Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Amelio identified that the clone deal was bad (fixed license cost instead of based on % of machine price) and rebranded to MacOS 8 in order to renegotiate to get a better clone deal.

Spindler made the original clone deals assuming they would be chasing aggressively low pricing as seen in the PC market but instead the clones ate Apple's high-end market, replacing Apple's high-end margin with cheap OS licenses. So Amelio wanted to renegotiate the deals to be based on the value of the machine so that Apple would not lose from a clone maker selling a high-end machine instead of Apple.

Jobs as iCEO continued the negotiations (after all, NeXT was also an OS-only company at that point so Jobs wasn't necessarily sold on the idea that Apple had to sell hardware) but nobody aside from UMAX bit on the more expensive MacOS 8 license (so yeah there was one clone they had a MacOS 8 license - you can find UMAX MacOS 8 CDs out there) so Jobs gave up, and there were no other clones.

So Amelio started it and Jobs finished it.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: