After lengthy discussions with Be and rumors of a merger with Sun Microsystems, many were surprised at Apple's December 1996 announcement that they were purchasing NeXT and bringing Steve Jobs on in an advisory role. Amelio quipped that they "choose Plan A instead of Plan Be." The project to port OpenStep to the Macintosh platform was named Rhapsody and was to be the core of Apple's cross-platform operating system strategy. This would inherit OpenStep's existing support for PowerPC, Intel x86, and DEC Alpha CPU architectures, and an implementation of the OPENSTEP libraries running on Windows NT. This would in effect open the Windows application market to Macintosh developers as they could license the library from Apple for distribution with their product, or depend on an existing installation.