🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <42stfp$hqq@hecate.umd.edu>,
Sean Luke <seanl@carmi.cs.umd.edu> wrote:
>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.

I guess I didn't make myself clear enough.  I was referring to the
*PC* market, not the workstation market.

NeXTSTep was priced for the workstation market, not for the PC market,
so it naturally failed in the PC market.

>  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 SGI systems have never been (to my knowledge) targeted at PC
users.  They've *always* been targeted to the workstation and server
markets, and in these markets they're quite successful, primarily
because SGI systems *excel* at high-speed, high-resolution graphics,
and that type of graphics is in high demand in the workstation market.

>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.

Not in the context that I intended them.  Sorry.  :-)

>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... :-)

I'm not sure exactly why NeXTSTep didn't do well in the workstation
market.  It may be that they weren't trying to target that market, so
they didn't attempt to appeal to it.  It may be that with respect to
that market, there wasn't anything particularly special about their
machines (the best thing about their machines was the user interface,
but the workstation market isn't as sensitive to that issue as the PC
market is).  It may be that the workstation consumers didn't think
they could take the company seriously because its founder had a
primarily personal computing background.

>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.

This is just another statement of one of Murphy's Laws: The perversity
of the universe tends towards a maximum.  :-)

>>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.

I thought Windows gained most of its popularity in the very late 80s
and/or early 90s, but my timetable could be messed up...

>>Oh, did I mention that NeXTStep's still too expensive?
>
>Again, an astonishingly odd statement from a guy at SGI...

For the *PC* market...


-- 

				Kevin Brown
                      SGI Customer Support Engineering