Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs. And because of this, a lot of interviews with those who worked with him appeared on the Web and just various stories from his life.
One such interview was given by Michael Dell, founder, and CEO of Dell. According to his story, at one time Steve Jobs approached him several times with a business proposal regarding the use of operating systems on Dell computers that Jobs was involved into one degree or another.
First, in 1993, then already fired and not yet reinstated at Apple, Jobs visited Dell in Texas several times, offering him to use the NeXTSTEP operating system on Dell PCs with Intel processors. Then Jobs was just trying to develop Next, which offered its own PCs running the same operating system. Dell then turned down the offer, noting that there were very few applications for NeXTSTEP and there was no market interest. True, then Dell still worked with the WebObjects web framework, which was also created in Next.
In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple after it acquired Next. And he again went to Dell, this time offering him to license macOS. Jobs said that in this way Dell will be able to offer its customers the choice between computers with two operating systems.
Dell liked the idea this time. He offered Jobs a deal in which Dell would pay Apple for every macOS PC sold. However, Jobs feared that such a system would undermine Apple's own sales since Dell computers were cheaper. He offered Dell another deal, which implied that Dell would simply boot macOS on all PCs along with Windows, and users would choose what to use. In that case, Dell would pay Apple for every PC sold.
Dell said it was not an economic proposition that made sense. Because in that case Dell would have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Apple, and this would not at all guarantee that users would choose macOS. In addition, Jobs was unable to guarantee Dell's access to macOS after several years.
This could change the trajectory of Windows and macOS on the PC. But obviously, they went in a different direction
Thus, if then the deal between Apple and Dell took place, the computer market could be very different now.
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