🚀 go-pugleaf

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

As a workstation it didn't have high-enough performance.  And it
didn't offer machines significantly faster than the base model,
in contrast to Sun, DEC and HP, even though it was reasonably competitive
with each of the workstation vendor's entry level models. 

It's usually the case that the upper limit of PC performance is
equal to the lower limit of workstation performance.  But to sell
a *line* of workstations and servers you need to have some that go even 
faster.

Workstation users wanted fast CPU's and NeXT didn't have them.

> >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.

No.  Sparcstations were faster, you could get even zippier versions
and they had real Fortran compilers.   They had RISC cpu's which
sophsisticated workstation buyers knew had more 'headroom' for future
growth.  They wer correct: the 68040 started to fall behind even the
Intel 486/Pentium much less PA-RISC, RS/6000 MIPS or Alpha.  

> 				Kevin Brown
>                       SGI Customer Support Engineering