Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!ucsd!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!van-bc!ubc-cs!rlin From: rlin@cs.ubc.ca (Robert Lin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Next rumours from MacWeek Message-ID: <8598@ubc-cs.UUCP> Date: 8 Jul 90 06:13:20 GMT References: <1990Jul7.230927.23012@midway.uchicago.edu> Sender: news@cs.ubc.ca Organization: Objective Software Engineering Corp. Lines: 121 X-Local-Date: 7 Jul 90 23:13:20 PDT I personally don't think MacWeek is trash. But I do think it is biased, and so do a lot of Mac users who read it. Local Mac guru extraordinaire Dave Murray told me how he read this recent article in MacWeek, comparing Windows 3.0 with Mac. "The article was obviously written by someone with a lot of Mac bias. He would raise minor problems with Windows 3.0, and criticize the hell out of it, de-emphisize Mac problems or say something like 'and of course, this is fixed as of System 7.0'...." This cavalier attitude from its writers hasn't gone unnoticed. In the most recent MacWeek I got, all letters (except one) criticized the way Apple is handling marketing vis-a-vis the Windows 3.0 threat. For the longest time, most Mac periodicals have a "let's kneel and praise" attitude, and the Mac became a total sacred cow. Slowly, with people like Dvorak ("The Devil's Advocate"), a tiny voice of criticism was heard. A recent article about Apple's Obligopoly, for example, is particularly interesting. Let's not forget that we in the NeXT community inherit many of the old problems with the Mac community. Face it, some of us get extremely defensive about these beloved machines of ours. That includes people who work for NeXT. Let me give you an example. When I went down to NeXT Inc. for my developer's training during March, there were still no announcement of the 68040. Rumour was flying wild about whether the next NeXT would be RISC or CISC. I was determined to find out, so I asked people. They were all very tight lipped. SO I decided to try another approach; I started a RISC vs. CISC debate. To my surprise, I found a totally defensive attitude toward CISC. This I might have expected from a group of grizzled PC DOS marketing staff, but certainly not from a progressive company like NeXT, where the engineers get hired for their intelligence, and not their ability to pay lip service to established policies. I had at least expected to hear a balance treatsie on the pros and cons of RISC versus CISC. Instead, I heard things like, "RISC is a none-issue. It's a fad. It's unproven technology." And not just from one source, but from many... the people who are in a position to know abut the upcoming 68040 chip. I thought, this is a joke! I respect their decision to use the 68040, but what I heard was defensiveness that bordered on lies. At that time, I caught on to the fact that they must be using the 68040, and that it was not a matter up to debate anymore, but a decided fact, and handed down from Above as the Gospel Right Way To Do Things. All this is chronicled in lesser detail in Tao #1, by the way. To be fair, the people I talked to were the most zealous of the NeXT workers, and they tend to be the ones we meet at the Developer's Camp, to impress us with the energy and enthusiasm of the company -- which is impressive and substantial. That energy galvanizes people and makes the world move. What I saw was perhaps the dark side of enthusiasm, called zeal. --> ABOUT THE MAC WEEK RUMOURS This is my guess only. I think the people at NeXT is under a lot of pressure from Steve and from general competition. They realize this is a make or break year. They are working very hard to make their upcoming announcement a super WOW. The pressure has caused some less sturdy fellows to drop off the side. Steve Jobs becomes the most abrasive (and paradoxically the most effective at getting people to get things done) when the pressure is high; this has been demonstrated over and over again in the past. Head hunters know NeXT hires only the very best. So they actively raid the company as a resource for top notch talents. So with a combined high pressure from Steve, and big bucks offers from competitors, some have decided to leave. Is that so surprising? I think "five top people" is definitely an exaggeration. The truth is probably something like "two top people, two low level guys", and maybe an accidental casaulty of circumstance somewhere else. Given the tension in the industry, it only serves NeXT's purpose to obfuscate the enemy with false rumours. What better red herring than to throw out a story about "Warp 9", the Wonder SparcStation SLC turbo clone? Those guys at NeXT are smart, they know what they are doing. I am guessing they will stick to the basics, and in general that means to accentuate the positive and fix the negative. For NeXT, it means - System 2.0, with high performance file system and task scheduler algorithm thoroughly revised. You'd be surprised how much performance is lost to poorly optimized schedulers. - New Canon 32 ms, 512 M floptical to fix persistent complaints. - The 68040, of course, at 25 Mhz and maybe 33 model, depending on Motorola's production capability. - Low prices. Major price cuts can be achieved while still preserving profit margin because one very expensive cost, our "free" NeXT software, has been amortized and paid for by us pioneers. - A show of strength from major software vendors, with applications available for immediate delivery, to once and for all silence critics of the "no apps" variety. I personally also believe Color WILL be available. As far as March, I was told they had working color boards. It's been quite a while since. Rumours that color won't be available may be intentionally spread to lull competitors into complacency. The workstation market is a deadly business. From what I've seen, NeXT is better organized and much more nimble than their competitors like IBM, SUN, HP, and Apollo. They've got small and fast killer-engineer teams who are free from all the bureacratic red tape that tie down engineers from the other workstation vendors. NeXT is also cash rich enough (remember Canon's $100 million investment?) to endure any sort of cut throat price war that SUN may wage. Because NeXT is smaller, it would be instead to their interest to emphasis value as opposed to low price tag. As I conjecture along these lines, I am guessing NeXT will bundle yet another significant piece of software, along the lines of a "Desktop Document Retrieval System" like Paper- Sight, the way they bundled FrameMaker (as demo software). Anyways, sorry about the verbosity. That's my two cents.