🚀 go-pugleaf

I think I said, about two years ago, that NeXT has to decide whether it is a
hardware company or a software company.  NeXT's policy was to lock its
customer base into a single hardware and software platform.  You could not run
NeXTSTEP on anything other than a NeXT computer, and you couldn't run anything
other than NeXTSTEP on a NeXT computer.

NeXT made a step in the right direction with NeXTSTEP/486, but IMHO going
after the NT juggernaut is more for public relations than for profitability.
NeXTSTEP/486 is simply too expensive and the market perception of NeXT as a
company compared to Microsoft does not support a serious competition.

NeXT has still not done anything about the ``you can't run anything other than
NeXTSTEP on a NeXT computer'' problem.  Screams of ``why would you want to do
this'' aside, the fact is that NeXT withholds programming documentation about
its hardware.  Porting or developing an alterate operating system to NeXT
hardware is not feasible.

This all was very much in the 1980's idiom.  Every major vendor did this, and
are now backtracking.  DEC has announced with Alpha that ``DEC will sell
whatever the customer wants to buy'' without insisting that the customer buy
what he doesn't want.  They'll sell software (including sources) without
requiring hardware purchases, and they'll sell hardware (down to the chip
level) without requiring software purchases.  DEC recently gave away a very
impressive freeware CD-ROM, including a nice ``install to hard disk'' feature
that just builds the directory structure and symbolic links to the actual
data (there was supposed to be this in NeXTSTEP 3.0, but I didn't see it).
What's more, DEC's freeware CD-ROM includes sources; although they supply
binaries for RISC/Ultrix everything is designed so you can easily rebuild on
your own local platform.  There's a lot of good stuff on it.

Best yet, DEC's freeware CD-ROM is free.  NeXT charges you for their
advertising; consider the $25 fee for the ``educational software'' CD-ROM and
the fees for the videotapes of the Steve Jobs dog&pony roadshows.  It's like
paying for a NeXT T-shirt -- *why* would anyone want to pay to advertise a
company's product?

I hope NeXT sees the light.  NeXT is behaving a lot better than they were two
years ago, but there's still a long way to go.  Somehow, going up again SUN --
a vendor which is justifiably hated by lots of people -- doesn't inspire much
confidence.