🚀 go-pugleaf

   From: glenn@rightbrain.com (Glenn Reid)
   
   Jim Becker writes
   > 
   > walking by Computer Attic on University in Palo Alto last week gave me
   > a gut feeling about the future of the black box.
   
   Computer Attic is a bad metric.  They never had their heart in the
   NeXT to begin with; I don't even know why they bother to fly the banners.

i seem to remember when Computer Attic originally got them  they  were
very  positive  on  the NeXT, and it was the place i went to play with
one.  didn't know of another  store  around  that  would  carry  them,
except BusinessLand. *That* was a high-priced store! Box  of  floppies
for $25!

back when the NeXT first came out they were in the windows of CA,  and
there was a lot of NeXT presence felt walking by or into the store.

as an update to my original post, the NeXT sign  has  now  disappeared
from the front window. there are still two banners in the back, with a
Mac banner in the middle of them. so it was there  for  at  least  two
years, and just vanished in the past week.

   A better place to go, for totally the opposite experience, is MacAdam
   computers in San Francisco.
   
not  finding  a decent NeXT store in all of Silicon Valley, and having
to go to San Francisco to find one, does not bode well for mass market
sales.  people need to see the machine to fall in love with it,  after
all. 

i'm  not  flaming  the NeXT, personally i think it's the best computer
i've seen (in twenty years).  however i was also involved heavily with
the  Amiga,  which teaches one that there are marketplace rules beyond
"mere"  technology.   this  is  unfortunate,  as  technically superior
products fall by the wayside and those  that  win  out  normally  lack
technical innovativeness and "spirit". seeing the Japanized version of
the  NeXT  made  me  understand  how  far  ahead  they are of Sun, for
example. but Sun rules the workstation market.

--

so, my big question with the Amiga became  "who  is  making  a  living
selling  third  party  products  for the machine".  it seemed that the
Amiga would support people that had other main-stream incomes, but not
those that "quit their day-jobs" and went fulltime.

anyone out there paying their mortgage  on  software  sales?   have  a
non-home office, and are making a profit?

-jim
--
 -Jim Becker / jcb@ncd.com   /   Network Computing Devices, Inc. (NCD)