All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).
Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)
eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.
I can believe that, but I recall some tradepress article about more than 100 companies selling non-java 'web middleware' who got bowled over by J2EE, and otherwise Next would have just been another one of those. That was Sun's strategy, not Next's.
WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.
Hey PJ, I like your posts because you have the historical background on a lot of this stuff that industry has mostly forgotten.
But... Since you mentioned it, I actually have read J2EE and WebObjects documentation. And I conclude that WebObjects was shit. It drew the 'Web MVC' line at the completely wrong place. Nobody ever cared about about DOEs or whatever, they just wanted a database driver. You look at this huge pile of industry crap and its no wonder why Rails was successful.
Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)
eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.