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Pretty wild 3 years in to actually selling NeXT Cubes and Mr. Jobs flat out says "We've had historically a very hard time figuring who our customer was". I thi

Pretty wild 3 years in to actually selling NeXT Cubes and Mr. Jobs flat out says "We've had historically a very hard time figuring who our customer was". I think that's a very fair and accurate assessment, but surprising they let it go so far out of control. They really started out going for the academic market for years, but there really wasn't much demand there.

peppertree 2y ago
In the video jobs mentioned he wanted to sell 50,000 units in 1992. The actual numbers were 20,000 units in 1992 and 50,000 in 1993. This just reminded me of Tesla ramp up. Musk was right about volume but too optimistic on timing.
OnlyMortal 2y ago
In our case it was display postscript. We wrote a WYSIWYG editor for Yellow Pages (Gouden Gids in NL). It was also used for the Golden Pages in Ireland, the Puerto Rico YP, the YP for Norway, the YP in SA and the NTT one in Japan. Understandably for the time, people were blown away by it.
mattl 2y ago
They were aimed initially at students and higher education but too expensive for many.
pipeline_peak 2y ago
> They really started out going for the academic market for years, but there really wasn't much demand there. Well they were already buying Sun and Sgi boxes. I don’t know the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those Unix machines were far better priced. NeXT suffered the same commercial challenges Apple faced. You have to develop things in THEIR world, albeit a more polished, user friendly one.