smithw@mathnx.byu.edu (William V. Smith) (06/29/90)
I noticed the following in the June 26 MacWEEK: (quoted without permission) "NeXT has been hit by a wave of defections lately. At least five key employees have left the cubist fold. . . .sources say Steve Jobs' management style has taken its toll on some of the toilers, and the burnout factor is reaching a peak. Sales are flat, and looks like the much ballyhooed color board for the cube may not be introduced this fall. "Instead, NeXT will focus attention on its new machine, code-named Warp 9. . . .sources now speculate that the new NeXT machine will be pizza-box shaped, like Sun's SPARCstation, and will be powered by a 50-MHz 68040. The 256-Mbyte magneto-optical disc will be dropped in favor of a 2.8 Mbyte floppy disk from Sony, and it will ship with a 200-Mbyte hard disk and 8 Mbytes of RAM." Now what do you think of that one?!
agm@cs.brown.edu (Axel Merk) (06/29/90)
Just a quick opinion about management styles: Jack Tramiel, former president of Commodore (yes, the company that opened the computer market to the general public) was fired from his own company in 1984 because he changed the head management too frequently. The company had just grown grown to a billion-dollar company and they decided to kick out the heart of the company (ok, Jack is no perfectionist as Steve Jobs is, but that's not the point I'm trying to make). Jack Tramiel left, the stock price of cbm plunged from 42 to about 10 within a year, and the company had to go on a severe "diet" in order to avoid running chapter 11. Nowadays, he is running Atari (with his son) and won't let anyone kick him out again.... If Steve Jobs fired a couple of important people (or they just left), there might be a good reason for it. I believe, however, that NeXT wouldn't be NeXT without Steve Jobs. If he does not get along with some people -- it's up to him to replace them; I wouldn't be surprised if these ones were in favor of the pizza-box like monster you scare us with. Axel ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Axel Merk "One needs a certain amount of blindness -- -- agm@cs.brown.edu to see perfection" - Christopher Nuzum -- -- (401) 272 2262 -- Brown University -- Box 53 -- Providence -- RI 02912 --
gft_robert@gsbacd.uchicago.edu (06/29/90)
-------- In article <44175@brunix.UUCP>, agm@cs.brown.edu (Axel Merk) writes... [...] > If Steve Jobs fired a couple of important people (or they just >left), there might be a good reason for it. I believe, however, that >NeXT wouldn't be NeXT without Steve Jobs. If he does not get along >with some people -- it's up to him to replace them; I wouldn't be >surprised if these ones were in favor of the pizza-box like monster >you scare us with. > Can you say "cult of personality" ? Robert ============================================================================ = gft_robert@gsbacd.uchicago.edu * generic disclaimer: * "It's more fun to = = * all my opinions are * compute" = = * mine * -Kraftwerk = ============================================================================
manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) (07/01/90)
In article <SMITHW.90Jun28123728@mathnx.mathnx.byu.edu> smithw@mathnx.byu.edu (William V. Smith) writes: > The 256-Mbyte >magneto-optical disc will be dropped in favor of a 2.8 Mbyte >floppy disk from Sony, and it will ship with a 200-Mbyte >hard disk and 8 Mbytes of RAM." > >Now what do you think of that one?! If it's true, then NeXT's product development management is ready for giggle camp. How exactly one will install 200MB of software on a 200MB hard disk, leaving space for paging and user files is beyond me (perhaps there's a clever compression scheme involving the DSP). More to the point, the number of people would care to load a system from 75 floppies is probably limited. Then there's the peculiarity of using a non-existent version of the '040 with not enough memory. As for the pizza box, will it have a Sun logo on the front? (Why would NeXT suddenly use somebody else's design?) And who exactly would the market be? This box would certainly be no cheaper than the current one. It's not exactly a credible rumour. -- \ Vincent Manis <manis@cs.ubc.ca> "There is no law that vulgarity and \ Department of Computer Science literary excellence cannot coexist." /\ University of British Columbia -- A. Trevor Hodge / \ Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1W5 (604) 228-2394