Now we know who bought NeXT computers: The CIA and other spooks were the company's biggest customers, says Randall Stross in Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing. It's a neat irony, the black-bag boys buying into the black box, but not too useful when it comes to customer testimonials. Stross is a professor of business, and he tells the story of NeXT, the business. With its Reality Distortion Field of Dreams marketing, the company ran through some US$250 million of capital to sell just 50,000 computers.
(Steve Jobs and and the NeXT machine: brilliant, charming, but with no input jacks.)
But NeXT was more than a business story. It was a story of celebrity, hype, and technological folklore. Hartmut Esslinger of frogdesign designed the cube, he said, to represent "revenge" - Jobs's desired revenge against Apple. But Stross makes one error: NeXT's magnesium box, so expensive to cast and paint, was not in fact a perfect cube. One side was slightly larger. Nothing at NeXT was quite as it appeared - sales figures, for example, were constantly inflated.
The black box was a perfect metaphor for the enterprise: a piece of minimalist art into which the viewer could project his or her own imaginings. One such projecter was investor Ross Perot, who said wistfully, "These kids remind me of when I was young." (After reading the details here, American citizens may think more carefully about any enterprise Perot backs.)
As Alan Kay told me, at the time the cube was introduced, both the first Mac and NeXT were like models of Steve's head: brilliant, charming, but with no input jacks. But however much NeXT was a reflection of Jobs's legend and his flaws, those of us who covered NeXT or rooted for it were in a sense complicitous in the failed enterprise. People wanted to believe that there was indeed a next big thing, rather than a future of small steady enhancements, refusing to accept that the revolution had slowed down to evolution.
Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing, by Randall Stross, US$24. Atheneum: (800) 257 5755, +1 (212) 702 2000.
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