I was trying to reconcile the various statements in your previous comment:
"the biggest botch was JLG asking for too much money"
"Steve ended up asking for 4x as much"
"it had so many flaws, missing features and shallow implementations, OSX would certainly never have shipped"
If Jobs asked for 4x as much as JLG, and Apple went with Jobs, then clearly the ask by itself was not the problem.
And if the Apple board of directors had concluded that BeOS would never work for Apple, then my question would be, why would Apple pay anything for it?
I wasn't aware of this:
> What isn't commonly discussed, is there was an option for both acquisitions to happen
What would be the purpose of acquiring both? Was the idea to acquire Be only for the talent and not for the OS?
A bit of both and it is a fascinating thing for me to think about, because of the knock on effects. Because Steve was insightful, even if JLG was on board with it, Steve probably would have told Amelio, don't bother, because we can scoop up the people later on. Steve did something later on with Eazel, although with Andy Herzfeld's request to do so, and ended with much of the Safari team, Finder/Spotlight team, key CoreGraphics and iPhone team members and more.
If all of Be had went to Apple, perhaps Apple would have use used elements of the Media Kit, the file system (Dominic ended up at Apple doing the new file system, and more anyway), the UX team (Bill Bull ended up at Apple anyway), etc. But the effect on the industry would have been interesting. Danger, Inc. and the Hiptop wouldn't have happened, Android under Andy Rubin wouldn't have happened, Hiroshi would have ended up an exec at Apple and not running Android for Google, Eazel probably wouldn't have happened (not such a big deal). Benoit would have been an exec at Apple and not Google, Erich Ringewald would have ended up an exec at Apple and not Amazon, etc. These are must minor fluctuations I guess, but fun to think about.