A thought-provoking piece by Jim Carlton in the Wall Street Journal the other week claimed that three previous attempts to license the Mac operating system, in 1985, 1989 and 1992, were all scuttled when Apple Computer Inc got cold feet. According to Carlton, the first approach came from none other than Microsoft Corp’s Bill Gates who wrote to then Apple chairman John Sculley, offering to put Microsoft’s weight behind the Macintosh operating system. At the same time, a team gave a two-hour presentation describing how the Macintosh System could be re-written to run on iAPX-86-based personal computers. The second attempt nearly materialised in 1989 when Sculley reportedly persuaded workstation vendor Apollo Computer Inc, now part of Hewlett-Packard Co, to build a high-end machine using boards from Apple and the Macintosh operating system. According to Carlton, both the Mac-on-iAPX-86 and the Apollo ventures failed due to the intervention of Jean-Louis Gassee, then head of Apple’s engineering corps, an assertion that Gassee refutes. The last time that licensing came up, says the report, was in 1992, when John Sculley formed a division at Apple’s Claris software unit to spearhead a clone strategy. Claris built clone prototypes for the mail-order market, the idea being that if the scheme proved successful, it would be extended to true third-party cloners. Again, the plan was aborted at a late stage. One problem was that Apple’s margins were just so high that any clone manufacturer would have forced down prices or wiped the floor with Apple’s own machines. Now in 1994, a slimmed down Apple has margins much closer to the rest of the industry and is consequently better placed to compete with its own clone makers. You can imagine for yourself what Apple’s position would be like today if it had bitten the bullet and licensed the Mac OS system in 1985.
