Just Call Me The Seer: I Was Dead Right on Apple

摘要

It gives me the utmost pleasure to say I told you so! Some of you might remember a column I wrote early last year (see "Apple's Next Move Misses the Mark," Feb. 3,1997, in the fortune.com archive) saying Apple did the wrong thing when it bought Next Software in December 1996. Boy, did I take heat on that column. So much heat that I wrote a column about how I got mail-bombed by the Evangelistas, a hardy group of Macintosh enthusiasts who hang out at www.evangelista.com and really objected to what I said in the first column (see "MacAttacked!" June 9,1997, in the archive). Apple bought Next (mostly from Steve Jobs, for $400 million) in order to turn its operating system into the next-generation system for,the Macintosh. I criticized the decision for two reasons: (1) The company didn't need Next's operating system, although its own software did need improvement; and (2) What the company really needed was a visionary, someone like Steve Jobs, who at the time insisted he was not moving to Apple. I also accused Jobs of being pretty cynical for selling his company to Apple when he must have known that buying Next wasn't the right thing for Apple to do.