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From: nwickham@triton.unm.edu (Neal C. Wickham)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: NeXT/Amiga Flamage: Get a life.
Message-ID: <1991Apr06.042636.3533@ariel.unm.edu>
Date: 6 Apr 91 04:26:36 GMT
Article-I.D.: ariel.1991Apr06.042636.3533
References: <9x1G.&$h1@cs.psu.edu> <1991Apr06.013637.28281@ariel.unm.edu> <#54G+r2i1@cs.psu.edu>
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Lines: 48

In article <#54G+r2i1@cs.psu.edu> melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) writes:
>
>
>   Let me ask you again.  Do you believe that there will be enough NeXTs out 
>   there to support a healthy software market?
>
>Yes.  I think software companies will see NeXT as a major player in
>next two or three years and they will port their wares to the NeXT so
>that they can get a larger share of the market.  Once a company gets
>entrenched in a market, it's hard to get them out.  examples: Lotus on
>the PC, Excel on the Mac, WP on the PC, Word on the Mac.  Many
>companies stuck with Lotus during their tough years because it was too
>much trouble to change.  Same with A-T and dBase.
>
>-Mike


Lotus, WP, and Mathmatica won't cut it.  With my Amiga, I can run ms-dos and
Mac as well as Amiga-dos and UNIX.  I may very well have my Amiga in five 
years.  I don't think the computer market will change in the next five years
like it has in the past five.  There is this inertial aspect called available
software.  

I think most people who knew about Amiga when it came out thought that soft-
ware companies would all jump on the Amiga band wagon.  But they didn't.  They
wrote for clunky old ms-dos, because, they said, there weren't enough Amigas
sold. ...they were in the business to make money and there was money to be
made with ms-dos.

The simple fact that the average price for a NeXT (ed & list) is around $6,000
means that its market will be very restricted.  There will never be droves of
people marching to computer stores to lay down six thousand bucks for a
computer.  NeXT will never have the variety of software that is or will be
available to ms-dos, Mac, and Amiga.  The NeXT is nice ...I think anyone will
give you that.  I just don't believe the market for it is out there. 

There is a lot of hype for NeXT.  Jobs and people in California know the
power of advertising and image and hype and they have sunk a lot of money
into hyping the  NeXT and it may carry them so far.  But I've have a wait and
see attitude.  There are a lot of things you can buy for $6,000.  And on 
purely technical grounds, I am not convinced that NeXT really out performs
Amiga. ...I wouldn't want a CPU time killer like Post Script on my monitor!




                                       NCW