August 28, 1990: Licensing Revisited

Six years after the Mac was introduced and five years before Microsoft had run the GUI gauntlet with Windows 95,  Apple's Senior Vice President Dan Eilers came up with four transformative ideas for the company:

1 License the OS.

2 License the OS and hardware.

3 Start a new Apple brand or

4 A whole new company that would port the OS to Intel (unimaginatively called Macrosoft).

While any of the solutions might have worked (except Mac OS on Intel, everyone knows that is just too stupid for comment) Sculley rejected all of Mr. Eiler's suggestions.

With Sculley ousted, Spindler did license the Mac OS to other hardware makers; companies were started to port the Mac OS to Intel and Steve Jobs did finally make the jump to Intel hardware. Mr. Eilers made his suggestions this week in 1990.