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General Discussion / Re: Revolutionary PC Technology
« on: January 09, 2021, 06:44:10 am »But Apple was having big business problems. Microsoft bailed them out, and Apple's board got Steve Jobs back. Jobs killed MacOS 9 and replaced it with NeXt, renaming it Mac OS X. The clones were not included in these plans. OS/2 was out. IBM didn't want it, Apple didn't want it.
I could speculate that OS/2 might have competed against Mac OS X had IBM got behind it. I doubt IBM would have gotten any return on their investment, though. I doubt Microsoft really saw that they were going to lose control of consumers to Google and Apple. IBM at least had the vision to get out.
Microsoft showed some real intelligence putting Windows on life-support and moving their attention to consumers and their cloud platforms. Now LinkedIN is nearly as profitable as Windows.
Yeah true I wasn't thinking about the fact the Apple nearly died during that time and it wasn't until later that Steve Jobs saved them.
I think IBM should have stayed in the fray, evolving, could they have been able to focus on consumers. But it doesn't seem to be in their DNA since they are always focused on enterprise. Like IBM really didn't focus on third party software for os/2 like Microsoft did with Windows... they were more concerned with OS/2 running on servers with custom enterprise software instead. But ignoring the third party software market meant they couldn't compete in the consumer realm.
You have a good point about Microsoft - but somehow I feel Microsoft is taking the same direction as IBM. They have been shuttering their consumer brands and moving to just business focus, with a few exceptions.
Enterprise seems to be were the easy money is - but you lose technological relevance.