Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!psuvax1!news From: melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) Subject: Re: Amiga OS *IS* state of the art, but the NeXT is better In-Reply-To: es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu's message of Thu, 4 Apr 1991 01:53:11 GMT Message-ID: Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet) Nntp-Posting-Host: sunws5.sys.cs.psu.edu Organization: Penn State Computer Science References: <1991Apr3.190802.11055@sugar.hackercorp.com> <1991Apr4.015311.19714@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> Distribution: usa Date: Thu, 4 Apr 91 04:46:35 GMT Lines: 48 In article <1991Apr4.015311.19714@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes: 20,000 machines isn't so hot, actually. It certainly isn't enought to keep the company afloat, nor will it generate enough sales to keep ANY software houses from the big-world happy. WordPerfect and Lotus will turn back unless sales pick up, as no matter what Steve Jobs wants, they want money. It's a start. I think Sun sold around 180,000 machines last year, while its closest competitor sold half as many. NeXT should sell between 40,000 and 50,000 machines this year. They will need a lower priced machine to sell more, and I'm sure that they know that. However, the people/companies who can spend $5000 on a computer are also the ones who can afford to pay $500 for a word processor and another $500 for a spreadsheet. And despite the claims that Lotus couldn't do this on anything but the NeXT environment, they will soon port it to MS Windows and probably XWindows/Unix. I seriously doubt that developing on the NeXT and then porting is CHEAPER than just developing on the destination machine. But the NeXT is magical :-). You write software correctly the first time :-). Jobs probably promised these companies a rose garden. They will soon be disillusioned. Of course, CBM did the same thing back in 1985, and many were soon disillusioned. Commodore screwed up big time. They had the machine, but didn't know what to do with it. Too bad Jack Tramail couldn't buy the Amiga when he went to Atari. As to buying stock, as I mentioned before Commodore has been given "Strong Buy" status by a major Wall Street analyst firm. That, combined with very strong sales over the second half of 1990, have resulted in the stock quadrupling in the past 9 months (BTW, a round of applause to those with the vision and money to buy in at $4/share!) How's NeXT stock doing? That's right, they are afraid to make things public. What do you want NeXT to make public? What does it matter? >NeXT question. -Mike