From: waltrip@capd.jhuapl.edu
Subject: Re:  Nextstep on NT
Organization: CAPVAX, JHU/APL
Date: Thu, 10 Sep 1992 14:41:24 GMT

In article <dillon.0nhp@overload.Berkeley.CA.US>, 
dillon@overload.Berkeley.CA.US (Matthew Dillon) writes:

	[...]

>     NT is a piece of crap... MicroSoft's sole purpose in life is to develop
>     proprietary software, hook everyone, then leave them hanging.

	Your second allegation doesn't support your first (perhaps you didn't
	mean it to, of course).  But as to MicroSoft's sole purpose in
	life (if there is such a thing), no one is suggesting it's
	philanthropy or altruism.  One vendorism is extremely dangerous, if
	not evil, and I believe you are correct in being concerned.

	But none of this means that NT is a piece of crap.  A lot of excellent
	people were hired to put NT together.  Like all good people, they take
	pride in their work and that's part of THEIR personal objective in
	working.  We should be prepared to recognize good work regardless of
	the source.  Which is not to say that MicroSoft--as IBM or DEC--still
	can't find a way to screw up a good thing.  Which is another reason
	not to let MicroSoft get its hooks into you too deeply.  But that's
	true of any organization (even NeXT).

	[...]

>     How many
>     releases will they have gone through to get the most basic multitasking
>     that NT is to provide?  How many more before the OS is stable?  How
>     many more before processes stop crashing the machine?

	I believe I can answer that.  If the first release is as good as the
	developer's pre-releases:  ONE.

>     If NeXT is interesting in breaking MS's choke hold on the market with
>     NS-486 they are going to have to sell it in the $50-$100 range and have
>     a large number of NeXT applications available for it at introduction,
>     as well as hire the SoftPC people to put together a PC-emulator (not
>     too hard on a PC platform!) to give people a jumping board.

	I would guess that you're in about the right price range for a run-
	time version.  A developer's version could be more.  They could
	probably also come up with a "corporate" version that supported more
	NT inter-operability (sort of analogous to their Banyan support but
	more) and charge more for that (but not a lot more).
> 
>     If NeXT doesn't do this then their NS-486 will be a failure.  NeXT, if
>     you can break Microsoft I would be really happy!

	I just want them to be an effective (large) competitor.  Our only
	real protection as customers is good Standards and a lot of 
	competition.  And I still believe that an effective way to compete
	against Windows apps is to port NeXTSTEP to NT and let our
	NeXTSTEP apps compete side-by-side with (mostly) inferior Windows
	apps.

Opinions expressed are my own.

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Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy