Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mstar!mstar.morningstar.com!bob From: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: early adopters (was Re: What's NeXT's Eighth Breakthrough should be ?) Message-ID: Date: 20 Sep 90 14:50:09 GMT References: Sender: usenet@MorningStar.COM (USENET Administrator) Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Organization: Morning Star Technologies Lines: 40 In-Reply-To: ty@thedog.cis.ufl.edu's message of 20 Sep 90 03:42:02 GMT In article ty@thedog.cis.ufl.edu (Tyng-Jing Yang) writes: After the release of New NeXT, here is a question for NeXT's first-year personal buyers. "Are you regret to buy(love) NeXT too early ?" ps: Early Birds should get the worms(reward,not bugs) My girlfriend (now my wife) and I bought a Macintosh in March of 1984 because it was so clearly revolutionary in what it brought to the personal user class machine, and in so many ways The Right Thing. As expected, Apple improved the machine with subsequent products. The upgrade path was too expensive and too frequent for me, and my Classic Mac spent the latter years of its life running uw in my home study, performing fine service as a multi-window terminal dialed into my UNIX machines at work. By the time it finally fritzed out, it was unable to run any vaguely-current systems or applications. Also, by that time, Apple had been taken over from the innovators by the lawyers and I was no longer interested in maintaining or purchasing their products. That Classic Mac case now collects dust in storage, having been cannibalized to donate components to friends' machines of similar vintage. I bought a machine with specific capabilities, and (until it had hardware problems) it never ceased to perform those same functions. I got exactly what I paid for, and exactly what I expected. I received years of reliable service while it did exactly what it was originally advertised to do, and what I bought it to do. In every field, progress marches on. People who bought the Nth generation of any technology are bound to be passed by when the N+Mth arrives. But in the mean time, they have received the benefits of using the technology during that period of time. And the Nth generation stuff continues (modulo breakdowns) to do exactly what it did when it was purchased. I know people who still drive 1972 Dodge Darts. They aren't surprised or angry when Chrysler introduces new models that surpass theirs. They just decide, using the normal cost/benefit analyses, when it's time to trade in their 72 Dart on an 81 Horizon :-)