Steve Jobs passed away!

[dammy]

@EDanaII

I know what you are saying here, but you need to think back to 1997. The desktop market was dead, MicroSoft had the desktop. Apple had a mass of undifferentiated desktop product lines and was losing money fast (I believe the quote was "Apple had 90 days before bankruptcy").

Steve Jobs had to figure out some way to get money into Apple, and fast. The Apple clones were cheaper and "better" than anything apple could build, as they were built using standard PC parts/cases/keyboard/etc... Getting a $10 royalty per machine sold, when those machines only occupied 3% market share was not going keep apple afloat. Steve did kill the clone market but he did it by increasing the licence cost.

IIRC, Apple was getting $75 royalty for OS8 and $75 royalty for the hardware clone. $150 @ machine would easily have kept Apple a float even with their inferior hardware not to mention new hardware (PIOS 1 which had room for 4 PPC CPUs) that was in the pipeline.  Problem is Jobs was a complete control freak, that is bottom line why he killed AIM, he couldn't conceive of giving up control of Apple, even if it was going to a future winner.  I will point out that at the time Jobs killed off the AIM (renamed OS8 to OS9 which wasn't covered under the existing agreements with IBM/Motorola), Motorola's StarMax line was ready to be open for business.

[dammy]

@Dammy

Thats exactly the problem, Apple would not have been the No1 vendor of MacOS-HW by the end of the century and it's very questionable wether the transition to NextStep (aka OSX) would have worked out.

What if those clone-makers (representing 70% or more of the market) had put their weight behind something like BeOS or a revamped WindowsNT-PPC ?

Vs going X86 and ARM?

OSX allmost killed Apple as it were, but under such circumstances....

And OSX is the only thing that made the Mac "sensible" after 2003 or so.

Well that and make the Mac "sensible" was dumping PPC entirely and going with x86 and ARM.  Jobs' pull out of AIM killed any hope PPC had of being continually developed as a desktop CPU.  It was just a question of how far could Jobs BS people on how great PPC was before every knew he was lying through his teeth.

[dammy]

@dammy and EDanaII

I am speaking with 20/20 hindsight here, at the time I was very much thinking as you were that Apple needed to clone and expand the Mac platform independant of Apple... Problem is, I couldn't see the future as well as Jobs... And let's be fair he got it right, for Apple at any rate.

-edit- I forgot to add that every Apple product line is now built on the NeXTStep platform (if we exclude the legacy iPods)... iPod touch, Mac, iPad and iPhone all built on NeXTStep, amazing when you think about it!

Back then PPC was close to x86 capabilities.  It wasn't the future that Jobs was worried about, it was about his absolute control that was not there with the cloners.