melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger) (04/14/91)
In article <14470@darkstar.ucsc.edu> isbell@ucscf.UCSC.EDU (Art Isbell) writes:
Until the word about NeXT gets out to a more general audience, sales will
continue to be below where they should be, but then until NeXT can deliver new
systems in reasonable amount of time, maybe it's just as well. Unfortunately,
the big boys (IBM, DEC, HP, Apple, etc.) know about NeXT and have the personnel
to catch up in the categories where NeXT excels, so NeXT may lose its window of
opportunity before the buying public finds out about our "secret". Very
frustrating....
NeXT(IMHO) has a couple of more years to get things going. Apple has
an OS written in 68000 assember, with, I imagine, more than a few apps
written in assembler, and/or making use of low-memory addresses. I
still think that there are many Mac apps that still aren't 32 bit
clean. HP has an awesome line of $12,000-$40,000 machines with the
Snake series, but they're in a different market. IBM is the biggest
problem, or is that Microsoft/Compaq/MIPS? 386 machines are going to
get really cheap since AMD cloned it, and I don't think Intel wants to
share profits. Expect the 486SX media blitz real soon now.
NeXT's single biggest problem is the dearth of software for the NeXT.
Still no accounting or CAD packages. I called Quark last week and
they said that they were reevaluating their NeXT port, but they are
definitely doing a port for Windows 3.0.
Cheaper machines couldn't hurt NeXT either. $4995 is might be a good
business price, but $3300 is a little much for educational machine. I
think a $2500 NeXT would sell at an incredible pace. However, if NeXT
only makes one change to their machines this year, I hope it is to
ship all machines with 16MB of memory with no price increase.
-Mike