[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
Executor on sale: July 12 - August 31
Dear Folks,
Assuming you've been following this list for a while, you already
know about our DOS development effort and have seen all the work that
we've been doing on the NEXTSTEP side of things lately. We're
bearing down on a 1.3 official multi-architecture-binary release of
Executor, and in anticipation, we are putting Executor on sale: $149
+ shipping non-academic, $99 + shipping academic.
The purpose of the sale is to jump start our DOS release. The basic
idea is that we will use the money brought in from the sale to get
sample copies of Executor/DOS out and evaluated and finance the first
run of documentation and packaging. Then, with the DOS dollars
coming in at a steady pace, we will hire more engineers and provide
color support, a very high degree of compatibility with the major
applications and release Executor on a variety of platforms, all
while continuing to release our experimental and incremental versions
of Executor/NEXTSTEP.
This sale rewards people who purchase Executor now. If you have
access to anonymous ftp, you should be able to see how much progress
we've made and the direction and speed we're going.
Our competitors are selling their products at a considerably higher
price. Liken, selling for about $700, available on the SPARC and HP
requires that you obtain a copy of System 6 and use it on non-Apple
equipment, contrary to the license that comes with it. Equal
available on SPARC and MIPS doesn't require anything from Apple, but
as far as I know will primarily be sold bundled with Word and Excel
(the only two applications they're officially supporting) for a
retail price of around $1,200.
If you know someone who could use Executor, now is the time to buy.
A few thousand dollars of sales now helps ARDI much more now than it
will in a few months, and Executor, especially with the free update
policy at $149 or $99 is a steal. Please note however, for once, we
are going to be hard asses about deadlines, if we don't receive an
order by August 31, it will not be entitled to the sale price.
If you know of a nest of NeXTs, be it in an academic, commercial or
government setting, please pass the word. A University NeXT lab with
a dozen NeXTs and a dozen PCs running NEXTSTEP/Intel could get a ten
concurrent user license (every machine doesn't have to run Executor
at the same time) for < $1,000 and run courseware that's normally run
on Macs. ARDI gets some money at an important time, the lab gets
inexpensive Macintosh emulation and you get the satisfaction of
seeing NEXTSTEP being used for more activities.
With the ability to pick up Executor from ftp.cs.unm.edu and test it
out in demo mode, people should be able to figure out whether or not
it's a good match, and if not, send us the feedback that we're
putting to such good use.
Thanks for your consideration.
--Cliff