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From: jack@Taffy.rice.edu (Jack W. Howarth)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: Not another NeXT defector???!!!
Message-ID: <1990Nov14.062822.7879@rice.edu>
Date: 14 Nov 90 06:28:22 GMT
References: <1990Nov10.015237.3468@athena.mit.edu> <1990Nov10.022306.6551@agate.berkeley.edu> <108620@convex.convex.com>
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Organization: Rice University
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 Well, here's my two cents on this topic. The NeXT is a very lovely machine,
BUT... They need to get a larger market share. The 040 NeXT has been claimed 
as much faster than the 030 Macintosh's. True...however, the reality is than
80%+ of the CPUs sold are Intels running DOS/Windows/OS/2. The 486 is out and
has been out for a while. It has MIPs similiar to a 040. Granted the FLOPs of
a 486 are poor compared to an 040 that only applies for scientific/engineer-
ing applications. So rather that spew on about Apple's pricing, I suggest that
you look yonder at the 486's. What is the cheapest 486 box one can buy? As far as I can see, last time around NeXT made a temporary splash with the 030 cube 
until 030 Macs and 386 DOS machines shortly became more common. The fact that
NeXT has small installed user base really hurts it badly and the NeXT cheer-
leaders don't or won't see that. A mainframe software company in town was going
to put all their publishing (30+) machines on the NeXT cube until they realized
that the installed base was 8,000 or so. At that level of market share you have
developers sitting around writing great tools for each other. My guess is that
the 040 NeXT will make a few gains this year but will level off as Mac 040's
come, the workstations like Suns etc come down in price and 486's cheapen even
more. Here at Rice, I believe they sold less than 8 cubes until this Oct. Since
then two more were bought at fire sales (one by the bookstore and the other by
a EE computer repair technician). The point is that these types and levels of
sales are not reproduced campus or nationwide. I have heard that many of the cubes bought last year were used as evaluation units. The problem is that after theevaluation, all too often there weren't takers for more cubes...
                               Jack
p.s. The mainframe software company (which writes for Big Blue) bought all 
Macs after much wringing of hands over the issue