Back in the mid-to-late nineties I had the fortune of using both BeOS and NeXTStep. I loved both operating systems and recognised their differing strengths and weaknesses.
I must say I was hugely disappointed when Apple chose not to pursue “Plan Be” and opted to purchase NeXT instead. The operating system seemed like overkill and not a good match for Apple’s use-case (single-user machines, media-focussed workflows, with an obvious advantage to be drawn from pre-emptive multitasking and almost real-time multimedia processing). NeXTStep struck me as a much more “workstation-type” OS that would have had little resonance on the consumer and professional market.
It turned out I was wrong: Moore’s Law has made the heavyweight NeXTStep an eminently shoulderable burden, and that it is now so “lightweight” in relative standards that its direct descendant (iOS) can comfortably run on (albeit unimaginably powerful) mobile devices.
I wrote elsewhere in this thread that with the benefit of hindsight I don’t think Apple’s resurgence could have happened had they had chosen Plan Be.
Yes, they picked Steve Jobs, and NeXTSTEP was quite advanced with ObjectOriented-UI and its UI-builder - most of the stuff is still there with a new Theme and called MacOS X. Companies like Pixar used NeXTSTEP.
BeOS was quite interesting too. Though it lacked multi-user support, and had a small user community. Its BeFS filesytem had an indexing feature that dwarfs all desktop search features even today - and Windows "Cairo" (1996) / WinFS (2006) that tried to accomplish it too, turned out as vamporeware.
Both NeXTSTEP and BeOS were ahead with multimedia support like real time video player and WYSIWYG editor.
"... "Vaporware" was coined by a Microsoft engineer in 1982 to describe the company's Xenix operating system, and first appeared in print in a newsletter by entrepreneur Esther Dyson in 1983. It became popular among writers in the industry as a way to describe products they felt took too long to be released. InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize it by lampooning Bill Gates with a Golden Vaporware award for the late release of his company's first version of Windows in 1985.
Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite's demonstration was well received by the press, but the product was never released. ..."
