Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ukma!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!previous.cis.ohio-state.edu!jgreely
From: jgreely@previous.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Selling through Businessland
Keywords: NeXT, RISC, MACH, multiprocessing, bundled software
Message-ID: <42127@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 6 Apr 89 20:31:03 GMT
References: <1554@neoucom.UUCP> <121@dg.dg.com> <1749@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> <123@dg.dg.com> <42030@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <1877@csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Reply-To: J Greely <jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: The Ohio State University, Department of
              Computer and Information Science
Lines: 54

In article <1877@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> zdenko@csd4.milw.wisc.edu
 (Zdenko Tomasic) writes:
>In article <42030@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> J Greely 
> <jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes:

>>Nonsense.  It's a high-end Mac with a real operating system)
>    I hope not. I hope it is much better than Mac.
>    Why are you afraid of competition?

Says who?  Afraid of competition for what, the NeXT?  Simply put,
no one is aiming in the least for the same market.  A high-speed
Unix box is *not* competition, since neither speed nor Unix are
the primary selling points of the system.  I replied in the manner
I did simply to drive this home (he can quote press releases, so
can I).  The Mac is not a bad machine, but it suffers from an overdose
of "design philosophy".  The NeXT has many of the same ideas behind
it, built onto a more mainstream base.

>><insert more commercial propaganda>
>              ^^^^^^^^^^
> Just like you do. Tit for tat, right?

Precisely.  That's why I did it.  I just happened to have recently
received NeXT's latest propaganda sheets, so I made appropriate use of
them.  It seemed fair.

>>"of the class and magnitude".  Don't you love it when they put you
>>down?  Seriously, on what information do you base your numbers?  Are
>>you working from the current press releases, or just punting?

>   Granted, he was a bit vague, but aren't you asking now for what you
>   objected in the first place (commercial!) ?

Nope.  I want to know what he means by "of the class and magnitude".
All he did was list companies.  Some reasonable explanation of what
sort of applications he considers worthwhile would go far towards
supporting his position.  As it is, it meant absolutely nothing to me.
I consider Adobe Illustrator a very worthwhile development, but does
he?  Is professional MIDI control software of sufficient magnitude, or
is that just wasting precious cycles?  While we're at it, what
performance freak would consider X-Windows a virtue on a machine
shipped with a base 4 meg?

<delete irrelevant discussion of the virtues of capitolism, along with
an amazing amount of whitespace>

My point was that his commercial said nothing relevant to the NeXT
machine.  All it did was state how good the DG box is, and imply that
the NeXT is junk by comparison.  If all you're after is MIPS, that may
be true, but NeXT isn't building Speedy Gonzales (more of a "Cat in
the Hat").

-=-
J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)