🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin Brown (kcbrown@starfruit.csd.sgi.com) wrote:

>NeXTStep never had a chance.  At the time it was introduced, it
>required workstation-class hardware to run it reasonably well, ran on
>only one brand of hardware (NeXT's) and that hardware was too
>expensive for anything but the workstation market.  No surprise that
>the NeXT systems never got very popular.  

I find this most peculiar coming from an SGI guy.  Let's replace "NeXT" 
with "SGI" and see what happens:

"SGI's UNIX-with-graphics-libs never had a chance.  At the time it was 
introduced, it required workstation-class hardware to run it reasonably 
well, ran on only one brand of hardware (SGI's) and that hardware was too 
expensive for anything but the workstation market.  No surprise that the SGI 
systems never got very popular."

But despite that all the facts above are true, SGI systems _are_ fairly 
popular systems.  So we see by example that the logic in your argument is, 
well, flawed.

It's clear that there is _another_ reason why NeXTSTEP didn't do well in 
its early years (it's doing better now as an OS only with emphasis on 
vertical applications, but at quite a cost to its early general-purpose-app 
developers).  But what is the real reason?  Well, this being *.advocacy, 
I guess we'll never figure it out... :-)

So I'll argue instead that this is a classic example of Luke's First 
Axiom of the Computer Industry:  If a product has competition, and it is 
the most popular, it is never the best.  The sarcastic but short version 
of Luke's First Axiom:  Quality is inversely proportional to Popularity.

>By the time PC-class
>hardware was beefy enough to run NeXTStep, it was too late: Microsoft
>had captured most of the market with Windows and managed to get it
>past the point where compatibility is everything.  

Microsoft had done this by the time NeXTSTEP was introduced.  Remember, 
this was in the late '80s.

>Oh, did I mention that NeXTStep's still too expensive?

Again, an astonishingly odd statement from a guy at SGI...

Sean Luke           U Maryland at College Park    
seanl@cs.umd.edu    http://www.cs.umd.edu/users/seanl/