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There was a lot of awesome things about NeXT machines and NeXTStep but there were also crappy things. The endless list of nested menus for example was nice in t
by ebbv 14y ago
There was a lot of awesome things about NeXT machines and NeXTStep but there were also crappy things. The endless list of nested menus for example was nice in that it was standard and you knew what to expect in every application, but also could be less than ideal in some applications.
Nostalgia favors remembering the good things and forgets the frustrations of daily usage.
In the end NeXT failed not because the machines were too expensive (it was competing against Sun, DEC and SGI workstations which were also very expensive, so the price was not really out of line in that context -- only if you compare it to PCs, which you shouldn't.) It lost for a variety of other reasons, and I'm sure if you talk to 20 different people who placed the PO's for workstations in the early 90's you'd get 20 different reasons.
A lot of the times it just came down to "Our guys are used to SunOS/Irix/etc. and don't want to adjust." Or "Our software works best on X." or only works on X. etc.
- jjtheblunt 14y agoOr, in the end, NeXT succeeded in being bought by Apple, morphing into XNU, Darwin, and thus OSX and iOS, and doing quite well?
- ebbv 14y agoWell, NeXT got bailed out by being bought by Apple. I don't think you can really call it success. I mean you can call it that but it's not by any yardstick I'd use. It's like you're in last place in the race and your Mom hands you a trophy.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cstross 14y agoSubsequent disclosures suggest that Apple had screwed the pooch over Taligent/Pink, and was desperately shopping for a next-generation OS. The contest was down to NeXTStep, with Steve Jobs, or BeOS, with Jean-Louis Gassee. As I understand it, the BeOS folks held out for too much money (Apple was much closer to broke than they realized) while Jobs settled for power. All else is history. If Apple's successive post-Jobs CEOs (Sculley and Amelio) hadn't maneuvered the behemoth into a blind alley, NeXT would indeed have faded eventually. But with full access to Apple's resources, the NeXT team were able to turn things around. Sitting on the top shelf in my office, gathering dust (I turn it on every couple of years) there's a cube. A nice shiny silver cube that runs something that looks eerily like NeXTStep, if you squint at it, with a classic MacOS emulation bag on the side. If that's not a statement by Steve Jobs (and a trophy of success, to have the elbow-room to make such a statement) I don't know what is!
- signalsignal 14y agoActually it was the Newton that made Apple loose so much money. It was never profitable with an average annual loss of 1 billion USD. But if it wasn't for that loss, Steve Jobs would never have been requested to be a consultant at Apple and turn himself into the CEO later.
- ghshephard 14y ago"average annual loss of 1 billion USD." Citation? This is an interesting factoid, so I googled for about 10 minutes, and couldn't find any numbers on how many total newtons were sold, and how much apple lost on them. Really interested in any supporting data you might have.
- signalsignal 14y agoSo you voted down my comment because you couldn't find a citation on Google? First link :-> http://www.edengene.co.uk/article/how-the-world-learnt-from-apples-failure/ http://www.edengene.co.uk/article/how-the-world-learnt-from-... using https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=newton+apple+loss&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#...
- jsnell 14y agoThat link suggests a total loss of about 750 million over 11 years from start of development to discontinuation. That's an order of magnitude less than the 1 billion annual loss you originally claimed.
- ghshephard 14y agoWasn't me - I actually was really interested in your comment (as I indicated). The link you provided, btw, states, "Although the exact scale of the Newton losses remains unconfirmed, some sources say that the company sunk a billion dollars into the Newton and recouped only about one quarter of that amount in sales." "Some Sources" might have merit if that was the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times (though, in both cases, those "sources" might have ulterior motives") - but they aren't useful in this context. Also, as a later poster indicated, losing $750mm over the lifetime of a multi-year project, is a lot (lot) different than losing $1B/year. I'm still intrigued, and would love if (anyone) could track down some data on the Newton, and it's losses. Or even how many units it actually sold.
- mikeash 14y agoNeXT basically took over Apple from within. Their technology ended up in basically every Apple product, nearly completely displacing what was there before. Their top people became Apple's top people. Their CEO became Apple's CEO. Apple watchers from the time often joked that NeXT bought Apple for negative $400 million. Buying NeXT is what turned Apple from a perpetually "beleaguered" niche computer company (remember that word?) to one of the most valuable companies on the planet. The modern Apple, Inc. is much more NeXT Inc. than it is Apple Computer, Inc.
- jimbokun 14y agoNeXT got a second chance handed to it, and then took advantage of it to build the world's most valuable company. It's similar to the break Microsoft got when IBM inadvertently handed it the PC OS business. It was a great opportunity, but not every company would have leveraged that opportunity to dominate computing for two decades. If Jean Louis Gassee got the same opportunity for BeOS that Jobs got for NeXT, do you think he would have gone on to create the world's most valuable corporation?
- pjmlp 14y agoI doubt that, as I mention in another comment. When I was at CERN Apple was giving sessions selling UNIX heart of Mac OS X as a way to attract UNIX fans to the platform, which many enjoyed given the OS's pedigree. Not sure if the same would have worked wit BeOS as base, although I really enjoyed it as OS and follow Haiku's development.
- nsns 14y ago...à la dinosaurs as birds?
- erikj 14y agoOS X and iOS are much closer to NeXTSTEP than birds to dinosaurs are close to each other.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jfb 14y agoISTR Next ads in Byte, and it being targeted at the high-end of the PC market. I had one at Chicago and loved it, but only because I didn't have to try to live with the WORM as my only storage. Great computer, great, great OS.
- altcognito 14y ago> (it was competing against Sun, DEC and SGI workstations which were also very expensive, so the price was not really out of line in that context -- only if you compare it to PCs, which you shouldn't.) Except that it is the only comparison that ended up mattering. PC obliterated the workstation market.
- erikj 14y agoAnd killed a lot of really good things along the way, like Lisp machines and their unique operating systems.
- pjmlp 14y agoQuite true. For one, it would show all young developers that there was a time where OS were implemented in languages other than C. And also that Live Editing so trendy nowadays, was already available in the early 80's in the form of Lisp Machines and Smalltalk.
- ebbv 14y agoEventually. But NeXT had failed way before that happened. NeXT got bought out by Apple about the same time that the workstation market collapsed.
- rbanffy 14y agoTo be fair, the NeXT machines were not as fast as competing RISC boxes from Sun, HP, IBM and DEC, and were equally costly. Also, as you pointed out, it was not Unix-ish enough. It was the most Mac-like Unix machine at a time being Mac-like was not an advantage in the high-end computing market.
- reeses 14y agoMy two favorite days with my 030 cube were similar to those with my boat. The day I bought it and the day I traded it for a 3/80. The cube, that is. I traded the boat for cash. :-)