Before he was a kingmaker at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington was a lawyer at Silicon Valley firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where he worked on the deal that brought NeXT Software—and Steve Jobs—to Apple. It almost didn’t happen.
Apple’s decision to buy the ousted Jobs’ NeXT Software was a last minute one. They were in fact looking to buy BeOS (now defunct), but the asking price was too high, and they went with NeXT for $400 million. Apple needed to buy the foundation for a new operating system, as their own OS development efforts at the time were, in a word, screwed. NeXTSTEP became the basis for OS X.
Mike, who saved a voicemail Steve left him about an “administrative issue” for years, considers a world without Steve Jobs. And you know, it’s a scary thought. [TechCrunch]
