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From: smith@canon.UUCP (Mark Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Subject: Re: What is Sun doing?
Message-ID: <9003021153.AA03781@hagen.canon>
Date: 3 Mar 90 00:13:08 GMT
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In response to David Lau-Kee's posting "What is Sun doing?", Tom Schneider
writes:

> There was an article in (the 1990 January issue?) of Scientific American
> about technical races. It seems that when two nearly equivalent products
> appear, one of them can take over because of random market forces. So VHS
> beat out Beta video.

It is tempting to draw an analogy between NeWS and Betamax, in that both are
seen as "technically superior" products which lost in the marketplace.
One flaw in the analogy is that VHS and Betamax were competing
technologies meant to do exactly the same thing; there was no point in
both surviving. With NeWS, Sun has the opportunity to position it as a
complementary rather than purely competing technology to X. This whole
"X vs. NeWS" debate, implying that there can be only one winner, has
inevitably damaged NeWS more than X. Because X has a C-based interface
(well, a multitude of them actually), it will be *perceived* as easier
to learn and use by the vast majority of the Unix/PC programmer community.
Look at the commercial Unix world (for instance, the financial services
sector), where most Unix vendors see the greatest growth potential.
There is no way that systems houses/DP shops in these areas are going
to be convinced that they should learn PostScript. Obviously, a C interface
to NeWS is no problem, but the perception already exists that
NeWS-is-PostScript-is-strange and X-is-C-is-familiar.

With the merged server, Sun has a product which requires a precise
marketing strategy to win both commercially and technically. Unavoidably,
X will be seen as the basic, standards-oriented window system. If that's
all the support that your application needs, then fine, use it. For
developers who need better support than X delivers (device independence,
imaging, server enrichment, etc.), then the learning effort put into NeWS
will be worthwhile. (And no, adding "display PostScript" to X will *not*
make it as powerful as NeWS.)

The only way that Sun is going to see a reward for their efforts is
to promote both sides of the merged server as solutions, and support 
developers on both sides. Standards are wonderful for producing
networked multi-vendor Lotus 1-2-3 clones, but not so great for
advancing the state of the art.

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