Hi, comp.sys.next.misc, It's Rohit Khare, with something I hope the net
will appreciate: a complete account of Steve's keynote. It's not a
transcript, but definitely fills in a lot of holes in the net.flashes this
week. Pardon the spelling errors. E-mail suggestions, feedback, and whether
this should be evolved into something fit for sonata or NUGletter
publishing.
(* starred items are net.trivia and rumors from pretty decent sources)
Steve Speaks
The date may have been January 22, but it was really New Year's Day
for the 5,000 NeXTheads crammed into Brooks Hall. Steve Jobs' keynote
speech marked the opening of what NeXTWorld Editor-in-Chief Dan Ruby
declared "NeXT's breakthrough year." In keeping with Ruby's declaration,
Steve then produced an auld lang syne for 1991 and presented NeXT's 1992
resolutions to blow the competition out of the water with NeXTStep Release
3 and new Turbo systems.
The first slide in his presentation reviewed NeXT's 1991 performance
(*done in Concurrence): $24.5 million in Q1, $25.0 in Q2, $32.5 in Q3, and
$45.6 in Q4, for a total of 440% growth from 1990, amazing for what Steve
called "the worst recessionary market in memory." Corresponding with this
growth in sales volume has been a flip-flop between higher-ed sales and
Fortune 500 sales. In the Cube days, 80% of sales were to education. At the
opening of 1991, 62% of sales were to commercial/government purchasers, and
today 81% of sales are in that sector (*The CIA is very possibly NeXT's
largest single customer today). The change in customers has been reflected
in a parallel channel transformation. Direct sales doubled to 256 sites,
higher ed went from 200 to 370, but the VARs who specialize in selling
solutions to commercial sites soared from 13 to 425. Shipping apps also
rocketed from 63 to 247, as did NeXT User Group membership, to 15,000
members in 250 groups in 28 countries. Similarly, NeXT has shown
astonishing growth overseas. For all of 1991, 57% of sales were in North
America, 28% in Europe, and 15% in Japan (*although for Q3 and Q4 North
American sales may well have dipped below 50% !).
After presenting these statistics, Steve then invited Dr. Hiego Imagi
(sp?), President of Canon, to speak on the Japanese market. Dr. Imagi
warmly praised Steve for his successes and their companies' partnership
(which Steve indicated had begun on the Seventh Day of NeXT), and declared
that NeXT sales in Japan would have a "tremendous leap in 1992." He gave
three reasons why Q3 and Q4 showed spectacular growth in Japan: Release
2.1J, localized and native apps, and downsizing. The downsizing issue
reveals certain valuable characteristics of the follow-the-leader Japanese
market. When a few key corporations embarked on downsizing, it quickly grew
into a national IS priority. Canon has tried to successfully position NeXT
as a part of that movement, with large sales to Yamaha and an unnamed large
car manufacturer. Furthermore, when they closed the 400-station deal with
Osaka University, almost every other Japanese university called to find out
what the leader was doing, and Dr. Imagi announced that 3 other
universities have made a commitment to similarly replace mainframes with
NeXTs. He also alluded to the fruitful Canon-NeXT partnership that produced
2.1J, the MO drive (now dead), the laser printer, the color printer, the
color laser system, and "new and exciting work with flat panels."
Next, Steve discussed lessons learned in 1991. "Who are our
customers? our competitors? What is NeXT's 'compelling advantage'?," he
asked. NeXT was genuinely surprised when they did this exercise in the
summer of 1991, and Steve now presented NeXT's answers. The first group of
customers (*the one Steve is most enamored of) is Financial Services, which
was SUN's first commercial market. He listed Phibro Energy, First National
Bank of Chicago, Swiss Bank/O'Connor (previously SUN's largest site), Union
Bank of Switzerland, JP Morgan, and TRIMARK as installations with triple-
digit commitments to NeXT. Second was Government, at all levels. DoD, Navy,
DARPA (which bought one for every Principal Investigator), the City of
Baltimore, and the LA Sherriff's Department were all mentioned as
significant customers. Unmentioned were NSA and the CIA (*did anyone notice
that 2.88 Mb ED floppies are still export-restricted by COCOM?). Third was
Health Care, where NeXT was piggybacking on explosive healthcare-industry
growth. He mentioned that four hospitals have over 100 slabs each. Finally,
he mentioned that NeXT had not forgotten education. NeXT has now become the
largest selling workstation to students, and has become the overall #2
seller at Stanford and MIT. As for the second question, Steve pulled up a
slide with a giant SUN logo, titled the "Mother of All Competitors." NeXT
has now firmly thrown its lot in with the workstation market and has
abandoned the "PC on steroids" image by co-opting the Intel world and over-
powering the Mac. He stated that in any head-to-head competition with Sun
over a commercial site, NeXT walked away with the order 80% of the time. He
also called the NeXT vs. Sun video "great evening viewing."
The 'compelling advantage' presentation marked the formal debut of
NeXT's first solid marketing message in its three years (* USA TODAY
reported Thursday that Steve Jobs was CEO of the "three-year-old NeXT
Computer, Inc."). He began with the obvious statement that a 50-100%
advantage is not enough to persuade customers to defect to your platform .
Though NeXT's best-of-breed apps were, in fact, 50-100% better than
anything else on any platform, they were not selling the machine. NeXT
needed a compelling advantage, something it did 500-1000% better than any
other platform. Consider the mac, Steve asked. They put together a
graphical computer with a bitmapped-display, and a PostScript laser (and
then they threw Steve out). Only 9-12 months later did someone come up with
desktop publishing, which grew into Apple's compelling advantage, that
which brought Macs into Corporate America through the back door. "Mission-
critical custom apps are our Trojan Horse. Except we're getting invited
through Corporate America's front door," Steve said, and then brought up
the now legendary story of how O'Connor built a 2-year project for SUNS in
90 days in the NeXT. He explained why mcApps are better on the NeXT:
Interface Builder, "mere-mortal" usability, shrink-wrap quality, and
instant integration with 100's of productivity apps. He then trotted out
the soon-to-be-legendary Booz Allen, Hamilton independent study that
tracked 100 veteran SUN programmers migrating to NeXT: 82% declared
NeXTstep the superior to SUN, Mac, DOS, and Windows environments. 100% said
NeXTstep was easier, 91% found it more complete, and programs were
developed 2-9 times faster with an average of 83% less code. Another
section comparing only NeXT and SUN was even more onesided with 96-100%
advantages for NeXT.
Compelling advantage in hand, Steve presented Release 3 with the
usual "E-mail Workout With Steve" format. The new Workspace and NeXT apps
have been colorized in this release, but tastefully enough to avoid "pink
borders and purple menus" (* for example, docked icons now have a slight
gradient behind them. Also, menus and windows were italicized, whether that
makes it into the golden master is unknown). Steve picked up the windows
and raced them across the screen, claiming "If were on a Mac, we'd be here
until NeXT week." Entering Mail, he claimed "Mail is easy enough that even
executives can use it without the manual." One of his mail messages was a
scan of Reed, his four-month-old son, accompanied by a 3-minute CD-quality
classical sound clip (i.e. long enough to realize we are dealing with a
very amazed new father). Next was a praising sound clip from H. Ross Perot.
Also evident was that the new Text object is colorized to allow drag-and-
drop color on selected text. He demonstrated binary file attachment with a
DataPhile document containing the entire Third-Party Catalog. He also
pulled up a WordPerfect window and pointed out it took 48 man-years for the
Windows port, but only 1.5 for the NeXT version (*BTW, the best-of-breed is
fading. WP was showing the X version at Uniforum, and it is almost
identical). The next message was a demo of transparent networking. The
message indicated certain files were on certain system, and he demoed how
he could reach them all through /Net and the Novell icon, or the SUN icon,
or the Teradata icon, or AppleShare (*no Apple logo, only a painted apple),
etc. He grabbed each one in turn and drag-and-dropped them into a Frame
template, pointing out that drag-and-drop has been added to every app in
3.0. "With NeXT networking, we have secretaries navigating the largest UNIX
networks in their cities, and they don't even notice it." Cool Feature #2
was Object Linking. With Distributed Objects, applications can message
objects anywhere on a net, allowing shrink-wrapped distributed apps by the
end of the year, where apps can munch unused cycles anywhere on the net,
Zilla-like. Apparently a RenderServer uses this to slice up huge Renderman
runs. DO's other use is for object embedding. He pulled up Draw and Edit,
copied a Draw graphic, and chose Object/Link from Edit's Edit menu (*Edit
is now integrated with GDB), chose Update Continuously from the Link
Inspector, and watched the crowd gape as he worked in Draw and the RTF file
kept changing. He pointedly observed that NeXTLinks would be the first
shipping object embedding system, and that it had "No New Manuals", and
that "It just works" -- no editions, no publish/subscribe, nothing. He
quickly showed off an improved faxing architecture that introduced fax
groups (* Fourth on the list: Cal_Tech!!), and then went back to Mail to
read the next message. Instead of a message field, there was a lock panel
sitting in the message window. Any message or file can be secured in this
way by a Service using Richard Crandall's new method of public-key Field
Elliptic Encryption (* NeXT avoided the Internet standard just for the sake
of avoiding RSA license fees, I hear). Upon entry of the private key, it
decrypts, and opens with an audible clank and a padlock-opening animation
(Inside it revealed Job's salary had doubled for '92 to $2/year). The last
message showed of the language customizability of 3.0; 3.0 will ship in
seven languages simultaneously (all NextApps have been localized), as will
3.0J (*which is seperate because of the phonetic entry system and the
expense of Kanji fonts, and overhead of composite characters).
Next was the DBKit demo. Essentially identical to the demo he did at
the 2.0 launch. Except this time he publicly hooked it up to some giant DB
servers on stage, like Teradata, Sequent, Prime, and Control Data. The
connection to the Teradata did crash, though, and he asked indulgence of a
Beta system from the audience. Finally, he got to color. He promoted
PostScript Level 2, the color printer (NeXT had hidden print samples under
every third seat, much to the house's delight.), system-wide Pantone
Matching system, and calibrated, device-independent color fidelity. The
showstopper, though, was the Iceman demo. An interactive, fully-compatible
version of RenderMan will ship free on every 3.0 system. The 3D control
panel has fidelity knobs, polygon-shading buttons, and a rotation/scaling
interface based on a 2D projection of the
three othrogonal Great circles of a sphere, with scaling along the x and y
axes. The demo was absolutely stunning, and interactive on a Turbo Color
slab, without even tossing the i860 at it. NeXT's plan is that as hardware
can support it, the fidelity and interactivity will increase. 3D is now
supported in any app, with DPS being imaged on a glass plate in front of
the scene.
Then he came to the hardware. Steve announce that the 3.0 Extended
Edition will ship on CD-ROM in Q2 for $295 (*very reasonable considering
the licensing costs of Pantone, RenderMan, Novell, and the development
cost, and that other workstation manufacturers have 4-digit upgrade fees
and up). The Turbo machines, at 25 MIPS (a suspicious 67% MIPS improvement
for a 33% clock hike), will have a standard 250Mb drive, and the new price
curves have been flattened out by raising the entry to $5995 and $8995 but
reducing the mid-range. Rumor has it that the 3.0/CD-ROM drive deal will be
a $700 bundle. The color printer retails for $3495, and it truly is a real
pricing revolution. Don't compare the prices with an HP PaintJet or a
DeskJet C; this is a serious, calibratable, PostScript color printer that
beats the pants off the competition. The final piece of hardware was the
i486 chip, and Steve invited Dave Hauss, President of Intel, onstage. He
proclaimed that he had been working STeve for 15 years to produce an Intel-
based OS. He claimed he'd never been able to play with Steve's toys before
because he was "allergic to Motorola," and made a great show of sneezing
and hacking when he got close to the Color Turbo. Later, Steve demoed
NeXTstep on a 50 Mhz Compaq, and pulled up some voice-mailed praise from
Intel's Andrew Grove. NS486 is $995 on CD-ROM in Q2, $2495 for all the
development tools. It will do 2-bit SVGA, but needs a bus-mastering color
card to really shine. Steve closed by commenting that "Finally, there's
some good software for PC's"
Etc.
125 Booths, 200 volunteers.
the World Expo folks put it together in 88 days, compared with the
usual year-or more planning times required for other shows. Hell, at
Uniforum they weren't selling T-shirts for Uniforum '92; they were hawking
Uniforum '93 shirts! Guess that makes another mission-critical custom expo
completed 2-5 times faster with NeXT :-)
Interesting phrases: "gratuitous multimedia" "the three lesses:
diskless, colorless, and useless" "It used to be a computer on every desk.
Now, it's *only* one computer on every desk, please."
Dr. Sam Goldberger of Spherical Solutions fame is actually Son of
Murph, a former Caltech President.
<< If you want to see the next two topics, e-mail me. If there's
enough response, I'll write about Quorum's Mac emulator, Simon Says, and
other Neat Stuff>>
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