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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Sunday, August 28, 2005A revisionist history of NeXT Braeburn provides a horribly inaccurate overview of the history of NeXT, the company Steve Jobs founded, ran into the ground, and then inprobably rescued when he snatched Apple Computer out from under the nose of Gil Amelio in 1997.Much of the information in this history is obvious only in retrospect ("the most important aspect of NeXTStep was not its architecture or feature set, but its programming environment"), but that's not the big problem with this article. I think it's important to keep the "success" of NeXT in perspective, since this is a company that bled billions of dollars over a decade, had no sales to speak of, and failed in every single market it entered. But you'd never know that reading this "history." Instead of sticking to the facts, Braeburn barely mentions NeXT's many failures and even, bizarelly suggests that the company had some success, which it did not. (The quotes "NeXT sold all of the Cubes it had on hand and started taking backorders" and "The NeXTStation sold incredibly well for NeXT," in particular, are both incredible bits of history rewriting.) Fox News-like reporting notwithstanding, NeXT's technology was excellent--we can credit Avie Tevanian for that--and the fruits of that work continue today in the New Apple, which is really NeXT 2.0: NeXT Done Right. That's the real history of NeXT: A hugely unsuccessful business that made incredibly great technology which lives today in Apple. [ Posted at 11:05 AM | Permalink ]
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