gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (03/04/90)
phil@SCRIPPS.EDU (Phil Cohen) wrote: > . . . it turns out that DEC had decided that > there was no way that they were going to allow SUN to pull off > another "NFS phenomenon" with NeWS. From what my source said, > it seems there were unlimited funds available for shooting down > NeWS. Technically, the development teams on X and NeWS were about equal, I'd guess. Unlimited funds (if true) didn't seem to help there. That is, both worked hard and evolved things as fast as they could. Sun took a year's beating when they decided to integrate X, though, and the X developers had the significant 'free software' advantage: many users were fixing up the code, writing new stuff, and folding most of it back into the release. We *tried* to get Sun to adopt some portability changes and new apps, but it somehow never worked. *Everybody* got their changes back into X, evolving it faster and making everybody feel like part of the team. It didn't take unlimited funds to shoot down NeWS. All it took was a marketing decision: making X11 even more accessible than NeWS. Putting it out for free to the public, and putting the development group at MIT, with wideband wide-open Internet ftp access, was a brilliant stroke. As brilliant as Sun licensing NFS to everybody for cheap. Sun wanted to do the same thing with NeWS, but DEC trumped their offer with a better one -- free. In contrast, Sun made it hard to get NeWS. At every turn there was another bottleneck, for both source and binary customers. Grasshopper regularly had to get 'under the table' copies of things because their release processes took forever and produced poor quality 'generic ports'. Customers had to special-order binaries on a slow death release schedule, and for X/NeWS you had to be somebody special just for them to accept your order. Anyone in their right mind would've just FTP'd X11 from MIT or uunet and cut the crap. *All* the commercial licensees, who had paid $25K or more for NeWS, begged Sun to just put it in the public domain (blowing their $25K investment), more than a year ago. But nothing happened. --- Sun was able to overtake DEC in the computer market in the early '80s because DEC got complacent about their installed base and stopped moving forward and adopting new technology. (All the world's a Vax, we're first in market share, so what if these little companies have faster/cheaper boxes...) I've seen a lot of signs of this in Sun these days. It's an attitude that will make them an also-ran if it continues -- like DEC in workstations. DEC tried to get into workstations late, but after ten years of propaganda, their employees weren't interested in pushing non-Vaxen. Internal to Sun, NeWS competes with SunView -- and loses hands down. You won't find NeWS running on even one out of a hundred workstations there. Why should a sales rep or developer support person recommend something new when they like the good old alternative better? Why should a programmer write NeWS apps when the customers will have to go through significant pain to run the apps, while a SunView app will just tar in and run? Why should any employee run NeWS when many of the tools they need to use produce ugly blotches on the screen and can't be pushed behind their NeWS windows? *BECAUSE IF YOU DON'T STAY FLEXIBLE SOMEONE WILL SNEAK UP ON YOU*, that's why. But the technical team didn't make it easy enough to switch, and the marketing team didn't sell the rest of the company on the need to. Since Sun itself didn't switch to NeWS, its customers didn't either. Since the customers didn't switch, no other manufacturers adopted it. End of story. -- John Gilmore {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com Boycott the census! The government that invaded Central America does not hesitate to break into "their own" census database to violate your privacy. Maximum penalty for refusing to answer: $100, no jail.