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From: jack@umbc4.umbc.edu (Jack Suess)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Marketing niche for NeXT
Message-ID: <1991Jun21.025728.2044@umbc3.umbc.edu>
Date: 21 Jun 91 02:57:28 GMT
Sender: newspost@umbc3.umbc.edu (News  posting account)
Organization: Univ. of Maryland Baltimore County, Academic Computing Services
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As a owner of a NeXT machine I am hopeful that the company remains in 
bussiness. The discussion of the NeXT as a Vanilla Unix box and how Next
markets (so to speak) the machine has made me think about where NeXT fits
in on our campus.

I believe that next should target the machine as a personal productivity 
machine aimed at users presently considering the purchase of X-terms. With
the release of the latest generation of machines (i.e HP snake, RS/6000,
R4000), CPU cycles are quite abundant. We find that many researchers buy
one of the above beasts as a computation server but then look at having a
X-term or MAC in their office. Most users at our campus want an easy to
use machine that has a good word processor and graphics package that also
allows them to run applications on their computation server.

The Mac offers good word processing and graphics capabilities and 
bundled with Mac/X offers access, albeit poor, to the X applications 
being run on the computation server. An Xterm provides good X access 
to the server but forces the user to rely on standard Unix tools for
personal productivity.
The NeXT can provide both X-access and good word processing. 
The neXT is much more cost effective than
a comparable Mac II and Academic prices place the 105MB NeXt within
shooting distance of good X-term.

The flaw in this marketing niche is the reluctance on NeXT to openly
accept the fact that the X-protocol is really the key to open systems.
I am not recommending that NeXT forego the Nextstep environment but rather
admit that X is important in an open systems environment and ship an App
that supports an X-server within the Nextstep environment. This could be
NeXt's own product or one such as co-Xist. Until NeXT itself states that
X is important and NeXT is committed to providing users with a means of
supporting X, users will be leery to purchase a NeXT in place of an X-term.
I have seen pencom's product and it is a good product. In fact I am ordering 
it for the Next I am getting at work; however, I would feel much better if
X support came with every NeXT. In a distributed computing model I 
need at least
two things from every desktop device, TCP/IP and X. NeXT's acknowledgment
of the importance of X would assure me they would do nothing to jepordize
the support for X, such as release version 3.0 with changes to Nextstep that
break Pencom's product.


I realize I am probably paranoid, but do others share my paranoia?

jack suess                     Assistant Director, UMBC Academic Computing
-- 
Jack Suess                           UMBC Academic Computing
Internet: Jack@umbc5.umbc.edu        Standard Disclaimer:
Bitnet: Jack@umbc                    The opinions expressed above are mine and
ATT: 301.455.2582                    not my employers.