Developments to Date

MacWorld

Press releases from around that time were very vague and even contradictory. The message was one of an internal power struggle. By the time the dust had settled, Avie Tevanian of NeXT was in charge of Apple Software development, with a team of 100 NeXT engineers and 50 Apple engineers working on the new operating system; Jon Rubinstein (once head of hardware at NeXT) was in charge of Hardware at Apple, and key Apple figures had left or moved to one side.

Marco Landi, head of sales, left; Ellen Hancock was still CTO, but no longer with hardware or software development reporting to her, and it was rumoured that she might leave also. More importantly, Heidi Roizen, Head of Developer Relations, had left "to spend more time with her family". She was very well respected at Apple, and it is rumoured that she had said that she would leave if she was ever asked to lie to developers. The extra hours that may have been required, and the loss of projects that she was closely associated with, such as the Pippin (rumoured to go in the March 14 layoffs) and BeOS, are probably contributory factors.

Executive Committee

The head of sales from NeXT, Mitch Mandich, has become head of Business Sales; as Apple has never had very strong enterprise sales, this isn't as big as it may sound. It effectively means that the NeXT sales and marketing teams have been bundled together in a group that is separate within Apple. Apple's enterprise sales have been historically very low.

A number of technical points have been confirmed:

• Display Postscript will take some features from QuickDraw GX, which is otherwise lost;
• QuickTime (and probably NeXTTIME) will be incorporated;
• the UI may be based on the new 4.0 UI demoed by NeXT in PR1 of 4.0, but with a Mac menu bar and sliders on the right;
• Netinfo stays;
• the API is OpenStep;
• NeXTSTEP/Intel and OpenStep/NT stay;
• OpenDoc is probably to be dropped;
• Java will be an important part; all APIs will be accessible from Java;
• it will remain multiuser.

In addition, full capability for running current Mac System 7 apps will be built in.

A number of points are still definitely unknown:

• what apps remain; Mail.app has not been confirmed;
• what filesystem support will be used;
• what happens to other versions: NeXTSTEP for m68k and SPARC;
• there may be a project to run Windows 95 apps with the same status as System 7 apps; the "Red Box".

Companion announcements have been made by MetroWerks, to say that they will port their development tools to Rhapsody, and will provide porting tools for Mac developers.

A recent announcement from Amelio appeared to confirm that the System 7 series (now, confusingly, including a System 8) will continue indefinitely. It appears from both this announcement and the earlier reluctance to flesh out details that senior management at Apple have been very reluctant to say anything that existing Mac users might take offense at. However, this has been taken to the extreme of avoiding making clarifications that have been well overdue. It is ironic that the Mac user, who was once considered to be very discerning, is now perceived, at least by Apple, as being arch-conservative.