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.
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.
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.
The video is also a great example of Steve Jobs opinion on traditional UNIX systems, and why although the compatibility was relevant for NeXTSTEP and OS X, that was never the main development story.
This was very much spot on. As a middle level manager I tried to bring these in our Healthcare business, but got very little traction. The senior executives could not or would not appreciate the benefits. A portion of the development team were more interested in skills for their next job. I cannot understate the amount of time, money and people we burned through by taking another path.
I am glad this technology survived in MacOS and its hardware.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 60.3 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
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.
I am glad this technology survived in MacOS and its hardware.
Not to mention the outrageous rates even for local telephone calls.