Vickin Kane
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 7 months, 2021–2026
18:48 · 59K views · Nov 22, 2013
An internal 1991 NeXT video in which Steve Jobs explains the company's product and marketing strategy. It shows NeXT aiming at the Unix workstation market.
HN cites it as primary-source evidence that NeXT adopted Unix as a means to reach the workstation market rather than out of ideology.
7 comments from Hacker News
Back in those days conferences weren't filmed. [LINK] Here are some references, Chris MacAskill did a full overview of what he had to do to convince Job, it was even commented here, [LINK] Now gone from the Internet, [LINK] However it is saved on the Wayback machine, [LINK] => "They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them." There is also the interview with UNIX Today! [LINK] => "You know, take SGI's new machines-they have 8-bit color frame buffers in them, you can't even put up a bunch of beautiful color photographs without having one of them look good. The rest of them look blah because you can't do it in 8 bits. You know what I'm talking about. So most computers haven't even gotten past the stage where you could put up a bunch of color photographs, much less other types of media, or moving, dynamic media. And I think that that's an advantage that we'll continue to keep. " => "We're bringing Unix to the commercial market where what they care about is designing, creating and deploying mission-critical custom apps alongside those in a multitasking environment. They want to be able to use a suite of productivity apps that are compatible in the data formats with all the ones they use in the PCs. And that's where we have an
Here's another instance, refining the delivery of "a bicycle for the human mind": [LINK] . It is a "performance art", like a stand-up comic, an actor, a politician, a presentation, or a congressional hearing. Some people do not want to rehearse as they feel it "empties them". He was known to meticulously practice the delivery of keynotes so he could hit things on time, as if it were a play, if I recall correctly. You can see that there's a good part of storytelling. If you watch Elon Musk videos, there often is repetition on the three things he focused on in college: the internet, multi-planetary life, and sustainable energy. In more recent videos, the narrative has shifted to five things he focused on during college, and an addition of genetics and artificial intelligence made it to the list. This is a bit different, like a git history change, which goes unnoticed by most interviewers. However, people think about a lot of things and nobody would be able to list all their ideas or thoughts, let alone someone like him. One of the best interviewers in the space is Sarah Lacy, in my opinion. She has enough raport with her guests in Pando Monthly videos (there are bout fifty of them, and I invite everyone to watch them), but she doesn't hesitate to invite her guests to better recall the events, timeline, or context... "Yes, but X had invested before and you had replaced so and so on the board at that time, so that must have been before Z". Way better interviews because she has th
If you want to piss off even more, those that buy Apple only because they want a shinny UNIX, but don't buy into Apple's culture since Mac OS Classic days, you only need to remind them that Steve Jobs was hardly a UNIX fanboy. Just like with Microsoft strategies, for NeXT, having NeXTSTEP being based on UNIX was more to check boxes against Sun, and bring software into the platform, not to make it easy to go out, hence the whole userspace stack, even drivers, are based on Objective-C frameworks. "Why We Have to Make UNIX Invisible." [LINK] > They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them. [LINK] "NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)" this video
Indeed, however many people are too young to remember that he looked down into UNIX, as a bunch of greybeards without taste. "Why We Have to Make UNIX Invisible." [LINK] "That time I had Steve Jobs keynote at Unix Expo" > They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them. From [LINK] The value proposition NeXT found on UNIX, was the same as Microsoft (after they let go of Xenix, thanks to MS-DOS golden goose deal with IBM), a means to an end, the market of companies and universities that wanted something with UNIX in the box. "NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)" this video Note that he wasn't at Apple when A/UX and MkLinux efforts took place.
It is definitly an accident caused by NeXT acquisition, neither BeOS nor Copland had great plans regarding UNIX like support. And even in NeXTSTEP's case, that was a side effect of Steve Jobs wanting to go after the UNIX workstation market, the idea was to make it easier to sell NeXTSTEP into those clients, there is very little UNIX in Objective-C, or the related XXXXXXXKits. "NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)" this video Surviving NeXTSTEP documentation, [LINK]