From: jeffo@uiuc.edu (J.B. Nicholson-Owens)
Subject: Re: the REAL problem is...
Reply-To: jeffo@uiuc.edu (J.B. Nicholson-Owens)
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 06:40:38 GMT

I agree completely with Gavin Bowie's post.  There are a few points I  
wish to add.

NeXTSTEP 486, as much as it has cost NeXT and as good intentions as  
NeXT had when they set out on doing it, is gonna cost NeXT plenty  
(which they will most likely pass right on to you, the NeXT hardware  
owner, in the form of overpriced upgrades or equipment that you have  
been asking for for years).  Nobody's going to buy it and the people  
that do, will probably be very pissed when they discover that there's  
no software market for the NeXT.  People will compare NS486 to Windows  
and since Windows will cost less and even without considering software  
bases will seem to do the same thing.  When they learn that there's  
tons more software for Windows than NeXTSTEP, Windows is a sure sell.   
People don't necessarily buy quality, they buy what they can rely on  
and what they know they can get support for (should something break).   
NeXTSTEP is far from being that.

While NeXT is selling "mission-critical apps" the software USERS will  
discover that this quickly translates into developers rediscovering the  
same old wheel (every developer doing similar things that could  
probably be done with already-tested, often-used and more-general  
commercial applications) and keeping their customized-for-my-workplace  
apps to themselves (OOP is nice, but unless you share it, the benefits  
will quickly vanish).  I have a very hard time believing that there are  
THAT MANY programs out there that need to be made that are SO different  
from what exists commercially that the entire program needs to be built  
from scratch.  I would say that more people can get what they need done  
from commercial packages then custom packages built solely from what  
the OS company sent.

The sooner NeXT pushes "profit-building-critical apps", the sooner the  
machine will look better to users (when was the last NeXT demo you saw  
that stressed how many good apps run on the machine instead of what a  
wonderful development environment it is?).  NeXT doesn't seem to  
realize this yet, but they need users.  Developers alone don't seem to  
be pulling the financial weight needed to make NeXTSTEP really take  
off.  The Mac and Windows development environments may be the worst  
ever and the developers on those platforms might whine for years, but  
since there are USERS WITH MONEY, those developers are getting used to  
those environments.  I don't think there's a chicken and egg problem  
with computers and software:  most people buy a particular computer for  
the software that runs on it; once they see the software running, they  
ask "Which computer is that?" and purchase that one.  This makes  
perfect sense because machine language and system-level commands are  
not what the end user is going to be directly dealing with.

NeXTSTEP 486 users will soon discover that, just like UNIX, the NeXT is  
a developer's machine; built by developers for developers.  Users have  
no place here because there isn't that much to do if you don't know  
UNIX and can't build your own applications.

One bad feature of OOP that is currenly being demonstrated on the NeXT  
is that people are unwilling to make significant enhancements to  
other's objects or replace them altogether.  For instance, there have  
been plenty of developers groaning about the NeXT Text object.  If the  
development environment is so wonderful and this object is so bad, why  
not make a new one?  Or at least make the enhancements needed to make  
it work well.  I've posted before about things I'd like to see in  
NeXTSTEP word processors, and I think a few of those ideas would be  
great wrapped up inside a Text object because the more people that used  
would mean the more applications (and thus the more users) that could  
benefit from it's advances.

The NeXT has and continues to have excellent potential.  But the  
problem is that potential is all it has.  Unless some big apps come out  
for the NeXT (or some fast, and very much needed, relief via software,  
for example, Microsoft Word or Excel on the NeXT), or something happens  
to get a lot of people into the NeXT, it will become another has-been  
with a good idea.
-- 
-- Jeff (jeffo@uiuc.edu)
-- NeXTmail welcome
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy