I sat at Cafe Du Monde knocking down beignets and cafe au lait and reading the USA Today, and saw the news that Apple was buying NeXT for $400 million – and bringing Steve Jobs back into the fold as an advisor to the CEO. And I’ve said it before, but I clearly remember thinking “well, this is it. We live or die on this one.”
It was worse than we thought, to be honest. It wasn’t much known, but to some accounts Apple was only 90 days from bankruptcy. The product line was a disaster area – the battery issues with the PowerBook 5300 meant that Apple couldn’t ship a reliable PowerPC laptop two years after the transition began – and there were all kinds of strange dalliances with things like the Pippin game console, or the eWorld online service, or the godawful Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. But looming above everything else was Windows 95 and the fact that Apple was no closer to shipping a next-generation modernized operating system. Pink, Taligent, Copeland – all busts. The general consensus was that Apple would have to buy their new OS from someone else, and that someone was generally assumed to be Jean Louis Gassee’s Be, which already ran natively on PowerPC hardware and brought all kinds of modern features with no legacy cruft.
But Be knew they were in the catbird seat, and they were driving a hard bargain, and when NeXT was on the table, Steve turned on the Reality Distortion Field to the max, and next thing you know, money changed hands and Himself was back. Less than a year later, I’d be making my living off the support of Apple products. I still am. And Apple went from the brink of collapse to the most valuable company on Earth.
It’s going to be important to remember in days to come: you can come back from a hell of a lot.