> $400 million for part-time help.
>
> I am just repeating what some analysts have pointed out.
> You shell out this kind of money for part-time help and
> consultation? That is not a wise investment decision. If
> I was going to spend this kind of money, I want somebody
> in there doing the OS development full time not just a
> consultation effort.
I think you misunderstood what took place. Apple paid $400M for NeXT the company, including all of its assets, employees, technology, know-how, knowledge, marketing, consulting services, cash flow, alliances, reputation, etc. It isn't as if Apple put $400M in Steve Jobs' pocket so that he can work for them part time. Another way to think of it is that Apple bought NeXT, so Jobs has to be involved somehow, and he has other interests (i.e. Pixar) so he will be employed only part time.
> Other analysts have pointed out that developers have
> found using NEXT OS not very friendly (UNIX remnants here
> I think). Also developing apps is not as easy in NEXT OS
> and porting could create problems.
I've been a NeXT developer for 6 years. I've used a lot of other environments -- XWindows, Motif, SunViews, MS Windows, MacOS, Xbase, etc. I think that the NeXT environment is far and above the best development environment to work on. That is why I've stuck with it all this time even though a lot of other environments have much more market presence. I totally disagree with all of your statements about the development environment.
There is very little exposure to Unix if you don't want to be involved in it and the tools are pretty good (not always great but pretty good) and some are very innovative and there is still nothing like them even 8 years later. But the toolkits are extremely robust and it's possible to crank out sophisticated applications in a matter of weeks or months rather than the usual years. I wrote a database application to keep track of our company's training efforts including reports and accounting in about 2 days.
If I had any gripes about the environment it would be that there is a fairly significant learning curve to become fully familiar with all the tools and toolkits -- about 3 months for the average developer, less if you are experienced in other object oriented or windowing environments. I'm past this learning curve and thus am very productive but a newbie might be turned off by it at first. But I would say that 95% or more of the hundreds of NeXT developers that I've dealt with absolutely love the environment and often become very vocal NeXT zealots after only a few weeks of fiddling around. The NeXT environment was truly written by developers for developers.
> Apple did have a choice; they should have partnered with
> BeOS or better yet create a compettition as to which
> company can come out wiith the next pre-emptive
> multitasking MAC OS first.
I see your point, but NeXT has a *truly* pre-emptive multi-tasking and windowing environment with 7 years of (albeit limited) industry experience. This is a pretty compelling piece of technology.
Randy |
