<story><title>Steve Jobs tried to convince Dell to license Mac software</title><url>https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/the-steve-jobs-deal-with-dell-that-could-have-changed-apple-and-tech-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting to envision the what-if universe where licensing OS X  (and other software) became Apple&amp;#x27;s main business model.  I wonder if in this universe, Apple is basically the Google of our time (everything is a cloud service, massive ad tracking, using metadata as their revenue generation), or if they would be more like the MS of our time (playing a game of catch-up with Google).&lt;p&gt;While I don&amp;#x27;t really blame Dell for not taking this deal (it seemed like a pretty raw deal for Dell), I wonder how much more popular Unix would be nowadays had this gone through.  OS X was (and is) almost certainly the largest desktop *nix distro out there, and if it were installed on every Dell computer (and presumably later other manufacturers as well), I wonder if Unix might have become the &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; for desktop OS&amp;#x27;s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bityard</author><text>&amp;gt; I wonder if Unix might have become the &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; for desktop OS&amp;#x27;s&lt;p&gt;Microsoft is pouring buckets of money and human capital into WSL2. Today, it&amp;#x27;s their way to drag cloud developers away from the Mac and Linux ecosystems into the corporate-blessed Windows ecosystem. But tomorrow, maybe developers and server admins will demand more Linux compatibility and, who knows, maybe they will reach a point where the only way to improve performance is to &amp;quot;port&amp;quot; Windows services and applications to the Linux kernel. The open source community has already proven that much of it can be done via Wine.&lt;p&gt;One of those things that doesn&amp;#x27;t look terribly likely now but might prove obvious in retrospect.</text></comment>
<story><title>Steve Jobs tried to convince Dell to license Mac software</title><url>https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/the-steve-jobs-deal-with-dell-that-could-have-changed-apple-and-tech-history/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tombert</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting to envision the what-if universe where licensing OS X  (and other software) became Apple&amp;#x27;s main business model.  I wonder if in this universe, Apple is basically the Google of our time (everything is a cloud service, massive ad tracking, using metadata as their revenue generation), or if they would be more like the MS of our time (playing a game of catch-up with Google).&lt;p&gt;While I don&amp;#x27;t really blame Dell for not taking this deal (it seemed like a pretty raw deal for Dell), I wonder how much more popular Unix would be nowadays had this gone through.  OS X was (and is) almost certainly the largest desktop *nix distro out there, and if it were installed on every Dell computer (and presumably later other manufacturers as well), I wonder if Unix might have become the &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; for desktop OS&amp;#x27;s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moonchrome</author><text>Or they would be bankrupt ? Mac OS lost to Windows and if Apple was about software instead of hardware they would probably miss iPhone and iPod just like Microsoft.</text></comment>