I always assumed they were mostly sold to academics and R&D departments. Super-expensive workstations were a thing back then, so NeXT were competing with other super-expensive desktops from SGI, Sun, etc - not with the Mac/Windows consumer market.
NeXT boxes could not compete in the visualization space against SGI and they lagged behind Sun, Digital and HP in price/performance, even after ditching the MO disk for conventional ones. It also didn't help much they had a weird Unix OS that didn't have X.
They were well rounded machines and their development tools were excellent, but that's it. As much as I would have loved to have one, I could never justify the tradeoffs between it and, say, a Sun pizza box.
Exactly. So they had orders of magnitude fewer customers with orders of magnitude higher prices than Apple today. But by the time WebObjects became a thing NeXT was out of the workstation business so the price was purely for the software.
The good news is that in the talk, Steve mentioned that the Enterprise WebObjects (probably the one you needed: EOF was for WebObjects what Cocoa was for OS X) license was $25k so it had started to drop. Even back then free was tough to compete with...
> Even back then free was tough to compete with...
At the time, even though it was easy to see that free software would eventually reach a critical mass and overtake all the system software space, the market was not nearly there.
While I used a lot of Perl (which was free) to write dynamic pages, all my software was running on Solaris and IRIX on very expensive hardware. HTTP was served mostly by Netscape's proprietary server with some traffic on NCSA HTTPd. Linux, IIRC, had terrible SMP support back then and Windows was a joke.
Why didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit.
Put differently, any platform needs a critical mass to survive, and if they price it so high, it won't have that critical mass, causing it to die, in which case the development cost would be wasted.
Surely people in the 80s weren't so dumb as to not understand network effects, so what am I missing?
NeXT workstations and OS were not successful, and at this point had largely been shelved. WebObjects was the only thing which they had which was profitable. Most customers were developing/deploying on NT, which (I assume) is why Jobs is at the Microsoft conference.
Ya, but the snark at the time was that Jobs was such a great salesman he sold a dead OS to those dumb suckers at Apple for $400M. (Of course they were really buying Jobs & team.) Still took about 6-8 years for that OS to get good.
Apple failed spectacularly, multiple times, to develop a successor to MacOS classic. Time was running out and they needed something that worked. They could have picked either Be and BeOS, shaped MkLinux into something presentable, or NeXT and they chose to bring Jobs back in. It didn't hurt bringing him back in reignited faith in the company.
NeXTSTEP was only dead to the market - it was still a pretty good OS, specially when compared to MacOS 9 and Windows. NeXT failed against Sun and SGI, not against the PC market. They never even tried that.
> Why didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit.
That's 2019 thinking. In 1990s almost no one would think that, especially in the world of commercial software.
