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Comment by kartickv | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit.

Put differently, any platform needs a critical mass to survive, and if they price it so high, it won't have that critical mass, causing it to die, in which case the development cost would be wasted.

Surely people in the 80s weren't so dumb as to not understand network effects, so what am I missing?

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NeXT workstations and OS were not successful, and at this point had largely been shelved. WebObjects was the only thing which they had which was profitable. Most customers were developing/deploying on NT, which (I assume) is why Jobs is at the Microsoft conference.

> NeXT workstations and OS were not successful

My MacBook would like to have a word with you. ;-)

Ya, but the snark at the time was that Jobs was such a great salesman he sold a dead OS to those dumb suckers at Apple for $400M. (Of course they were really buying Jobs & team.) Still took about 6-8 years for that OS to get good.

Apple failed spectacularly, multiple times, to develop a successor to MacOS classic. Time was running out and they needed something that worked. They could have picked either Be and BeOS, shaped MkLinux into something presentable, or NeXT and they chose to bring Jobs back in. It didn't hurt bringing him back in reignited faith in the company.

NeXTSTEP was only dead to the market - it was still a pretty good OS, specially when compared to MacOS 9 and Windows. NeXT failed against Sun and SGI, not against the PC market. They never even tried that.

> Why didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit.

That's 2019 thinking. In 1990s almost no one would think that, especially in the world of commercial software.

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