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Red Hat Diaries/006d

Business As Usual

The honeymoon is over.

Syd and I bought our Apple laptops within two weeks of each other a year ago. It's been a long honeymoon. Syd used hers incessantly; I used mine when I had the time and felt the inclination. I started taking it seriously at the end of the summer. I invested in hundreds of dollars of books and stuff.

I got Jaguar for free because I won a raffle at the distributor's the night it was released. I never win anything else otherwise. Syd has not upgraded to Jaguar because she doesn't want to. I have three Pogue books at home, and one is supposed to be hers, but she won't upgrade. So be it.

Syd saw NextStep when she was a kid. Her father took her to an expo where they had it. 'Daddy daddy, we want one of those!' she blurted out when she'd seen the fabulous icons and stuff. I was wooed by the local NextStep reps in Stockholm who wanted me to help promote their product way back in the beginning of the 1990's. We'd each seen it, we'd each been blown away, but neither of us had had any opportunity to get closer to it. Until Apple bought it and released it as OS X Aqua that is.

The new home for NextStep is a fact. It's not necessarily good, not necessarily bad. It's just a fact. Now you have menu bars at the top of your screen. Anytime you click an icon in the dock, you not only switch to a new application, you get a new 'Untitled' document on your desktop, whether you want one or not - and most often you don't want one.

Apple's operating systems were a complete mess. It's hard to believe they used to make rude remarks about Windows all these years, considering the Dark Ages they lived in. They had no set binary interface. They had hundreds of so-called kernel extensions which were infamous for conflicting with one another and causing frequent system crashes. Users had to manually configure how much memory each application was allowed to use. Microsoft Windows was never that bad.

NextStep on Apple is an improvement, but it's still a kiddie toy. There are a number of impressive graphical applications which make you take a step back and take a deep breath both. But Apple has never had, and I fear never will have, any consistent record in the corporate world. They have never had a real robust industrial strength application base for corporate needs, and now I think I know why.

It's their application layer - that same layer that impressed so much with its fabulous icons. All that layer can do is make good icons. It can't handle data - not on any large scale. Perhaps well enough to manage a list of songs in iTunes, but what about customer databases? What about directory listings? In the face of real world assignments such as these, the dazzling NextStep technology breaks.

Programmers are most often a congenial breed. They develop a unique sense of humour, engendered by the paradoxical realities of their everyday life, the Dilbert-like contradictions which other people notice, but which they have to deal with tenfold over. It's a black humour, and it's very contagious.

I've been dealing with programmers, and have myself been a professional programmer, for around twenty years now. I've enjoyed it. Almost to the last one, I've had only good things to say about my colleagues. I have never run into any 'assh0les' such as I so quickly uncovered in the Apple development community.

You hear stories about this all the time. Microsoft's people are rarely like this; Apple's are notorious for it. Yet when you are the proud owner of a new sexy TiBook, you tend to put things like that out of your mind, and when you are new to a terrain, you tend to prefer to 'see for yourself'. And so it was for me. I deferred opinion until I had seen myself, and generally put all negative nuances neatly out of mind.

I shouldn't have. I realize that today.

There are a few people on the Apple Cocoa Development list that want me to stick it out. They think I could make a contribution, and they'd hate to see me go.

What they don't understand, poor peons that they've been taught to be, is that it is they who are the contribution. They're the ones buying the books and keeping the ego-trippers in the pink. They're the ones bowing their heads and lowering their eyes when the meanies come in the room. They're the only reason the wobbly bandwagon keeps on running.

NextStep is not a mature technology. It is weighed down by a dogmatic approach to object orientation, and an unhealthy focus on the world of graphics, to the detriment of support for the world of business. More than anything else, it is hurt by the very unpleasant people who crowd around hoping to make a fortune, now that David Pogue and the Wall Street Journal and recently Business Week have proclaimed their computer the born-again darling of the industry.

But it's a toy and no more. You get great graphics and great multimedia but there is nothing beyond the eye and ear candy for the home user. I myself found it impossible to do work on the machine - you simply do not have the tools to get the job done. There is so much more than the mere lack of industrial support for business database-like applications.

A few companies have managed to survive since the early 1990's with NextStep technology. They've had a number of customers they've been able to count on. Their number has not grown. They've been considerably less than 1% of the market up to now. Thanks to Apple, they might be as much as 5% in a couple of years. For now, most Apple users are not using their technology.

They'll never make it. No matter that certain banks and financial corporations use NextStep tools today, the basic framework will not hold. Application programmers coming in from around the world to start developing high-grade software for typical clients will run into a brick wall. It can't be done, not as things stand, and with the general attitude in this psycho-nightmare community, it's doubtful any changes will ever be made.

People will abandon NextStep because the powers that be are assh0les, and the assh0les will go on, they will persevere, in a market that gradually no longer exists, because they are convinced that they are right and the whole world is wrong.

It's business as usual.

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