Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!spl1!laidbak!att!rutgers!mit-eddie!bu-cs!mirror!necntc!necssd!necbsd!baker
From: baker@necbsd.NEC.COM (L. BAKER)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXT not revolutionary enough?
Message-ID: <8651@spl1.UUCP>
Date: 1 Nov 88 15:28:59 GMT
References: <471@wucs1.wustl.edu>
Sender: news@spl1.UUCP
Organization: NEC America Inc.
Lines: 45

From article <471@wucs1.wustl.edu>, by conrad (H. Conrad Cunningham):
>...
> 	He maintained that the NeXT computer will be a failure because
> it not revolutionary enough.  Its only advantage is a short-term
> hardware capability/pricing advantage over the other available
> UNIX-based workstations.
>...

1)  I think that, as with everything else that costs people money,
    the market will decide.  The "visual interface" as a simple,
    easy solution "for the rest of us" was highly successful for the
    Macintosh;  I see no reason why it cannot do the same thing for
    Unix/NeXT.

    The market they capture may not end up being the "typical workstation
    users," e.g. engineers, CS/technical people, but then the market for the
    Macintosh turned out to be a *bunch* of people who'd never considered
    buying a computer in the first place.  Which was exactly what they
    planned for it in the first place (Lisa flames notwithstanding).
    I think that Jobs & Co. have come up with a similar product, with
    a similarly untouched target market.

    Part of what I find facinating about the NeXT machine is that it is so
    obviously aimed at an interdiciplineary audience; consider the
    combination of reasonable graphics, high-quality music generation and
    reproduction, high-quality printing capability, powerful tools for
    manipulating text databases, a bunch of standard databases obviously
    targeted for *nontechnical* writing, a so-called "visual" (read: easy)
    interface ... the thing sounds like "the computer for the Liberal
    Arts Major"

    In direct answer to the criticisim that "Its only advantage is a
    short-term hardware capability/pricing advantage over the other
    available UNIX-based workstations," I think that the same comment
    could have been/was made about the Macintosh, and it is clearly
    a success.  Similar to the Mac, NeXT brings together things that
    have never *all* been present in any single product on the market,
    though they have been available scattered piecemeal across the
    industry's various product lines for years.

LEB
-- 
Larry Baker, NEC America Switching Systems Division, Dallas TX
Uucp:     {harvard, ames}!cs!necssd!baker
Internet: necssd!baker@cs.utexas.edu