OpenStep Introduction
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Transcript
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Hi, I'm Rick Jackson, Director of Product Marketing for NEXT. We'd like to take you
through some of the details of OpenStep and the relationship between NEXT and Sun that was formed
to endorse OpenStep as an industry standard. To begin with, we're going to take a look at the
actual press conference that was held between NEXT and Sunsoft in November of 1993. Well,
Let me start today.
My name is Ed Zander, president of Sunsoft.
Very, very pleased to have you all come here today.
We do have about 35 or 40, I guess,
editors on the East Coast listening in.
And we're going to take some questions and answers
after this.
I want to thank all the people from the East Coast
and thank all of you here today to attend this session
on such short notice and Thanksgiving week.
And we apologize.
But to be very frank with you, we didn't
have this thing consummated until about 72 hours ago.
So it was very hard to plan the right days or the right weeks.
And we felt that going any longer,
the way news travels around this industry,
wouldn't be necessarily beneficial to both us
and to the press out there.
It's a great day if I can find these two guys.
I can get going.
Maybe they're calling the deal off.
I don't know.
They're into a fight back there.
Am I supposed to introduce you guys?
Is it supposed to be music?
I mean, you know, Steve, Scott, anybody seen him?
Well, OK.
Well, here they come.
Oh, my God.
Oh, I see.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you to the Yasser and Yitzhak of Computer Valley.
For those on the East Coast, Scott is actually
wearing a black shirt, which is pretty gross.
I think it's a great day.
In some cases, I'm really sad.
I mean, it's really sad because there's
nobody to hate anymore in the industry.
No more great quotes.
How do you pick on IBM?
It's going to be hard, but there's always the guy up
in the Northwest, I guess, that they'll
have some things to say about.
For those that don't know who these individuals are,
on my left is Steve Jobs, who is the president and CEO of Next,
and of course, Scott McNeely, president
and CEO of Sun Microsystems.
Many people have told me in the last 24 hours,
this is never to happen in your lifetime, but it did.
Enough of the personalities, though,
because I think we have a lot of news here today
that is a great day for the industry,
and a great day for open systems, and a great day
for getting better technology to software developers
and end users and administrators in order
to complete the realization of right-sizing
and client-server and distributed computing in the 90s.
What I will do is to go briefly through the facts
before the hyperbole comes up on stage.
I will give you what we did today and what was announced.
Steve will come and share the next perspective
and talk about what their plans are
for the open specifications.
Scott will then talk about the Sun perspective.
And they just figured out what company they work for.
And so we made a lot of progress.
And then I'll get up and we'll take some Q&A.
And for the people on the East Coast,
we'll do some Q&A here.
And then we'll shift to the operator who will signal me,
I guess, on the East Coast.
So without further ado, let me get through the specifics.
And I'm supposed to work this gadget like this.
That's me.
And I think the bottom line, and you've got the press kits,
and if I had to, in one short statement,
say what we're trying to do here today
is to basically a partnership that
is strategic, and it's technical, it's marketing.
And the one purpose here, of course,
is to give the end users a capability that up until now,
they really haven't had in volume.
And that is to drive not only a volume object technology
into the industry, but a volume object standard
into the industry.
And we'll talk more about that later.
Let me tell you what the five things we're doing.
First and foremost is really exciting news
that next we'll be opening up the specification
at the application level for Next Step.
We'll publish and freely license the specification.
And Steve will come up here in just a few short minutes
to tell you about that.
This is a major, major breakthrough, we think,
for object-oriented technology, providing it in terms of standards, an open format,
something certainly that Sun Microsystems had to have in doing a deal of this nature,
and we're really, really excited about the next commitment to this area.
The second thing, from our perspective, Sunsoft...
which is the software subsidiary of Sun Microsystems,
is licensing the portion of Next Step that we
call the application layer.
This is the area that you basically see on the screen.
It's the way you develop object applications
and write to object applications and operate
around the screen.
We are basically licensing that technology
and incorporating that in our Solaris software environment
using our distributed object foundation technology
that we've been developing.
Scott will talk more about that a little later,
and I'll show you some detailed slides in just a little bit.
But bottom line is we're licensing some technology
and making it a standard part of our Solaris object
foundation for the future.
Third, I think in order to show how strategic this is
to Sun Microsystems, we are making a minority,
small yet sizable $10 million investment in Next Computer.