🚀 go-pugleaf

Before I start, I would like to say I am HOPING that NeXT succeeds despite  
themselves, but they are not making it easy.  Also, this is the opinion of  
the author only and not necessarily the company he works for.

Just wanted to give some input from the REAL world on the NeXT.  And I do  
not mean the computer world, I am talking from the business perspective,  
you know the people that keep the computer world spinning.  From what we  
have seen, the technology of the NeXT has great potential but horrible  
corporate planning. 

NeXT has got to realize their is no way to follow the Apple scenario, that  
their success was a product of time and not a product of a great marketing  
plan.  They are not going to get the NeXT out in the masses, which is the  
only way to stay successful, with their current marketing setup.  Has  
anyone at NeXT ever heard of supply and demand curves and  
fair-market-value pricing, this is not the optionless-era of Apple.  I  
know NeXT believes it's competition is Sun, but even Sun has decided to  
become more price competitive with PCs and Macs. 

Moving onto that Sun-bashing strategy, why would you limit your market to  
such a small portion when you could easily compete in a market 100 times  
that size.  It looks unprofessional to corporations to continuously bash  
your competition and never back it up.  When you see a NeXT ad, if you  
notice or can find one somewhere, you will see that their main emphasis  
tends to be how much "better" they are than Sun.  Since, most computers  
sold are PCs or Macs this advertising becomes fairly useless.  Also, their  
ads tend to be Novels (like this post)  that nobody would ever spend the  
time reading, with a tiny NeXT logo, usually near the center of the  
magazine where no one will ever see it. 

One thing that NeXT cannot touch with the Sun, at this time, is cost  
effective X-Terminals.  Your power users get their own CPU and the masses  
can have inexpensive X-Terminals which allows them to sell a high  
function/price.  (I know computer people like to talk performance, but the  
business world is based on function not mips.)  What a corporation wants  
is their employees to use the computer as a tool to do their job  
efficiently.  Their is no way to justify a minimum of $6,000 per seat in a  
company where most employees need the machine only to look up a small  
amount of information and to occasionally use EMail and a Word Processor,  
that would probably be about 1/4 what they pay many of these employees.   
(I hope none of you idealists will jump on this point and try to say that  
"Well then they should pay them more").  The reason I say $6,000 is that  
companies want color and that is what it would cost on the NeXT even with  
a corporate discount.  

The current NeXTSTEP 486 plan is NOT the answer, this will still require a  
fairly expensive machine to operate it and requires too much resources  
(RAM & HD).  They will have to price themselves much more competitively  
with NT in order to make any inroads in the 486 market.

Since, Display Postscript is such a quick way to write to the screen their  
is no reason you should not be able to have a quick NeXT Terminal.  I  
think the importance of this has been drastically underrated by NeXT.   
They could optimize their log in process and make some changes to their OS  
to accommodate NeXT-TERMS and we could all have a great cost effective  
answer to windows and PCs.

One major problem with NeXT is their distribution and sales, as a VAR you  
find that the companies worth having as customers NeXT sales take  
directly, or I should say try and take directly.  Even if you work on  
account and do the demos they end up  "calling themselves a developer and  
get the developer discount" from NeXT.  Because of NeXT's small staff they  
are unable to satisfy their VARs and their in-house accounts.  If they  
just changed their direct sales and support people to VAR support then  
they could have many more satisfied customers and still maintain their  
relatively small staff.

One thing it looks like NeXT is coming to the realization of, is that the  
market drives the developer not vice-versa.  Another thing they should  
stop putting so many resources into is the education market, sorry about  
this one.  Corporate and Government sales are what will make NeXT  
profitable, it might be good idea to have an academic presence but do not  
try and make it a major focus.  Education accounts tend to be extremely  
low profit, low volume, and high maintenance.  Unlike government  which is  
low profit, high volume, and virtually no maintenance.  

Something that disappointed us was the NeXT hardware.  Looks great on the  
outside, but in their haste to cut a few dollars they short changed their  
hardware.  They needed to put in a real serial port that can handle 64K to  
128K synchronous communications, a SCSI-2 chip set and not just and  
connector, a 32-Bit ethernet chip set and maybe some kind of bus connector  
to allow the option of slots would have been nice.  All of this would have  
cost another $25 to $50 and made the machine much more versatile,  
especially as a file server or communications server.

A good plan for NeXT would be to:
	- Cut in 1/3 to 1/2 their current hardware pricing (even it means  
unbundling the extended software)
	- Use their VARs for sales and support
	- Limit the Developer program to actual developers 
	- Offer an Intro pack, which is not the same price as buying  
everything separately
	- Price NeXTSTEP 486 at PC prices, $300-$395
	- Rekindle the relationships with the large software vendors to  
port new and upgraded software to NeXT (Lotus, WordPerfect, FrameMaker,  
Adobe, etc.)
	- Port to SPARC and HP 
	- Come out with an answer to Quick Time 
	- Make the NeXT Dimension useful, it could be a great product
	- Work on a NeXT Term
	- Finish 3.1 in a more reasonable time frame than mid-summer
	- Come out with DBKit II in current bug fix time schedule,  
mid-summer