Redwood City Ð New price increases for NEXTSTEP 3.1 upgrades took effect October 1, signaling the end of a promotional period designed to hold onto existing customers while bringing new users into the fold as NeXT completes its transition.
"It was an incentive to give our customers a chance to upgrade below market prices," said Rick Jackson, director or development environment product marketing. "Now the pricing is in line with market value."
Release 3.1 upgrades have jumped in price from $99 to $495 for the developer version and from $75 to $95 for the user version. Customers who upgrade to 3.1 and register before October 31 will receive a free upgrade to NEXTSTEP 3.2 when it is released.
End users of NeXT hardware can receive their upgrades directly from NeXT by calling 800/ 677-6398 or 800/848-6398.
The $299 NEXTSTEP Evaluation Kit promotion ended on September 30. NeXT declined to provide sales results for the promotion, but sources close to the company said that about 4000 units were sold.
According to Marketing Communications Director Karen Steele, the program succeeded in its goal of exposing developers to the benefits of object-oriented programming with NEXTSTEP.
"The purchasers of the Eval Kit are exactly the types of corporate developers we are targeting, the ones who are deciding between NEXTSTEP and Windows plus development tools. We feel that we have successfully seeded a large number of development seats that we can convert to full NEXTSTEP deployments," she said.
Eval Kit buyers received full working copies of both the user and developer versions of NEXTSTEP 3.1 for Intel. To upgrade to Release 3.2, they have to purchase the complete user or developer versions for $795 and $1995, respectively.