Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!mcgill-vision!quiche!opus!peterd
From: peterd@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: 15,000 orders---inflated?
Summary: Nobody coerced us...
Message-ID: <2265@opus.cs.mcgill.ca>
Date: 21 Sep 90 06:31:50 GMT
References: <382@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
Distribution: na
Organization: SOCS, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Lines: 92

In article <382@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>, barry@pico.math.ucla.edu (Barry Merriman) writes:
> I was talking to our NeXT outlet here at UCLA, and they suggested
> that the 15,000 orders for NeXTStations is inflated.
> (However, our local outlet---the UCLA bookstore (UCLA-BS)---is not real
> big on NeXTs anyway...)

For what it's worth, the McGill order announced the same
day as the big splash is real and nobody coerced us to
order any special amount. We spent as much as we could
afford for as many as we could afford, but nobody told our
store they _had_ to buy any (I know as I was directly
involved in getting the contract signed here at McGill and
am providing software support on campus. I am in far more
frequent contact with NeXT than our store is).

I gather a number of Computing Centre or Computing Store
types dislike NeXT, and I guess this has been a source of
amazement for the company. I put it down to the fact that
these people are used to a fair amount of pampering, NeXT
is a small company with radically different ideas on
service and distribution and originally NeXT thought
people would be demanding machines so were a little
arrogant (he said understatedly). I hope NeXT have
learned something in the past year. If not, they could
still have trouble.

> Anyway, the bottom line is that NeXT may have coerced distributers
> into promising to order more machines, so that Steve could
> pull out the big 15,000 figure at the gala. So, we're not 
> out of the woods, yet.


On the other hand, it doesn't matter how many of us bought
last month, now it's announced how many of _you_ will be
buying one? 15,000 is still a drop in the bucket compared
to PC or Mac sales, or even SLCs from Sun. I happen to think
they've licked their exposure on hardware (for at least six
months :-), now they have to work on their software. There
were a lot of products announced and I just received my
new Fall, 1990 Software and Peripherals catalogue and it's
definitely thicker. Also, there are a lot more
"Availability: Now" entries, so things are looking up here,
too. Heck, I even have to withdraw my comment made a few
nights ago about waiting for Cobol. It's apparently
available ans shipping now! GACK!!!


So, the big exposure, as far as I'm concerned is in
loosing their defining edge as they move away from the
idea of "all that bundled software" to a more select
package. This will encourage more developers and aid
updating, but NeXT will loose one of those things that
differentiated them. They were the "bundled solutions"
company.

My suggestion to address this might be of interest here,
and I'd like to see it discussed. I have suggested to a
couple of NeXT people and they've promised to "pass it on"
(sort of like "check's in the mail" ;-)

The idea is to sell each machine with a set number of
"software credits" and the user can choose whatever he or
she wants from the list of announced products. Each
package is worth a certain number of credits, the packages
are chosen when the machine is ordered and the packages
either installed on the release disk (more possible when
the optical was the medium of choice) or the order sent to
the vendor and the package mailed on.

The user should just get a card that has all the packages
grouped by function: Databases, Text Processors, etc.
No one vendor is shortchanged, extra credits would be
available for a price, users still see buying a NeXT as a
bundle of solutions, not the packaging problem that any
ordinary workstation is.

So wadda ya tink? Will this fly? Should it? You heard it
here first. I don't want a lot of credit (but get me my
colour machines, NOW! :-)


			- peterd


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+-------+ 	Peter Deutsch		McGill University
| u # u |	peterd@cs.mcgill.ca	School of Computer Science
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|  a a  |	
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