Item    5388207                 93/04/21        11:01 
From:  CONRAD_GEIGER@NEXT.COM@INET#    Internet Gateway 
Subject: NeXT Press article: "NeXT Tries A Different Slice of the Market"

For your information - a recent article about NeXT in the Corporate Computing
magazine: May, 1993 issue.

Conrad Geiger International NeXT User Group Program Manager


_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 
NeXT Tries A Different Slice of the Market
from Corporate Computing May 1993

As if the corporate desktop operating-system wars weren't bloody enough, Steve
Jobs and NeXT are about to join the fray.

On May 25, NeXT Computer plans to release its NEXTSTEP for Intel operating
system.  Formerly a workstation manufacturer, Steve Jobs' computer company has
backed away from a fight with Sun Microsystems, but now plans to take on
Microsoft, an even bigger competitor.

If you yawned at the news that NeXT was exiting the hardware business, it's
time for a wake-up call.  Anyone looking to boost the productivity of
client/server application development (and who isn't) should give NEXTSTEP for
Intel some time in the evaluation lab.

The development advantages of the NeXT black box are well documented. A 1992
Booz, Allen & Hamilton survey of more than 100 in-house software developers
found that the average NeXT workstation application could be finished in half
the time it took to develop a similar one on a PC, Sun workstation, or Apple
Macintosh.  NeXT devotees also praise its well-integrated user interface.  But
will those advantages survive the move to Intel?

Mike Adelson, A NEXTSTEP for Intel beta user, says yes.  Adelson, who is a
project manager at Chrysler Financial in Southfield, Mich., plans to install
NEXTSTEP on 2,500 Intel 486-based PC's in more than 100 branch offices across
the country.  "It's an excellent operating environment for us," Adelson says. 
"Our internal applications, word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, fax---all
will interoperate with a common interface.  we can grab information off one
application and cut-and-paste on another, even formatted text or graphics. 
It's a lot more integrated than Windows."

NEXTSTEP brings developers an object-oriented environment with a ready-made
library of programming objects.  Its Database Kit saves many lines of code in
connecting to SQL servers:  Programmers simply drag objects from an on-screen
palette to connect to Oracle, Sybase, and other databases.  There's even an
evolving practice of swapping software objects among developers at different
companies.

Performing well on the Intel platform is only one piece of successfully
developing clientserver applications in a large enterprise, however.  "It's
easy to prototype with 10 to 20 people," says analyst Judith Hurwitz,
president of the Hurwitz Consulting Group in Newton, Mass., "but if you want
500 people to use as application, you add complexity to both client and
server.  NeXT will discover the issues of (software engineering) management as
they scale from sites of 1,000 users to 10,000 users."

NEXTSTEP runs best on 486SX or faster PCs with localbus video and 16MB of RAM.
"It's the same thing you'll need for any other new operating system that's
coming out," says Adelson.  NeXT is negotiating to bundle NEXTSTEP for Intel
with PCs from Compaq, Dell, Epson, Gateway, and NEC, but no deals have yet
been announced.

--Daniel Miles Kehoe


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