Re: [TUHS] tangential unix question: whatever happened to NeWS?

On 1/25/2021 7:55 AM, Richard Salz wrote: Who made it wrong? The issues addressed by a presentation layer are there whether you explicitly make one (XDR) or embed it as a conditional (itself an overhead.) But it's a tomayto tomahto thing in the end, just as it was 30 years ago, the same only different -- and both distinctions opaque to who really mattered, the people spending money. ONC and DCE RPC are both charmingly clear in comparison with the vogue of protobufs and grpc. They're also both pervasive today well beyond the platforms that birthed them. A factor in the arc of NeWS' trajectory not thus far mentioned was its acceptance by ISVs, though Clem's comment applies: On Mon Jan 25 03:04:09 AEST 2021, Clem Cole wrote: In these forums there is a lot of discussions about the technical merits of this or that technology. It's perhaps unsatisfying to those of us invested in those technologies but often those merits (or their lack) don't determine what thrives and what doesn't. I was a distant observer of, and occasional experimenter with, NeWS as a technology. My recollections are of impressive capability and performance (for the time) and elegance. (But then, my TECO skills were still pretty high at the time so PostScript wasn't confronting in comparison -- I'm sure I'd think differently coming at it cold now.) But I was a much closer observer/participant with ISVs. The measure which most highly correlated with Sun's ascent and success was the "thud factor" of its applications catalog. When it was actually a printed thing, at its height the Catalyst catalog had the throw weight of a large metropolitan area phone book (hopefully not too dated an analogy.) Few of Sun's customers bought Sun to have Sun, they were bought to run applications that happened to run on Sun. We sold more Suns if we had more ISVs on board. If you sold more you got more ISVs. And so it goes -- the applications "virtuous cycle". When the feedback loop is positive, it turns "selling" into "order taking" which is a pretty clear indicator of marketing dollars having been well-spent. In this relationship there is a tension between platform differentiation attempts and keeping the flywheel effect of the virtuous cycle going. An ISV is going to look at platform differentiation as either lubrication or friction. They're going to resist friction and pursue lubrication. In the end, NeWS caused too much friction. (A corollary is that an ISV initially views any differentiation as friction, you need to prove it can be lubrication, and the ISV's importance to the market determines how much energy you put into that.) There was attraction to NeWS because it was provocatively capable. A number of ISVs, important ones, chose to adopt. But each release of NeWS, while objectively better, was also sufficiently different that what initially appeared to be an attractor was unsustainable for the ISVs to keep up with, even in service of Sun as the then market leader. Sun's volumes would allow us to get away with imposing a certain amount of friction of variation with ISVs but there were always limits to it -- the ISVs are trying to run their own businesses with their own differentiations and agendas to pursue. For the ISVs, variations of any sort were not a one-time cost. They repeated as qualification events when new software versions or new systems were introduced. Just staying still on a platform and with a vendor costs them. Making them re-do any portion of the initial effort as well is a significant disincentive. You may not be able to introduce your new product if they don't come along, they may not come along until they're sure your new product will sell enough to make it worthwhile. So successfully lubricating those costs as much as possible was for a lot of us a primary reason for the Sun's growth. Differentiation "behind interfaces" as we did in the operating system space helped lower that cost. Binary compatibility was super important. Gratuitous improvements that lacked opacity were avoided and we often made vanilla choices. Not perfect certainly, but good enough. NeWS stood out for not doing that, and that fact I think had far more to do with its status today than whether or not the source was available. Arguably NeWS never got far enough to have the availability conversation but now I'm back to being too distant from it to really know. The tensions being maintained in these market dynamics have multiple factors. It's tempting but hard to pick the one true reason for any outcome. But the virtuous cycle explains a lot of phenomena. It certainly doesn't hurt to be excellent in what you do, but sadly, it's not as determinative as we as practitioners might wish it to be. There's a reason we can all find examples of technologically superior failures. That said, I do think the NeWS experience was at least part of what later informed Java's compatibility especially at the binary level, the separation of the JVM from the language(s) hosted on it. Not the "one true reason", but among the mix of considerations.