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Exactly. The important thing about this video in retrospect is that NeXT had completely misidentified a viable market (workstation hardware for customer service
by trimbo 10y ago
Exactly. The important thing about this video in retrospect is that NeXT had completely misidentified a viable market (workstation hardware for customer service representatives) and the competition within that market (Sun).
Meanwhile, in another universe from this video, 1991 was the same year that Visual Basic was released. The rest is history there.
Ultimately, the plan of having NeXT's tools on dedicated hardware paid off.. but it took another 20 years for it to happen, and the target hardware was consumer hardware costing 1/50th of what's shown here.
- pjmlp 10y agoI wonder where there is the VB version for web applications.
- cuckcuckspruce 10y agoIsn't that ASP.net?
- pjmlp 10y agoKind of, but not really in regards to UI design versus the CSS/HTML/JavaScript mess.
- pcwalton 10y agoDoes Visual Basic pre-.NET/WinForms even support layout at all? Edit: Doesn't look like it. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/182070 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/182070
- pjmlp 10y agoGUI RAD tooling is much more than just layout, and at least it can center text and quite a few other things that require CSS tricks. Yeah HTML does layout, what about everything else? Where are the promised components, without frameworks faking them on top of a HTML, CSS, JavaScript? Apparently each browser still implements just part of it. Or a designer tooling to make use of such components in RAD way like VB.
- smacktoward 10y agohttp://php.net/ http://php.net/ :-D
- snaky 10y agoOracle Application Express
- wtallis 10y agoYou can't ignore how NeXT was somewhat constrained by not being able to compete head-on with Apple without incurring serious legal expenses. They got sued once right out of the gate and would certainly have been sued more if they started to cause real trouble.
- setpatchaddress 10y agoSure you can. Sun and SGI were viable for a while.
- wtallis 10y agoSun and SGI had a significant head start over NeXT. By the time NeXT shipped hardware, they were moving off 68k onto SPARC and MIPS respectively, building on successful and established product lines with the kind of hardware differentiation that NeXT didn't have the capital for. That's why NeXT had to change direction and make software such a major part of their strategy; they couldn't just re-play the same strategies that Sun and SGI got off the ground with, because those niches were now pretty well occupied.