NeXT and Apple

I wasn't going to mention it, but now that Eric Schmidt has brought it up ...

When he [Steve Jobs] came back to Apple, he was able to take the technology he invented at NeXT and sort of slide it underneath the Mac platform. So today, if I dig deep inside my Mac, I can find all of that NeXT technology. Now, this may not be of interest to users, but without the ability to do that the Mac would have died. I was surprised that he was able to do that. But he did it.

A lot of longtime Apple employees like to joke that Apple didn't acquire NeXT, but rather, NeXT acquired Apple. That's how fundamentally NeXTStep and its successor/sibling OpenStep was incorporated into the heart of Mac OS X. That's how fundamentally former NeXT employees became embedded in Apple's corporate fabric, too.

(Link courtesy of Daring Fireball.)