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Re: Computers

Actually it's the 'Be' OS that they bought and have been toying with
adopting.

Haven't we all learned that the MARKET is everything--technical superiority
matters not if the product is not marketed properly. Betamax, the Amiga,
the NeXT, OS2, etc. are all examples. People also opt for price over
quality--look at the sales figures for Packard Bell computers vesus
somebody like HP. Packard Bell produces crap, but its cheap crap and
marketed heavily through national retailers--so its a big seller.

The REALLY big winners are those who can market a superior product for a
reasonable price-- Honda, Toyota, and Nissan through the 1980s come to
mind. In the computer world, Apple overpriced their (at one time) superior
product, Commodore failed miserably to market their products properly
despite good cost/performance ratios, and now Micro$oft is taking over the
world by offering a good (but not spectacular) set of products at very good
prices and through intense marketing. (It also doesn't hurt that they have
an entire (free) newservice with hundreds of newsgroups covering all
aspects of all their products, maintain very extensive web sites, offer
instant upgrades for most products over the net [until the next major
release], and offer a state of the art web browser FREE to all--not just
academics.)

Apple marketed academia very smartly early on while IBM did not. As we see
in this discussion, much of the loyalty to one product or the other comes
from to which machine one first became accustomed. Those of us who have
lots of exposure to both tend to split down the middle which suggests (as
many others have said) that there is no one 'best' system. I just hope all
the Mac fans don't end up with drawers full of useless 'Amiga (aka Mac)'
software like I did.

Rick
----------
From: Larry Smith <Larry.Smith@SNOW.EDU>

.. They spent four years working
From Paul Camp
on the next generation operating system only to fail and hastily
purchase another failed OS as a replacement.

In what way was NeXT a failure? In the market, maybe; technically,
absolutely not.