Jean-Louis GassÃ©e glad Apple chose NeXTSTEP over his BeOS

Jean-Louis Gassée now writes a weekly column about Apple, but back in the day he was head of the Macintosh division under Apple CEO John Sculley. After his removal by Sculley in 1990 following nine years of service, Gassée started Be, Inc which developed BeOS, a multithreaded, multi-CPU operating system.

Speaking at a Churchill Club event honoring Steve Jobs, Gassée told the audience he was thankful that Apple did not buy BeOS because he "hated Apple's management." Instead of BeOS, Apple decided to acquire NeXT and use its OS as the basis of Mac OS X. Gassée called this decision "Jobs's acquisition of Apple" and paved the way for him to reclaim his company.

Besides Gassée's comments, the almost two-hour-long presentation is filled with memories of Steve Jobs from his former colleagues including Jim Atkinson, Deb Stapleton, Andy Hertzfeld, Regis McKenna and Larry Tesler. There's even an unexpected appearance by Chris Espinosa who was not on the panel, but in the audience as an attendee. The program is embedded below and well worth a listen.

[Via 9to5mac]

View Tags

Source: http://transition.churchillclub.org/eventDetail.jsp?EVT_ID=9…

Categories

Apple

Jean-Louis Gassée now writes a weekly column about Apple, but back in the day he was head of the Macintosh division under Apple...

Add a Comment

Sign in »

6 Comments

Filter by:

Jehuda Saar

JIM Atkinson ? Really...You DO mean BILL Atkinson !!!

November 12 2011 at 5:30 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply

Danny Goodman

Haven't watched the video yet, but in this context, I suspect the Atkinson you're referring to is Bill, not Jim.

November 11 2011 at 7:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

macserv

Gasée was just as ridiculously brusque back in 1996-'97 when Apple was deciding which company to buy. NeXT bent over backwards to make sure Apple were comfortable, and had their questions answered. Be (read: Gasée) basically said, "Look, we've told you all about it— do you want it or not?" Add to that the fact the BeOS had nothing close to NeXT's 100% object-oriented UI, PostScript-based display, Objective-C, the AppKit and Foundation frameworks (which would become Yellow Box, Cocoa, and Cocoa Touch), or the ProjectBuilder and InterfaceBuilder IDE.

He can pose all he wants (and he wants a lot), but Gasée should really be glad his company's OS wasn't chosen, because had Apple done so, they— and thus, myriad technologies and industries— wouldn't have advanced nearly as far as they have.

November 11 2011 at 7:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

1 reply to macserv's comment

PhilipM

I don't think any of the NeXT-based technologies were fundamental. Much of the early OS X development used Carbon, and developing OO frameworks could have happened over the 5-10 years or so it took to transition to more mobile platforms. BeOS has the benefit of being a small, modern kernel. Mach was supposed to be, but its broken IPC model is so slow, it has never really worked as a microkernel. The thing that really makes OS X as a multi-device platform is its UNIX heritage, which gives it a lot of flexibility to exploit good free software.

November 13 2011 at 11:09 AM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply