4 ms·
I find this an interesting debate. I think both are true: NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for ever
by xp84 3y ago
I find this an interesting debate. I think both are true:
NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by itself, IPO’d or whatever.
NeXT was a huge success: because tech developed there was hugely influential to future technology used even decades later.
- kragen 3y agoit was successful at delivering apple back into the control of steve jobs; it wasn't successful for investors along the way who bought stock at a higher price than the 427 million dollars apple eventually paid, but we weren't talking about whether steve jobs's investors were successful, but about whether steve jobs was successful. investors like canon were his cannon fodder. even a good slice of the investors ended up getting rich, tho it's hard to imagine what would have counted as a bigger success for steve jobs rod canion redefined the entire computer business once: he made open platforms dominant for personal computers. steve jobs did it four times: in 01977 by converting personal computers from hobbyist machines to home appliances; in 01984 by making the wimp gui the dominant interaction paradigm; in 01998 by redefining personal computers from home appliances to fashion accessories; and in 02007 by replacing the open-platform wimp gui with non-end-user-programmable sealed prisons with multitouch and always-on mobile internet access obviously none of these involved him inventing anything, and most of them are at best morally ambiguous, but certainly he set out to do each of those things and then successfully did them