From: andrewd@tamsun.tamu.edu (Andrew T Duchowski)
Subject: Re: NeXT habits creates hesitant market (was: Re: The New NeXT Keyboard)
Organization: Texas A&M University, College Station
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 17:15:36 GMT

In article <BvH1nt.Lz8@news.cso.uiuc.edu> jeffo@uiuc.edu (J.B. Nicholson-Owens) writes:
>Scott Turner writes
>> NeXT would seem to be making some bad "loyalty pays" moves this year.
>
>This year?  Don't forget the ND (which came out a couple years ago, I think)  
>that has not been upgraded, refunded (or recalled), and nothing by NeXT has  
>been made to get any hardware compression on that beast.  NeXT won't even let  
>out what that mystical expansion port does (is it still on there?)
>
>More and more with NeXT, I get the feeling that the more new stuff NeXT might  
>bring to market the more they'll see a series of hesitant buyers.  For myself,  
>I am now very hesitant to jump on new offerings by NeXT only because they  
>weren't so hesitant to screw the OD and ND buyers (and continue to screw recent  
>ND buyers).
>
>It's almost as if NeXT doesn't want us to buy certain things, yet they bring  
>them out anyways....jeez.

Maybe it's time for NeXT to give Jobs the boot, like Apple did :)  I
don't know if it's him, but it seems like the company that he's with
(until he's booted out) doesn't give a shit about backwards
compatibility (ie. ND, OD in NeXT's case - not to mention 1.0->2.0->3.0
discrepancies that seem to come out of the woodwork).

I haven't worked on Mac's or PC's that much, so I wonder if they have
the same kind of upgrade problems.  (I minimally administer a DECstation
and an SGI iris - both are easy to upgrade and I haven't run across
many problems.  On the DEC, the only different thing I can recall on one
of their updates was a new C compiler which conformed to ANSI standards.
Only a plus though if you ask me).  Plus, I really don't know that 
much about Job's influence into company decision and if he really
causes the problems that seem to produce many disgruntled users.
I personally own a NeXT and love the thing to death.  I have a cube
and thought eventually of buying a ND and an external OD (the latter
seems like an excellent removable media solution - why drop it?  It
should be encouraged so that we can grow closer to various multimedia
advancements), but now I'm not so sure about the ND....  I'm still
considering an OD for personal use - unfortunately I expect nothing
'neat' for the OD to come out from NeXT.

Anyway, no flames please about any of the above.  I may totally be
misinformed and Jobs may totally be the smartest dude out there and
NeXT the best company around.  Personally I can't really complain that
much except for the high prices of things (the only problem of getting
a unix box I guess), and the fear of being forgotten by NeXT in terms
of backwards compatibility - last scary rumor I heard was that they're
going to forget all about the cubes...that would be unpleasant to
say the least.

There's my $0.02 - don't flame me, don't even email me about this.
These are just some personal thoughts and observations - all usual
disclaimers apply.

"This is nobody's official document"

Andrew.
-- 
--   Andrew Duchowski
--   Texas A&M University
--   andrewd@cs.tamu.edu (non-NeXT mail)
--   andrewd@visual2.cs.tamu.edu (NeXT mail)                   
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc