🚀 go-pugleaf

    Third-party software for Windows has the advantage of getting written
    up and reviewed by half a dozen magazines making shrink wrapped
    software an easy pick for customers.

    Third-party software for the NeXT has no such luck.  The most you hear
    is an occasional review on the net and the advertising blurb in NeXT's
    catalog.  The majority of consumers, especially those targetted for
    NS486, do not have access to either medium.

    With no handy reviews to work from consumers are completely in the dark
    when it comes to buying NeXT software, and many people are not about to
    spend $500 just to see if the software does what they want.  The only
    counterweight to all of this is the demo system that many NeXT software
    vendors are using... that is, making demo versions of their software
    freely available, sort of like the shareware approach, but this to
    depends on the net which is not accessible to the majority of
    consumers.

    Without the exposure of magazine reviews and write-ups about the only
    thing the NeXT has going for it in a consumer market, at the moment, is
    the bundled software that comes with the machine itself.  It's all well
    and nice to have dealers running ten thousand dollars worth of third
    party software on their NeXT's, but a consumer isn't about to spend ten
    thousand dollars above and beyond the $5K+ he's spending on the
    machine.  The modularity of the NeXT is admirable but it also causes
    fragmentation in the third party market... to 'complete' your machine
    you have to buy a dozen 'fragments' each costing a bundle of money.

    Another reason the bundled software needs to be upgraded is that the
    current software pulls down the excellent GUI interface too much. It's
    wonderful that there are so many features in the GUI, but all those
    features stand to nothing if the word processor (Edit in this case) has
    fewer features then what most people are used to or if the draw program
    (Draw! in this case) can't even color text or shift it at angles.

    In otherwords, while the software may be of high quality source code
    wise, the lack of features in that same software drives down people's
    perceptions of the GUI as a whole.	A consumer does not view the GUI
    and the software running under the GUI as separate entities... it's all
    mushed together in his or her eyes.

    Also, your stastical anaylsis:

    'Bullshit!  NeXTSTEP now ships with _LESS_ bundled software than it did
     originally, and NeXT is selling more copies/machines than ever before!'

    Is, shall we say, extremely shallow.  For all we know the reduction of
    bundled software could cause NeXT to grow more slowly then it otherwise
    would.  Simply saying that since NeXT is still growing the lack bundled
    software has no effect is, well, meaningless. It's the same type of
    misleading argument that many politicians use all the time.  (not to
    say you didn't mean well, but you are trying to reverse engineer cause
    and effect and have simplified your results a dozen order of magnitudes
    too much).

    My point is that the lack of bundled software and the lack of features
    in what bundled software exists makes the GUI look like crap in many
    people's eyes because their point of view is of the machine as a whole.

					    -Matt

    ****

In article <1992Oct30.195337.25456@cs.yale.edu> nathan@laplace.biology.yale.edu (Nathan F. Janette) writes:
>In article <1992Oct29.083938.1398@cubetech.com> andrew@cubetech.com (Andrew
>Loewenstern) writes:
>> In article <dillon.0q9s@overload.Berkeley.CA.US>
>dillon@overload.Berkeley.CA.US (Matthew Dillon) writes:
>> >	At the moment we have the situation where while NeXT's GUI runs circles
>> >	around everyone else's, the lack of primo bundled software turns people
>> >	away from investing it.  Things like Edit and Draw! are cute and all
>> >	that but provide almost no capability, and that's what users see.
>>
>> Bullshit!  NeXTSTEP now ships with _LESS_ bundled software than it did
>> originally, and NeXT is selling more copies/machines than ever before!
>>
>> NeXTSTEP ships with way more bundled software than ether OS/2,
>> Macintosh, or Windows, and they are all outselling NeXTSTEP by a very
>> large margin.
>>
>> People care about *shrinkwrap* software, and bundled software prevents
>> the development of shrinkwrap software.
>
>A ha, so you'll support the unbundling of the development apps (IB,
>cc, etc) to encourage the development of shrinkwrap equivalents?
>
>What is the difference?
>
>--
>Nathan Janette 	"I'm a NeXTstep man,
>Dept MB&B, Yale Univ	 I'm a NeXTcube guy"
>New Haven, CT
>nathan@laplace.biology.yale.edu (NeXT)
>

--

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