NeXT East Coast Developer Conference 1994

Transcript

Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.

1. 0:00

   Good morning. I'm Steve Jobs and welcome to the next East Coast Developer Conference this morning.

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   Thanks for getting up so early.

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   We think you're really going to enjoy this conference and this is a chance for us at the beginning to spend an hour together going through some high-level information.

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   I also want to thank our partners who are helping us to sponsor the conference.

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   They all have suites right outside along this row where you can visit them,

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   and we really appreciate their participation.

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   It's making the conference much better.

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   What I wanted to cover today was just five topics.

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   I wanted to review 1993 a little bit, talk about our overall strategy,

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    talk about OpenStep a little bit.

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    As some of you might have heard, we've announced the open NextStep API.

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    API, it's called OpenStep.

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    Talk a little bit about the object wars and how that's

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    going, where we fit in, and then talk about the enterprise.

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    Does this sound about right?

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    OK, and then I wanted to give a demo.

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    Now, before I get going, how many of you are already

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    familiar with NextStep?

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    OK.

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    How many of you have seen me give a demo before?

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    OK, good.

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    Because of the large number that haven't seen some of this

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    I'm going to go through a little bit of it repetitively for some of those of you that have.

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    And please excuse me while I do that because I want to bring everybody along.

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    So, 93 Review.

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    We shipped some Intel products.

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    And we did pretty well with them.

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    We had no idea how well we would do when we started shipping them on May 25th,

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    but things worked out pretty well.

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    And these are global products.

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    Every CD-ROM and every version of Next Step We Ship works in six languages, and it's the most localizable product in the world.

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    We have three different SKUs based on documentation only.

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    English, French, and German.

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    We'll add others as the European countries come up to speed.

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    In addition, in our last release, 3.2, we've included the best PC emulator that we know of on the planet, which is Insignia Soft PC.

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    It ships on the CD-ROM.

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    and you get to use it for free for 30 days, I think,

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    and then you get to call them and pay them some money

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    to keep using it.

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    The reason it's the best that we know of is twofold.

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    Number one, Microsoft realized they needed some emulation

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    technology to make NT work.

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    And they went to Insignia and said, Insignia,

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    you've got to bail us out on this.

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    And Insignia said, sure, but as part of the deal,

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    we want rights to look at the source code for Windows

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    and modify it to make our emulators work better.

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    For several years they wanted this, and Microsoft agreed.

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    And so Insignia gets source code, which

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    means that they're going to be able to stay in lockstep

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    with Microsoft a lot more so than some of the other emulation

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    strategies.

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    And that was one of the reasons.

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    The second one was we worked very closely with Insignia

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    and gave them some of the technology

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    that we're working on for next time, which

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    allows the graphics to go much faster.

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    And so the combination of these things, we think,

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    makes a very strong emulator that runs Windows programs

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    in a next step window at anywhere from 75% to 95%

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    of native processor performance.

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    Of course, the key thing is architectures.

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    We switched to the Intel architecture

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    being our reference platform.

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    And we support a few hundred PCs right now.

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    In addition to that, coming soon is HP PA Risk

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    and Sun Spark architectures.

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    And we'll be rolling out the PA Risk stuff in beta

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    in the April time frame, shipping it in the summer.

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    And the Sun stuff will be in beta in Q3, shipping in Q4.

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    These are our PC partners, the folks

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    we deal with to preload and to make sure our stuff works

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    on their machines.

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    And we're adding to this list all the time.

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    And in terms of market acceptance,

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    we did not have any idea how much of the stuff we could sell.

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    So we set an internal goal that sounded pretty aggressive,

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    to sell $10 million worth of Next Step in the second half

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    of 1993.

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    I'm pleased to report to you that we did about $11 million.

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    If you annualize that, that's a $22 million software company doing between 40,000 and 50,000 copies of Next Step per year.

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    And given the turbulence that we created by exiting the hardware business last year and having to rebuild a lot of momentum,

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    we're extremely pleased with this performance.

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    We have been spending the last four months working on our plan for 1994.

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    We put a lot of work into it. We think it's quite realistic. We know where a lot of the business is coming from.

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    And in 1994, we think we can do about 100,000 copies and approximately $50 million in software revenue.

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    So we think this is going to be a very, very successful year for Next Step.

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    Objectware, as you know, this is a very successful year.

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    is an extremely important part of our business,

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    is to facilitate the creation and dissemination of objects

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    and companies making money off them,

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    and the object wear volume is exploding.

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    And our focus for this next year will be not only to keep that going,

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    but to add some new classes of object wear

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    along the lines of business objects.

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    And finally, a senior management team.

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    When we went through our transition,

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    we changed some of our senior management.

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    Matter of fact, we changed quite a bit of it.

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     And we now, I can report to you, I think have the best senior management team that NEXT has ever had.

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     Warren Weiss is our vice president of North American Sales and Marketing.

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     Working with him is Bill Wiesman, our VP of Sales.

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     Bernard Webker runs Europe.

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     Dominique Trompeau is our CFO. He's excellent.

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     And in the R&D side, I promoted three of our best folks.

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     Paul Hagerty is our director of engineering.

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     Jean-Marie Hulot is our chief technical officer.

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     and Avi Tavenian runs all of our risk platform support and enterprise products such as portable distributed objects.

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     We have a very, very good team that's working, I think, extremely well together.

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     This, along with adding folks like Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, to our board,

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     I think has really, really strengthened our management this last year.

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     So that's just a quick review of 1993.

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     What is our strategy?

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     For those of you that don't know, our strategy focuses on one core element, which is that we believe we are in the midst of a software revolution that is the largest thing that any of us have seen based on object-oriented technology.

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     It's going to cause significant opportunity and significant displacement in our industry.

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     This is much larger than the GUI revolution of the 80s and really is what's necessary to make client-server work.

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     So we think that we're banking everything on the fact that this is a whole new way to build software

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     and there's an opportunity to rearrange the players in this industry because of it.

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     We think the 80s were based fundamentally on individual productivity,

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     but the 90s are going to be based on operational productivity.