What if... (what would you use if not a Mac?)

[Benjamindaines]

What if Jobs never came back to Apple, obviously most of us probably wouldn't be sitting with Macs on our desks. What do u think we would have? PCs with Windows, perhaps a dell with NextStep 8.0 or maybe even Next hardware, Linux even? Or something else?

 

[iGary]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/223300/

 

[Benjamindaines]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/223300/

Nahh this is different, this is if he never came back in '97.

 

[crazycat]

There is no dought that Steave Jobs had a huge impact on apple, i think that apple would still be here but not as big. I would still think apple would be around but maybe stay at the 1% market share.

 

[jsw]

If Jobs had never come back, it probably would have meant that Apple went with Be instead of NeXT.

While I very much enjoy what NeXT brought, I was a BeOS developer and would have loved to see what they would have done to the Apple OS.

Of course, Jobs is a rock star, but I'm not convinced that he's the only one who could have turned Apple around.

 

[mkrishnan]

I was thinking the same about BeOS.... Although I think OS X benefitted so vastly from the tons of Unix code out there.

In terms of today...I think Apple still needs to do more to recognize and nurture future leaders. The day will eventually come when Jobs steps back. It needs to not devolve into a bureaucratic mess that's managed as if general management expertise can solve any problem without needing vision (cough cough Ballmer and MS).

 

[OnceUGoMac]

I was thinking the same about BeOS.... Although I think OS X benefitted so vastly from the tons of Unix code out there.

In terms of today...I think Apple still needs to do more to recognize and nurture future leaders. The day will eventually come when Jobs steps back. It needs to not devolve into a bureaucratic mess that's managed as if general management expertise can solve any problem without needing vision (cough cough Ballmer and MS).

Hopefully not leaders that are involved in the stock fiasco, either.

 

[mkrishnan]

Hopefully not leaders that are involved in the stock fiasco, either.

To me... the stock fiasco is, much like the battery recall, just emblematic of a larger problem, rather than any kind of leadership issue at Apple. Every laptop major is recalling batteries. Because they were all made by the same few companies and the issue is a common one. Blame aside, the issue just needs to be resolved, and we need to move on. The stock options problems happened at many companies, and there doesn't seem to be particularly compelling evidence that the leadership of Apple was malevolent. They just did what others did. And it was a rotted part of the structure of the way American companies do business, and it needs to be resolved.

 

[bousozoku]

If Jobs had never come back, it probably would have meant that Apple went with Be instead of NeXT.

While I very much enjoy what NeXT brought, I was a BeOS developer and would have loved to see what they would have done to the Apple OS.

Of course, Jobs is a rock star, but I'm not convinced that he's the only one who could have turned Apple around.

I relished the idea that BeOS would go somewhere. It was steady and fast and a lot of people on Macs would be complaining that they had to use C++, wouldn't they?

I think that Macs would have become the gaming platform. WinG/DirectX didn't have traction at the time and with a major computer manufacturer behind BeOS and it could have been something much, much more.

Of course, application programming wasn't so difficult. Finding a device driver was. Could Apple have changed that? IBM struggled so long with OS/2 that, by the time they got it together, OS/2 was dying.

I still remember the first time I started BeOS on my 120 MHz 604 machine because it startled me at how quickly it booted, especially since I was booting from a Syquest SyJet hard drive cartridge. It was done booting before Mac OS 8.0 was finished with the happy face.

It might have turned a lot of people away from Windows, if good applications could be created for multiple hardware platforms easily.

NeXT wasn't a bad choice since it was complete. It was very much the opposite of BeOS and that wasn't very exciting.