple what it is today. Without him, Apple might've had great products but failed miserably in the supply chain management side of the business. It's telling that after Jobs, Apple didn't slide into irrelevance but instead continued to thrive.

Tech aficionados (myself included) might have qualms about their product strategy, but overall the business continues to be wildly successful with regular consumers.

[gz5]

Nadella has been amazing and Huang underrated. Bezos should be on that list?

Grove vs. Jobs is interesting (for discussion; not that we can't just put them both in the same very small group at the top). For example, difficult to envision anyone being a better CEO for Apple than Jobs was. On other hand, if you take any_random_company, and put either Grove or Jobs at the helm, then Grove is likely the better fit for a much higher percentage?

[jmastrangelo]

Definitely would add Bezos and Musk. Bezos is one of the most managerially/business astute CEOs and Musk is able to will futuristic companies basically out of thin air.

[zyang]

Cook deserves more credit. iPhone survived the onslaught of Android and remained the most profitable smartphone. That alone is a minor miracle.

[paloaltokid]

I would submit that Rob Mee (founder of Pivotal Labs, former CEO of Pivotal) is one of the greatest unsung heroes of Silicon Valley. So many of the biggest success stories in tech today were either advised by him or worked with Pivotal Labs in their early stages.

Both Twitter and Square are notable examples, but it is a very, very long list. Google also worked with Pivotal Labs in their early days.

[kamikaz1k]

Why VMWare/Patrick?

(The rest make sense to me because of all the hullabaloo around the company comebacks...)

[smabie]

Steve Ballmer was pretty good. He couldn't evolve the company to a changing world, but he made shit tons of money for Microsoft. Also I think Nadella has done a really good job: I think they both kind of needed each other to turn Microsoft into what it is today.

[cowmix]

Elon.

[watertom]

After Steve left, and Apple was floundering I wanted Sun to buy Apple. I was working with Wall Street Companies at the time and I tried my best to make it happen.

I also worked with Scott McNealy here and there and brought it up to him a couple of times. Once he said to me, “Apple’s not worth having without Jobs, and Apple doesn’t need anyone else if they have Jobs.”

So I knew Sun would never buy Apple.

[baebeegeezus]

Imagine if Oracle ended up owning Apple. Unthinkable.

[austincheney]

> And that’s when Andy lost some credibility with me. I can’t remember exactly what he said about future speeds, but I seem to remember 400 megahertz or maybe even more. Oh, please. You’re claiming 10x more than Motorola?

Discarding numbers out of hand, at least those number actually were fictional. Reminds of a recent comment on HN where people twisted themselves into knots ignoring numbers they could easily reproduce themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22590983

[AceJohnny2]

I love this story so much because of that paragraph specifically. (I had read it before but couldn't find it anymore. Happy to see it show up again!)

> The only thing more insane was Intel’s 80486 running at 66 megahertz! Can you imagine? I was a physicist, I should know.

It's so perfect! I'm glad he gives us the benefit of his hindsight.

[Tepix]

Fantastic read. Once again, the chaotic nature of our future unfolding.

These days, the scientists that advise our countries‘ leaders about the pandemic can make a difference as Chris MacAskill made back then.

[cmacaskill]

Thanks! The fascinating thing is I had been a geophysicist for 10 years before joining NeXT, so all my instincts were to approach this as a scientist. When I see Dr. Fauci speaking the best known truths despite the political winds, it resonates with all I know of science -- speak the truth as best you know it and history will forgive you later.

[munificent]

It's crazy to think that if:

1. Apple had bought Be instead of Next.

2. Then OS X would have been based on BeOS instead of OpenStep.

3. Which in turn means it would have been written in C++ instead of Objective-C.

4. Which means iOS wouldn't have chosen Objective-C.

5. Which means Swift would never have been created to address its shortcomings.

Maybe there would have been some alternate-universe Swift to deal with C++'s shortcomings, but it would likely be a very different language. If nothing else, the lack of keyword arguments would lend a very different feel.

[cmrdporcupine]

Dylan was the C++ alternative that was being developed at Apple before the Jobs coup. It had all kinds of awesome sauce, much much better than Objective-C. Likely a non-Jobs Apple would have used Dylan in conjunction with C++, or Java since that was in ascendency at the time. The hate for any tech that came from Newton or was non-NeXT in general was a Jobs thing.

Also it's nice to think about an alternate universe where we had Newton descended mobile products, rather than iOS.

[chrislund]

I wonder then if iOS would’ve ever happened. Probably not, unless they still somehow got Steve Jobs.

Apple at least incidentally got some of the benefit of BeOS, or really, the talent behind it: Dominic Giampaolo, who contributed significantly to BeFS, has been with Apple for some time now working on their file systems. I think he is/was a principal on APFS. I’m sure there are others!

Also, muni! From robot frog!

[jki275]

Apple would not exist if they had bought Be instead. Buying Next brought Steve back, and that's the only thing that kept Apple alive.

[pvg]

previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17609813

[ngcc_hk]

“ he would ask who on planet earth is the best person to pull off something impossible and he would do anything to hire them.” Steve