Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 19:08:11 MST
From: yackd@alaska.et.byu.edu (Don Yacktman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc
Distribution: world
Organization: Brigham Young University, Provo UT USA
Subject: Bundled development environments (was Re: New SUN's, Bad news for NeXT?)


In article <1992Nov12.191652.28719@socrates.umd.edu>, ice@socrates.umd.edu (Fredrik Nyman) writes:
>songer@lexmark.com (Christopher Songer) writes:
>The other NeXT software, however, is immensely valuable to a
>developer.

Absolutely.  I use these tools daily, and find them to be very
"comfortable."  (Except for IconBuilder.  Technicolor yawns for
that program.)

> If I was making a living
>developing NeXT software (I'm not) I would pay a large amount of 
>money for IB if it wasn't bundled with the OS.

I would not, because I don't have large amounts of cash to do so.
If I had to buy development tools with my NeXT, I wouldn't have bought
a NeXT:  the cost to get a system that is useful to me would have
been prohibitive.  This is important, too.  In a recent post, someone
else mentioned that both the _amount_ and _quality_ of public domain
apps for the NeXT is incredible.  I fully agree.  Why is this?  Because
there's a great development environment, and it's "free" to anyone who
can afford a NeXT.  What it amounts to is that the casual user who gets
curious can fiddle about with programming for the heck of it and then
!voila! out pops a nifty app.  The PD software comes from folks like
this; people who are fiddling around in their spare time...  it this
fiddling cost $$, you wouldn't find the PD apps, or at least, not as
many of them!  Since so many people have said that the NeXT needs
more software, here we have something that is helping to solve the
problem.  An environment like this attracts hackers like magnets
attract iron...as long as it's free.  Some of those hackers will go on
to write the killer apps, and not just games.  :-)  (Of course, most
of my current projects are games, but there's other stuff, too...)

By the way, one of my roommates from last year bought a Turbo Color
because of how useable the machine is out of the box, the amazing
PD software (a major selling point to him), and the fact that the
machine is so wonderfully hackable.  (He witnessed how fast Columns
went together, and after that, wanted his own machine to work magic
with...rather than try and find a spare moment when I wasn't using
my favorite toy. :)  )

>I can actually understand Sun's reasoning.  Software support is *very*
>expensive so it makes sense for Sun (and possibly everyone else) that
>only those who *need* the tech support for, say, Sun C, pay for it.
>If you buy 100 SPARCs to run some generic application such as
>FrameMaker, would you really be interested in paying ~100 per box for
>software and support you don't use?  (The $100 figure is a guess; I
>figured that if 1 SPARC in 20 is used for development, the per-machine
>cost for C would be 1/20 of the $2000 SunC license fee).

This argument has been brought up before... and as I remember, there
were two remarks that are worth considering:  for a single machine, the
$1-200 difference isn't very much, and the cost of supporting different
configurations may override that.  (ie. what you save in software costs
is eaten up by newly created overhead.  NeXT is small enough this may
be an issue, but I am in no position to say whether this is actually
the case or not.)  The other point is that $1-200 adds up when you are
buying, say, 1000+ machines to outfit the corporate offices... so it
goes both ways.

The pricing on NS486 seems to be aimed at corporate markets, and note
the increased price for the development environment, so I think maybe
they paid some attention to the previous thread on unbundling.  And
as long as the development environment is free on the NeXT hardware
I'll be happy, and so will other hackers like me. :-)

>We're seeing a situation now where high-end PCs and low-end PCs are
>having similar performance and are used for running shrinkwrapped
>software, so it's hardly surprising that PCs and workstations are
>becoming similar in terms of what the vendor bundles with the OS.

Yeah, but I'd like to see NeXT be "better" than everybody else. :)
(What that actually means, I suppose, is open to private interpretation.)

Later,
-Don Yacktman
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc