NeXTSTEP Expo 1994
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Transcript
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Hi.
I'm Steve Jobs. Welcome to Next Step Expo 94. Thanks for coming.
We've got a lot of information to present to you today, so let's get started.
I want to talk about the state of our company.
It's been a year since we made the transition to a software company.
I want to talk about our customers, why they're buying our products, who they are.
OpenStep, our most important initiative this year.
How objects have narrowed down to a three-horse race.
And then, of course, products.
Let's get started.
State of the company.
Eighteen months ago, Next announced its intention to become a software-only company.
By the end of last year, we fully made the transition.
This year, we are fully a software company.
We're a software company with a clear mission.
I'd like to take you through that mission now.
First, the mission is, like many missions, a lot easier to say than to do.
To continue to lead the object revolution.
We think we're in the lead now, and we think it is a revolution.
We think the object revolution is going to change the way all software is written.
And we believe in the next 24 months, the object revolution is going to move into the mainstream.
And we'd like to ride with it into the mainstream and become the accepted alternative to Microsoft.
the prior candidates to be alternatives to microsoft os2 and macintosh have faded
they've receded and there is a tremendous opportunity and a market need for something
to fill that gap we'd like to be it but in a much more focused way not in the consumer market not
in the home market we are not announcing our intention to launch satellites we're going to
stay focused in the corporate market.
So our mission is to continue to lead the object revolution
and become the accepted alternative to Microsoft
in the corporate market.
This won't happen overnight, but together
we can make it happen over the next several years.
Now, in addition to having a mission,
we have a leadership goal, something
a little more short term, a little more objective to measure.
And our leadership goal is to become the largest company
delivering object technology to the marketplace.
Mission and leadership goal.
We have an experienced, stable management team.
We use the opportunity as we became a software company
to bring in some new senior management
with a lot of experience in the software industry.
We have an excellent CFO, Dominique Trompot.
He's been with us a little less than a year.
Warren Weiss, our VP of Worldwide Sales, runs all of sales, has been with us through the entire
transition. Working for him, Bill Wiesman, Vice President of North American Sales,
been with us a year, runs all of North America. Bernard Webker, VP of European Sales.
and Paul Vase, Director of Marketing.
Now together, these sales and marketing senior executives
have over 30 years of experience in the software business.
Paul Hegarty, our Director of Engineering,
has been with Nex for six years,
developed a lot of the technology that we have today.
John Marie Hulot, our Chief Technical Officer,
again, been with the company almost since the beginning.
and myself.
So that's our senior management team.
We think they're doing a pretty reasonable job.
In addition to that, we've been helped out immeasurably
by our external board members.
Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corporation,
Dan Case, the co-CEO of Hamburg and Quist,
and Mr. Akiyama from Canon.
They've been invaluable this last year
as we've made the transition to a software company.
We have 275 employees in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan.
We have offices in Vancouver, Paris, London, Munich, and Tokyo.
And our employees split up this way.
A little over 100 in R&D, a little over 100 in sales and marketing, and the rest in services and G&A.
For a company our size, we spend a very large amount of resources on R&D.
We intend to keep it that way because that's what it's going to take to continue to lead the object revolution.
Consistent revenue growth.
Since becoming a software company, we've been very, very pleased, quarter by quarter, as we have grown.
Now, we are not a public company.
We're not required by law to disclose our revenues.
But we've decided today to disclose them to you.
And the reason is very simple.
We think it will help further everyone's understanding of how far objects have moved towards the mainstream to see our performance.
Now, last year, 1993, we had an internal plan to sell $10 million worth of software.
We beat it by doing $11 million in revenues.
We were loading up some of our OEM partners in Q3,
so the actual shipments to end users are probably the reverse of Q3 and Q4.
Starting in Q1 of this year, we started to fire on all cylinders.
We did a little over $8 million in revenues.
And this quarter, although it's not done, we expect to come in in the $9 to $10 million range.
We think this is excellent performance, and we are right on track to meet our plan this year.
We expect Q3 and Q4 to produce even greater revenues this year.
We expect to be profitable every quarter in 1994.
This is a milestone for next.
And we think we have the right partnerships in place for continued growth.
Now, let's go back to our leadership goal, to become the largest company delivering object technology to the market.
Now, we wanted to measure ourselves against this goal.
We went out and looked, and it's not possible to get information on every company
because a lot of object companies are still private.
But the largest one that we could find turned out to be a public company,
and that was Park Place.
These are actual Q1 revenues.
Our revenues, Park Place's revenues, and the third largest company's revenues.
And I'm pleased to report to you that as of Q1, we are now larger than Park Place
and the largest company delivering objects to the marketplace that we know of.
But it's even better than that.
As you see, we're just a smidgen larger than them.
But the blue part of the bars represents services revenue.
Now, services revenue is great.
And this bar tells us we should build a more successful services
business, which we're planning on doing.
But services is ultimately parasitic on the core software
business.
And as we remove the services bar, you can see the software
sales.
We are approximately 60% larger than Park Place Systems,
the second largest company delivering objects today.
So when we go to our leadership goal,
to become the largest software company
delivering object technology to the market,
I'm pleased to report to you
that Next has become the largest company
delivering object technology to the market.
And that is the state of our company.
Customers. A lot of people think we still sell to the education market. That could not be further