Steve Jobs previews WebObjects at Object World 1995 YouTube
Transcript
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Good morning.
I'm Steve Jobs.
I'd like to welcome you to Open Step Days at Object World.
We've really enjoyed putting this together with OMG,
and we hope you enjoy the tracks today.
We're also having a party, the OMG Open Step party,
tomorrow night at the Center for Performing Arts across the street.
We hope you can come.
And we've got a really fun day today for you.
How many of you saw the billboard coming into town?
Isn't that great?
And after this talk at...
9.45
there is a second keynote on OpenStep
and at 11 o'clock there is a third keynote
on WebObjects
so I hope you can stay around for those
they'll be quite good
so we've got a lot of exciting stuff to cover today
and what we'd like to do
is talk a little bit about the past
and the present and spend most of our time on the future
we've got
a ton of new products coming out
that we want to take you through today.
So the past.
The past for us is 1994.
1994 was our first year as a software company,
and we were extremely pleased with how well we did.
We did $50 million in revenues,
and we managed to become profitable.
We did a lot of...
Yeah.
I know some of the people clapping are our shareholders in the audience.
We were able to ship a lot of new products and initiate a lot of new programs last year,
but the one I think is the most strategic of all is that we really established a major effort in professional services
because we realized that technology alone was not the most effective route to inject this into our customers,
that if we could supply some technology transfer, that would go a long way.
and we became the largest object supplier in the world,
a position that we really appreciate.
Now, let's take a look at the present.
The present for us is the first half of 1995.
In the first half of this year,
we have completely refreshed our entire product line,
actually starting in December of last year
with Next Step 3.3 and carried on through today.
We've completely refreshed every product we have.
We're not public, so we don't release numbers except on an annual basis,
but we have exceeded our revenue and profit plans for the first half,
and we're very, very happy with how the business is going.
It's growing very nicely.
We've added some really wonderful mainstream new customers to the list.
We grew our consulting business, this technology transfer consulting business,
400% from January through the first half of this year,
and we have remained the largest object supplier.
Let's take a look at a few of these in detail.
On the product side, we shipped Next Step 3.3 for Intel in December.
We shipped it for all the RISC platforms in first quarter.
We shipped Next Step 3.3J in second quarter on all four platforms,
carrying all of that into Kanji.
We shipped Next Step Developer 3.3 on all four platforms.
And we updated our Enterprise Object Framework,
which is the most profound piece of new technology we've shipped in several
years. All of our major customers are using it, as well as our portable
distributed objects technology, primarily adding support for digital Unix so that
you can run Next Step objects on all servers from digital as well as all
servers from HP and Sun. So we've been up to a lot in the product space. Customers.
We've got a very long list of customers. We really love them and they they
sometimes give us a lot of hassle about how our products can be better, which is
what we love, so we can go make them better for them. And we're very, very
close to these folks. Now I couldn't list them all, but I pulled a handful and
just threw some in alphabetical order. On this list, British Telecom is a new
customer. On this list, Fidelity is a new customer. Merrill Lynch is a relatively
new customer. On this list, NTT is a relatively new customer. Walt Disney is a
relatively new customer. So this is just a sampling but a very very blue chip
customer list and we're very very privileged to be working with these
folks. And then object experts. This is our, we have three parts to our
professional services. We have training and education, we have support and we have
object experts. And object experts are our consulting
organization that go on site with customers to help them train their people,
architect their core objects and their applications, and of course write some
of those core objects if needed. And we've grown this group from 4 to 21
people so far this year. I expect that it will go out somewhere in the 40s by the
end of the year, and I suspect it will hit a hundred people sometime next year.
We are absolutely moving into the consult of selling moat, following in the
footsteps of probably Oracle would be the best example.
These folks do technology transfer.
They're a direct pipeline to Next's engineering
so that when we have customers doing very state-of-the-art
stuff, they can get very state-of-the-art information.
And they really become a key component of success
for a lot of projects that are customers.
Lastly, Software Magazine ranked the top 100 software
companies early this year based on last year's results.
And in our first year as a software company,
we were a third of the way up the list.
We're the 67th largest software company in the world.
And based on last year's results, in terms of growth rate,
we were the fastest growing of this list.
So we're very pleased with that too.
Excuse me.
Now we want to spend some time on the future.
Where are we going?
We're going to show you three of our major directions today.
And we've got a bunch of demos.
If everything works, it should be pretty enlightening for all of us.
The first one is OpenStep. We announced the OpenStep initiative a few years ago, and OpenStep
was a realization that what our real jewel was was our object layer, not our complete stack of
hardware and operating systems and object layers. So if we could just break that object layer out
and run it on popular operating systems, a lot more people would want to buy it.
And we've been at that work for the last few years, and it will be shipping in the first half of next year.
And OpenStep has a lot of partners.
Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Digital.
Each of them doing OpenStep work.
Sun has announced their schedules.
They will also be shipping around the end of this year to early next year.
Others will be announcing their schedules shortly.
But I think the thing that has captured most people's imagination is putting OpenStep on Windows.
and I think a lot of folks have thought we were just, it was pure vaporware
and what we're going to do is show you that running today.