🚀 go-pugleaf

I can think of a definite advantage to dropping hardware.

NeXT would no longer have to concern itself with advancing hardware.
NeXT's market is simply not large enough to drive rapid hardware 
advancements. How many speeds of 486 are there, compared to 040?
Even with Apple selling Motorola based machines at very high demand,
Motorola's development time is glacial.

The 486 market has tons of competition driving performance up and
prices down. Intel has AMD and Cyrix to worry about. Regardless of 
whether NeXTSTEP will run on their competitors' chips, Intel will
do everything it can to stay ahead of them.

HP has Sun, IBM, DEC and SGI (to a lesser degree) to compete against.
They will also feel a great deal of pressure to stay at or near the
head of the pack.

If NeXT ports to x86, PA, SPARC, R4000, and alpha, then they can't help
but be at the forefront of performance. No one will ever be able to
blame NeXTSTEP for running too slowly. If it does, wait a few months
and someone will release a better chip that will run it faster.

NeXT wouldn't have to lift a finger or spend a cent. The hardware
race drives itself.

(Or rather, DOS, Windows, WNT, and X drive it. We'll just hang on 
for the ride of our lives)

I'd like to see more NeXT boxes. I'd especially like to see a Risc
upgrade for my Cube. But the lure of unbridled hardware advancements
is pretty strong. I may just have to live on Ramen noodles until I
can afford an HP running NeXTSTEP. Even then, maybe I'll NXHost apps
to my Cube and keep the ugly thing in a closet. Maybe a rack mount...

<disclaimer: I am assuming that something real will happen with HP.
I don't know if anything will, but I certainly hope it does. NeXT
would get a lot more respect, I think. My Sun-worshipping OOPS 
teacher said it best: "It's a nice toy." He also said he saw 
someone "cat" and "more" a tiff file at a NeXT demo.>

--
Jonathan W. Hendry
Drexel University
College Of Information Studies (tjhendry@queen.mcs.drexel.edu)
Anderson Financial Systems (jon@afs.com)