Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!spl1!laidbak!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!husc6!linus!heart-of-gold!jc From: jc@heart-of-gold (John M Chambers) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: Questions on NeXT machine Keywords: NeXT Message-ID: <8678@spl1.UUCP> Date: 2 Nov 88 18:21:30 GMT References: <17780@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> <[9.5]karl@ddsw1.alt.next> <25146@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Sender: news@spl1.UUCP Organization: Mitre Corp, Bedford, MA, USA Lines: 64 In article <25146@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>, bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes: > (Note that followups are directed to comp.sys.next) > > In article <[9.5]karl@ddsw1.alt.next> karl@ddsw1.MCS.COM ([Karl Denninger]) writes: > >With regards to Next machines only being available to colleges: > > > >I hope Jobs comes around to reality soon... > > >Failing to serve a major market segment that wants to purchase his > >machine (ie: you and I, folks) is a big, big mistake. Being arrogant > >and saying "you want one, go to college!" is not the answer. > > Failure to narrow one's focus in order to accomplish a goal is a big, > big mistake. Many companies, larger ones that NeXT (160!) have gone > under while trying to be everything to everyone. Kudos to one who > will recognize the limitations of size and time during a start-up > phase. His statement, if flip, was at least realistic. Yeah, but it may not even be that complicated. I'd like to remind y'all that most of use are very familiar with a similar story. For the first decade of its existence, Unix was basically distributed (at a very low price) to universities, and nobody (at ATT or elsewhere) even tried to build a market. After a few years, those universities started turning out a crop of graduates who, when put to work on the various commercial systems, all said things like "What's this garbage? Why don't you get a GOOD system instead of ______?" [Fill in the blank yourself.] What was a good system? Why, Unix, of course. Not that is't perfect, but it was far ahead of things like OS/MVS that the industry was pushing, if you wanted to do anything other than run a few canned packages from the vendor. The first few new hires that said this could be dismissed as starry-eyed academic idealists. But when corporate manages (at ATT and elsewhere) noticed that they ALL acted this way, well, the news slowly got through thick corporate skulls that maybe this was worth investigating, and that maybe, just maybe, OS/MVS wasn't the way God intended computers to run. With BSD, it happened again. Despite all of ATT's marketing power, BSD-based systems are doing very well against Sys/V, and as usual it's taking the corporate world (at ATT and elsewhere) a very long time to stop dismissing it as the ravings of a bunch of wierd student types. Events like Sun becoming a billion-a-year company eventually get the attention of corporate marketing types, but they aren't about to do things like BSD until someone else develops the market. Personally, I suspect that Steve Jobs is gambling on being able to pull off the same trick. Imagine 5 years from now, you are hiring new graduates to work on your new ______ workstations, and the new hires are all saying things like: "You call this turkey a workstation? For half the price, you could have bought a NeXT and you'd be getting some work done instead of beating your head against the wall trying to make the kludgey thing work." The first two or three you will dismiss as silly academic types that don't understand the Real World, but when the ALL act that way, well, maybe, just maybe you'll start to get the idea. Meanwhile, the corporate Unix developers (at ATT/Sun and elsewhere) are busy making their Unix into something that competes with OS/MVS... -- From: John Chambers From ...!linus!!heart-of-gold!jc (John Chambers) Phone 617/217-7780 [Send flames; they keep it cool in this lab :-]