Sadly, I know a few entrepreneurs that also think this way. They're not having much success, but cling to the notion that the world will 'wake up' and see things their way, eventually, some day, if they could just talk to enough people (and they usually cite Apple as their inspiration for this approach).
The Steve Jobs / Apple approach is more the exception that proves the rule, and even then, they've had their Newton moments too. What that proves is that with a successful enough company you can have a few failures. When you've only got the one product, you can't afford the luxury of your own Newton.
I think people take the ignoring customers as an on or off thing, but no company ignores what their customers want (including Apple).
What a good company does is never listen to only a single customer. What a good company does is listen to all customers and take that knowledge and solve the over arcing problem. Each individual customer is likely only seeing part of the problem and thus only asking for partial solutions. The problem is that they simply do not have the visibility to know the entire problem, and that's where a good 3rd party business comes into play.
The first thing Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was kill off the Newton. There's been the occasional slip, but nothing too ghastly (except the flower power iMacs).
Because it was falling apart without him and that's the company he really wanted to run?
Think what you will about Steve Jobs but the idea that he's some hack who's milked an incredible streak of good luck is not going to win many people over.
> Pixar was more proof that even he never thought apple would be the hit it is today.
The facts don't align with that theory. Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985. Toy Story was released in 1995. There wasn't any plausible path for Steve to return to Apple until 1996.
I'm no huge fan of the NeXT underpinnings of OS X, but the idea that using BeOS as an underlying operating system "would have forwarded the osx success a couple years" is silly.
Aside from the still-continuing claims of Be adherents and their Haiku descendants, BeOS was so very much Nothing Special and I find it highly unlikely the Magic BeOS Fairy Powder would have materially improved OS X.
it had an amazing multimedia framework. it had even patents for hardware stuff that put the later firewire to shame. and it had the best os api I've ever had to deal with.
it had everything that os8 lacked, and that later was added on osx only. except objectivec... but there were even compilers for that later on.
but thats not even my point. to downvote me above, first answer: how many clients next had?
BeOS was interesting on the surface and had a couple of neat ideas, but wasn't a substantial system underneath. Heck, it didn't even have the concept of user accounts and file ownership!
Anyone who laments the outcome of the Be/NeXT decision clearly knows little about just how much rock solid foundation came along with NeXT -- most notably the development tools and developer ecosystem.
The Mac ecosystem has experienced a consumer renaissance through iDevices/iOS, but also a geek renaissance through Mac OS X's UNIX underpinnings.
Classic Mac OS was derided as a toy (and in many technical respects it was), and BeOS would have done nothing long term to shed the Mac's toy image. Today, few people call OS X a toy.
I find file permissions just an annoyance on my debian desktop that I share only with my wife. And I deal with unix security since the early 90's. OSX has file permissions and about 30% of them are setuid. Great improvement!
Also, BeOS had an Xwindow port months after it's death. OSX had it when?
IOS is a completely different beast. I don't even imagine why you are mentioning this. But the beos hybrid kernel would be good for that as well. heck it was even bought by palm for that purpose. sadly politics never moved it. even Next took a lot of time to be absorbed in apple ...and they had the ceo at their side.
About the tech that matter... there was nothing super new about objective C. ever heard of smalltalk? anyways, GNU implemented all that 3 years after NEXT, and they were not even being paid. Meanwhile Next were licensing PS from adobe for the interface just like SGI was doing for what? 10 years?
No matter how many buttons had your rock solid development tools. it was just like programming in VB. and if you wanted to do anything just a little different, you had to deal with awful apis and post script. heck, there's one layer of hell with the same name.
now, on the other hand, I invite you to read the BeOS book that is now opensourced... from oreilley if i'm not mistaken. Even the OS being dead now, it's the best read if you ever want to learn anything about elegant APIs design.
...i know all that is pointless... http://xkcd.com/386/#Duty_Calls ...but i just can't stand to see apple taking any underserved merit for being cool
Maybe for you. However Mac OS X does manage them well for you, which means that you can set up limited access and guest accounts on your computer without worrying about someone fucking it up or looking at your shit.
> IOS is a completely different beast. I don't even imagine why you are mentioning this.
I mentioned it because the products sparked a revival of the Apple brand in consumer's minds. But yeah, now you mention it, the technology did do a great job of scaling down to the phone. BeOS might have been fine too, but hey, Palm chose a Linux kernel instead.
We're discussing could-have-beens, which is pointless.
> there was nothing super new about objective C. ever heard of smalltalk?
With that line of argument, there's been nothing new in computer languages for thirty years.
I'm sure you love your BeBox and spend your life porting stuff like Firefox to Haiku, but as cool as BeOS was on the surface, the world has past it by. Stop lamenting what could have been, there's no interesting arguments to be had there.
> i just can't stand to see apple taking any underserved merit
Whereas giving too much credit to experimental failed projects like BeOS isn't?
(I don't recall the details, but there was little to no printer support; certainly nothing comparable to classic MacOS. For Apple's core market at the time, that was the kiss of death.)
that's true. BeOS never got to the point of being a product.
After they noticed they had no money for the bebox they just pampered the OS for a sale. that's the main reason it looks so much like os7... or 8. it was being tweaked for an apple purchase.
printing was just a matter of paying the rights for the 'standards', again, they were steps before that point.
Also, linux didn't have decent print for the same reason. nobody paid pantone et al for color stuff licenses. heck, gimp didn't have CMKY until... does it have already? honestly, i gave up following it up.
The Steve Jobs / Apple approach is more the exception that proves the rule, and even then, they've had their Newton moments too. What that proves is that with a successful enough company you can have a few failures. When you've only got the one product, you can't afford the luxury of your own Newton.