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Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many early-90s OS projects succeeded & dominate the world today
- Thread starter mmphosis
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Great write up. The highlighted key-point for me being;
I have read articles (and seen in one or two of the dramatized Steve Jobs movies) that Steve really didn't have a finished product to sell to Apple at the time. NeXTstep and the NeXT workstations were hardly ready for prime time as they were little more than tech demos, but it was the bait that hooked Apple and got Steve back into the driver’s seat.
So with the NeXT acquisition came Cocoa, Objective-C and eventually Cocoa Touch which made a world of difference for developers (new and old) to push out millions of apps for Mac and iOS. Without any of this we wouldn’t have Apple as it is today. Imagine a Copland based Apple attempting to create a smartphone. Even the best examples of a non-NeXTstep/OS X based Apple device were the different iPod / classic / mini / nano firmwares and they were all clunky in comparison to the very flexible iOS.
I wonder, was it all a well-executed master plan or just a series of good luck and happy accidents?
I have read articles (and seen in one or two of the dramatized Steve Jobs movies) that Steve really didn't have a finished product to sell to Apple at the time. NeXTstep and the NeXT workstations were hardly ready for prime time as they were little more than tech demos, but it was the bait that hooked Apple and got Steve back into the driver’s seat.
So with the NeXT acquisition came Cocoa, Objective-C and eventually Cocoa Touch which made a world of difference for developers (new and old) to push out millions of apps for Mac and iOS. Without any of this we wouldn’t have Apple as it is today. Imagine a Copland based Apple attempting to create a smartphone. Even the best examples of a non-NeXTstep/OS X based Apple device were the different iPod / classic / mini / nano firmwares and they were all clunky in comparison to the very flexible iOS.
I wonder, was it all a well-executed master plan or just a series of good luck and happy accidents?
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As I understand it. The real problem was a lack of focus. You had multiple teams working on different projects hoping to throw everything together as one working OS. Every time there was a new tech buzz. Apple announced they would add it to Copland or Gershwin. It became a hopeless mess due to feature creep.
It wasn't a lack of talent. Copland didn't work because of management. Particularly Gil Amelio. I don't know if it was lack of clear vision or ability to delegate. If he snapped his subordinates in line, stuck to the original plans and stopped all the department in fighting. Copland likely would have been delivered as originally promised and on time.
When it came to acquiring NeXT. Apple was in dire straights. They were in talks with multiple OS manufacturers including MS to use their OS for the Macintosh. I don't know what Steve Jobs had to say. I can only surmise he wowed the board with NeXT and his vision for the future. Even Copland was a rather desperate move after the failure of Taligent.
It wasn't a lack of talent. Copland didn't work because of management. Particularly Gil Amelio. I don't know if it was lack of clear vision or ability to delegate. If he snapped his subordinates in line, stuck to the original plans and stopped all the department in fighting. Copland likely would have been delivered as originally promised and on time.
When it came to acquiring NeXT. Apple was in dire straights. They were in talks with multiple OS manufacturers including MS to use their OS for the Macintosh. I don't know what Steve Jobs had to say. I can only surmise he wowed the board with NeXT and his vision for the future. Even Copland was a rather desperate move after the failure of Taligent.
It's a funny story behind *nix, I mean it was created so one user could run a game on a terminal and turned out to be the most popular and widely used multi user OS in the world.
It's very flexible, in a way Copland wasn't, leveraging the power of FOSS and sticking a proprietary GUI on top of it was just a homerun.
It's very flexible, in a way Copland wasn't, leveraging the power of FOSS and sticking a proprietary GUI on top of it was just a homerun.
I think the article's thesis is muddled. BeOS and OS/2 technically "succeeded", in the sense that they were developed into a working, usable state, but they were commercial failures. They still exist today but they're dead ends. Neither of them dominate the world.
While Apple was struggling with Copland, Microsoft was struggling with Cairo, which had a similar fate; it mostly evaporated, leaving a few interface elements behind. Even though NT had greater market share in the late 1990s than the entire Macintosh platform it was a speck compared to Windows 3.11 and 95/98. Windows XP wasn't really finished until Service Pack 2 in 2004, at which time Microsoft was struggling with WinFS, which failed, and Longhorn, which eventually became Vista. It was difficult for Microsoft as well.
Writing a general-purpose operating system for a mainstream audience is hard - writing it without going bankrupt, or without taking so much time that the computing world moves on to the next thing, is almost impossible. The majority of operating systems developed in the 1980s and 1990s are now in the same state as the Emperor of Humanity in Warhammer 40,000, e.g. dead but a few cells are kept alive by the efforts of hobbyists. This is the fate that has befallen MorphOS, RiscOS, TempleOS, whatever remains of Palm etc.
In that respect Apple did pretty well. Unlike Microsoft they weren't flush with cash from Office and Windows. They had one major catastrophe that almost destroyed them, but they turned things around. I'm not an expert but impression is that Apple's development of OS X and latterly MacOS has been relatively smooth - bear in mind that during the same timescale Microsoft went from Windows 95 to Windows 10, which is perhaps more impressive given the enormous ground they covered, but ye Gods think of the waste. Mac fans grumbled about Lion but it was nothing compared to the reception that Vista and Windows 8 had.
And, yeah, while I'm still drunk I maintain that under the skin Windows 8 was actually okay. It was okay! You were okay, Windows 8. It ran better on the same hardware as Vista and at least it had a proper design instead of looking like a rave album cover. It's just that Microsoft screwed up the start menu. Everything else, great! 2gb of memory, no problem. It ran on my old ThinkPad X60 without a problem.
While Apple was struggling with Copland, Microsoft was struggling with Cairo, which had a similar fate; it mostly evaporated, leaving a few interface elements behind. Even though NT had greater market share in the late 1990s than the entire Macintosh platform it was a speck compared to Windows 3.11 and 95/98. Windows XP wasn't really finished until Service Pack 2 in 2004, at which time Microsoft was struggling with WinFS, which failed, and Longhorn, which eventually became Vista. It was difficult for Microsoft as well.
Writing a general-purpose operating system for a mainstream audience is hard - writing it without going bankrupt, or without taking so much time that the computing world moves on to the next thing, is almost impossible. The majority of operating systems developed in the 1980s and 1990s are now in the same state as the Emperor of Humanity in Warhammer 40,000, e.g. dead but a few cells are kept alive by the efforts of hobbyists. This is the fate that has befallen MorphOS, RiscOS, TempleOS, whatever remains of Palm etc.
In that respect Apple did pretty well. Unlike Microsoft they weren't flush with cash from Office and Windows. They had one major catastrophe that almost destroyed them, but they turned things around. I'm not an expert but impression is that Apple's development of OS X and latterly MacOS has been relatively smooth - bear in mind that during the same timescale Microsoft went from Windows 95 to Windows 10, which is perhaps more impressive given the enormous ground they covered, but ye Gods think of the waste. Mac fans grumbled about Lion but it was nothing compared to the reception that Vista and Windows 8 had.
And, yeah, while I'm still drunk I maintain that under the skin Windows 8 was actually okay. It was okay! You were okay, Windows 8. It ran better on the same hardware as Vista and at least it had a proper design instead of looking like a rave album cover. It's just that Microsoft screwed up the start menu. Everything else, great! 2gb of memory, no problem. It ran on my old ThinkPad X60 without a problem.
Copeland was Apple's Longhorn. It dramatically missed its requirements due to feature creep where everybody thought their tech domain was mandatory. It took the authority of Steve to turn the whole thing on its head. The painful act of laying people off was required to clear the decks and reset the clock as Apple pre-Steve II was a rudderless and worthless and riddled with corporate bloat.
No, there are a few betas around that are bootable but are very buggy and normally crash after running for a few minutes, but that's all, it never progressed beyond that.
I did get beta build D11E4 to boot quite a few years ago now:
Boot screen for the older D7E1 build, couldn't get that one to work beyond this: