3/50 --> 3/60 upgrade versus NeXT purchase

[Mitchell Wyle]

utacfd!utafll!bruce%Central at sun.com (Bruce Samuelson) writes:
>In reference to the recent Sun announcement in 7.123, let's consider the
>hypothetical case of a university department deciding between package 1 (a
>3/50 --> 3/60 8MB upgrade) and package 2 (purchasing an 8MB NeXT and
>keeping the used 4MB 3/50).
[Some clever tables, stats, feature comparisons deleted]

My personal speculation is that Sun and NeXt will be duking it out in the
delivery time arena.  If you order a NeXt now (we can't cuz we're friggin
foreigners), you will wait a long time to see your box.  Sun quotes us 90
- 120 day delivery times, and lives up to their word.  By the time NeXt
ships in quantity, Sun will have lots of h/w and s/w products *SHIPPING*
which will narrow the gap in price / performance which NeXt now
(admittedly) has.  Pay close attention to Bill Joy's talk at the Miami SUG
(Sun Users Group) meeting.  You should have considered DEC's new MIPS box
in your comparison, Bruce.  Good article, though; food for thought.

>Other software bundled with NeXT: NextStep object-oriented development
>environment using Stepstone Objective C, Mathematica, Allegro Common
Lisp, >Sybase SQL database server, Webster's dictionary, Webster's
thesaurus, >email with voice and image support, Jot (personal dbms),
WriteNow (word >processor), Digital Librarian (a text indexing tool), and
miscellaneous >other s/w.

When is Open-Look going to ship?  Which bundled software will come with
it?  Mathematica runs on our suns now.  So does Lisp and Oracle.  We paid
for 'em, though because NeXt is too late again (NeXt month ;-).

>Comments: Sun has a clear advantage over NeXT in the maturity of their OS,
>availability of 3rd party s/w and h/w, and probably in their support of
>standards (NeXT apparently will try to set some new ones).  However, for
>those of you who don't mind rhetorical questions, let me pose one: If you
>were a university customer whose h/w and s/w needs could be met by either
>a NeXT purchase or a Sun upgrade, which package would you choose?

I'd order a couple of NeXts, more suns and see which sales-droid lies
worse about delivery times.  Steve Jobs' last company is raping its
customers for upgrades, compatibility and software support.  If you've
never seen a screen with "Sorry, a system bomb occured," you've never seen
an Apple Macintosh.
Segmentation fault (core dumped).

More ramblings from...
-- 
-Mitchell F. Wyle                         wyle at ethz.uucp
Institut fuer Informationsysteme          wyle at inf.ethz.ch
ETH Zentrum / 8092 Zurich, Switzerland    +41 1 256 5237