A 5-point summary of NeXT's OS/product line.
Reprinted with author's permission.
soup
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Fri, Jan 17, 1997 (10:42)
I think the acquisition of NeXT opens up enormous opportunities for Apple. A lot of people aren't very familiar with NeXT's technology so they bad-mouth it (people always fear what they don't understand).
NeXT has 5 major products that blow the doors off of anything shipping today and anything even representing a gleam in some Microsoft developers eye today.
Product #1: the OS itself, NEXTSTEP. This OS is memory protected, multi-threading, multi-processing, preemptively multitasked, multi-media
rich, and object-oriented to the bone! Plus, it has already been ported to (and is currently shipping on) Intel-based machines, Sun Sparcstations, and HP PA-RISC! All they really have to do is port it to the PowerPC and they're in business on Mac hardware. Back when NeXT was in the hardware business, they had ported NEXTSTEP to a dual-PowerPC prototype machine they were thinking of shipping; so they already have alot of the leg-work done for the PowerPC port. NEXTSTEP is like NT, BeOS, and MacOS all rolled into one OS, and then improved by a factor of 10! There is alot of talk about retaining the Mac's interface. NEXTSTEP already has an elegant and innovative interface. My guess is that the new NeXT-based OS will support multiple 'looks' (much like MacOS 8 was supposed to) and that one of those 'looks' will be the traditional Mac interface. NEXSTEP also allows for the easy support of multiple languages. It already ships in English, German, Italian, Spanish, French, and Kanji (for the Pacific rim community). It's ground-up object-orientation allows for the easy implementation of various
'looks' and languages, and such.
Product #2: OPENSTEP. OPENSTEP is an open cross-platform development
environment specification which supports multiple application binaries. NEXTSTEP is based on OPENSTEP (some people like to say OPENSTEP-compliant) so it already runs on all of the platforms NEXTSTEP runs on, PLUS it has been ported to run under Windows NT and Windows 95! What this means is that an application developed for NEXTSTEP on Intel will automatically run on all of the other platforms! My guess is that when Apple ships it's NeXT-based OS for the Mac, it will be an upgrade for all of the other platforms, putting everyone on the 'same sheet of music'. Following this logic, Mac software developers should be able to get a good head-start on developing applications on any of the other platforms TODAY, and then simple 'tweak' their applications to be compliant with the new NeXT-based Mac OS when it ships. Since all NeXT technology is object-oriented through-and-through, this 'tweaking' is easier than most people think.
Product #3: Enterprise Objects Framework. EOF is a powerfull set of developer tools which allows applications to pull data from existing legacy databases (ie. Sybase, Oracle, DB2, Informix, etc). All a developer has to do is 'drop' the objects in his application.
Product #4: Web Objects Framework. WOF does for the web what EOF does for
the enterprise. It take data from legacy databases and dynamically builds HTML pages, on the fly, to any web browser.
Product #5: Portable Distributed Objects. PDO allows objects to be
distributed across multiple servers.
All of these products are designed to work together (and in heterogeneous networks) and are scalable from laptops to high-end entrerprise servers; from a single user to 10,000 seats and more.
In addition, NeXT has formed a group of consultants known as Object consultants. This workforce is already in place to seek out opportunities in the enterprise and internet/intranet markets and educate these customers on the value and use of NeXT technology.
In my opinion, Apple got 5 immediate revenue producing products (along with
a knowledgeable salesforce) for it's $400 million acquisition in NeXT. Not a bad deal. It can begin producing revenue TODAY by using it's marketing channels to help push NeXT's technology into the enterprise and internet/intranet markets, albeit on non-Mac hardware. When the new NeXT-based OS is ready, an upgrade should be released at the same time for all other NeXT products to put them all 'on the same sheet of music' and Apple can then start pushing it's own hardware offerings into those markets. By pushing the NeXT technology early, they can begin to build a substantial installed base of NeXT's technology from which to promote the Mac hardware from.
Peter J. Rucki |
