meo@stiatl.UUCP (Miles O'Neal) (03/01/89)
In article <4997@xenna.Encore.COM> bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein) writes: ... >Look, anyone who buys a $2000 X-terminal expecting a high performance >workstation (or even medium, heck, a 3/50 or uVax-II is much more >powerful) is a fool and doomed to serious disappointment. Regardless of the veracity of the above statement, our fate as software developers is tied to PERCEIVED value of X11-supporting hardware. Most of the market is dominated by IBM PCs and derivatives thereof. Much of the money stands to be made outside of the typical market that currently uses Macs or workstations. These people will hear either (a) X11 hardware is too expensive (everyone needs a high- priced workstation), or (b) we can do it with these X-terminal-thingies. If the latter is false, ie if they can NOT do it with these XTTs, a lot of them will stick with their old systems (PCs, mainframes, etc). >X-terminals, at this point, mainly buy you one thing: Software (and >other, eg. training) compatability with real workstations so you can >unify your environment while still keeping the cost per seat down. Whcih leads back to the same problem, that a lot of people don'y see that X11 (much less terminals) really buys them anything. For the next coupel of years, and maybe longer, a lot of effort is going to be spent on selling X11, not just the packages a developer has written. I worked for someone wjho had to do the same thing with Unix, and it's a pain. If you can't show the customer a large, tangible benefit, they mostly aren't interested (but then I need a different computer to run Lotus!) >It's a good excuse to not keep people on dumb ascii terminals forever >even tho you can't in your wildest dreams justify going ~$10K for a >workstation for every desk. It's close enough to the price of a dumb >ascii terminal to consider. > >And they do work, maybe not at the outer limits of windowtude, but for >the typical day to day chores of many people (eg. mail, text editing, >the sorts of things business people do with Macs or PCs or Unix.) The >people selling these things aren't as stupid as you seem to believe >(or do you think no one would notice if they don't work?) I don't see that anyone has shown true success yet in selling these things. Where are the megabucks? Where are the huge market numbers? You can always sell a techno-whizzie to the hackers & gadget freaks out there; the real trick is to carve a comfortable cave, not just a tiny crevice to hold on so you don't fall. Only time will tell; empirical evidence suggests that much effort must be expended to redirect an entrenched market. >The same sort of problems (no virtual memory, just brain-death on >running out of memory) exist on PC's and MacIntoshes. Would you argue >that here it is, 1983, and they're doomed to failure? For >straightforward applications with simple goals they're "good enough". > >If there's one thing I've learned in (well) over a decade of this >business it's that "good enough" tends to be very successful, and >"technically superior" but late/unavailable/expensive solutions tend >to lose, despite all the screaming. We have tried 2 of the available terminal types, and have another one on order. Of the types we have tried, one was "acceptable", the other was not. Neither was great. We sell real products, in the real world, to those people who have spent big bux on PC, big DECs, and IBM mainframes and such. It's hard enough getting them to look at something other than DOS or VM (like UNIX), that doesn't say IBM (or compatible) on the front. Our application, which is not really that big yet, will eat up a 1.5 MB or 2 MB X11 terminal pretty quickly, under light-average use. Nevermind heavy usage, or running other stuff as well. Of the announced terminals, something we (and our customers) can trust requires 3-4 MB of memory, just to reliably, competently run our software. And of the two we have tried, neither was really as fast as we expected for the money spent. As an aside, we HAD to get up to speed on how to write clients that were as bulletproof as possible. Our first attempts at our current project ate memory at an incredible rate! We have, on occasion, had 9 - 12 MB core dumps (on a 700K executable), from when the swap space and the memory were all gone on our development systems. ... >Same thing with PC's and a lot of other "obviously inferior" >solutions, they're *good enough* to get the work done for a lot of >folks, aficianados be damned. And again, with an entrenched "good enough" solution, we need to overcome a lot of inertia. The best way to do that quickly is to offer an OBVIOUSLY better solution, not just a "good enough" new couple of minor features (portabiliy? all my DOS stuff is portable now). ... >Yes, people who *needed* workstations (and there are a lot of them) >but decided to buy an X terminal merely because they're cheaper are in >for a shock. People who bought X terminals because the other choice >was dumb ascii terminals will be satisfied and even pleased. And when >they stop feeling pleased there's nothing standing between them and >nirvana but $$. Subjective, at best. ... >The software interface becomes unified and the organization is no >longer required to either buy two software worlds (one windowed, >another aimed at dumb ascii terminals) or, in my experience, to refuse >to invest in window stuff more than the minimum necessary since "most >of the users here have dumb terminals" (not at Encore, tho it's not >that far from the truth when you count the business side, we also have >lots of Suns here.) But for now, X11 is, at best, to most potential customers, just ANOTHER incompatibility to merge into their already tangled computing strategy (and I use that word very loosely). ... >But, only the truth will set us free, not hype. What is truth? What is hype? But I agree. -Miles gatech!stiatl!meo meo@stiatl.gatech.edu
bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein) (03/01/89)
>Regardless of the veracity of the above statement, our fate as >software developers is tied to PERCEIVED value of X11-supporting >hardware. Most of the market is dominated by IBM PCs and derivatives >thereof. Although I realize you deserve a better answer about all I can say is you're talking about the past and present and we're talking about the (near) future. Most of the disagreements in the rest of your note are pretty well summed up by this difference in perspective. The big wins go to those who can read the next move although I'll admit adequate livings can be carved out of focusing on the current and recent past trends. Put more to the point, the folks who founded Microsoft (eg) didn't look at the PC in 1983 and say, gee, who owns these? Everyone's using mainframes and minis, where's the market? The world pays on risk (it also can be pretty rude to those who take the wrong risks.) To try to analyze the X terminal market at this point is ludicrous, the products have been available for *weeks* in most cases and the major vendors are just making the software widely available (remember, most people running X up until recently got it from MIT as an experimental package.) -Barry Shein, ||Encore||
burzio@mmlai.UUCP (Tony Burzio) (03/02/89)
In article <3440@stiatl.UUCP>, meo@stiatl.UUCP (Miles O'Neal) writes: > a pain. If you can't show the customer a large, tangible benefit, > they mostly aren't interested (but then I need a different computer > to run Lotus!) You can run MSDOS in an X window with software from HP. They call it SoftPC and is available on the 9000 series machines. ********************************************************************* Tony Burzio * How long before Casio comes out with Martin Marietta Labs * a watch with X Window support? :-) mmlai!burzio@uunet.uu.net * *********************************************************************