From: anderson@sapir.cog.jhu.edu (Stephen Anderson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy
Subject: Re: Dropping bundled applications (was: Re: 3.0 and WriteNow)
Date: 4 Oct 92 15:25:03 GMT
	<ANDERSON.92Oct3105317@sapir.cog.jhu.edu> <60877@mimsy.umd.edu>
Followup-To: comp.sys.next.advocacy
Organization: Dept. of Cognitive Science, The Johns Hopkins University
In-reply-to: alex@cs.umd.edu's message of 4 Oct 92 03:03:34 GMT

I don't want to push this forever - I wasn't really as concerned with
the general issue of unbundling as the specific problem of a decent
lisp for the NeXT. A good part of the reason I dumped my Sun for a
NeXT a couple of years ago was the impression that I could use the
NeXT for lisp programming - the principal rationale in my field for
having anything bigger than a Mac Classic in any case. The fact that
ACL was bundled with the NeXT supported that. But almost as soon as I
had the machine, the viability of the lisp system began to decline,
and now my lisp is completely broken for the foreseeable future. In
this case, I think unbundling is directly responsible.

Full featured lisp systems, such as are offered by Franz, Lucid and
Harlequin (at least) are complex and expensive products to develop. As
a result, they only get done for markets where the return warrants it.
That can mean money, or even just a sense of providing a service to a
grateful user community [assuming there is such a thing....]. This can
almost be quantified, as is confirmed by the facts of CMU-lisp, a
really nice and quite feature-ful free implementation - which is only
available for SPARCs, basically. I've asked the CMU people about a
NeXT port, as have others, but their response (reasonably enough) is
that there's just not enough total demand to justify the effort
involved in porting the compiler to a radically different
architecture.

A machine that occupies a relatively small (if vocal...) market just
can't generate the $ necessary to maintain the interest of someone
like Franz, etc. all by itself. Knowing that, I would probably not
have switched to NeXT (despite its other virtues), given that I need
to run lisp, except that the company seemed to have done the only
possible thing to provide a solution: bundle a good implementation
(ACL) with the machine, thus effectively amortizing the cost over the
entire installed base. Yes, many people who never even opened their
2.x lisp upgrades will ask why they should pay for my software, even a
little bit. Perhaps others will pick up the torch of why the
availability of development software to the few who want it benefits
the many who don't, in the long run. All I want to say is that there
was a clear (if implicit) promise in the initial bundling scheme that
the NeXT would be a viable lisp platform. And that promise has been
broken by NeXT's failure to continue to provide a working lisp.

I do think that if Franz had made a bit of an effort to find paying
customers for ACL (after NeXT initially decided, for whatever reasons,
to stop giving it away) they might have found enough of a market
(especially given their unique monopolistic advantage - notice how
much competition they have on every platform except NeXT) to warrant
continued work. They may yet, if they try. But I think NeXT and its
software bundling policies are implicated here in another breach of
faith with their customers (something I know a little about - forget
the OD, I also have a ND bought on the naive assumption that product
specs meant something).

But then, if you're really turning into a Republican, Alex, as you
say, you won't feel companies have an obligation to their customers
beyond getting them to pay their bills....:-)

Obviously the bundling issue cuts differently in different places.
Once there are a bunch of competing wordprocessors, or spreadsheets,
or DB systems, perhaps competition is the way to encourage progress.
But I don't think that applies to development software, under
circumstances where competition is just not going to develop.

--Steve Anderson
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy