Nebula 2/Nebula Two.iso/Newsletters/NSnewsletterFeb96.txt

Text File | 1996-02-13 | 14KB | 283 lines

96/02/04

Subject: NEXTSTEP NEWSLETTER

 1.NEXT LOOKS POISED FOR GROWTH
 2.WEB MANIA  BOOSTS NEXT'S FORTUNES
 3.SUN WILL SOON SHIP OPENSTEP
 4.NEXT IS REALLY MOVING TO NT
 5.NEXT MAY BE DROPPING MACH
 6.STEVE JOBS IS ACKNOWLEDGING POWER POLITICS
 7.NEXT LOOKS OVERCONFIDENT
 8.BEHIND THE WEB MANIA DEMO
 9.OPENSTEP FOR WINDOWS 95 DROPPED AS EXPECTED
10.D'OLE AND EOF FOR NT EVALUATION
11.ERRATTA
12.OBJECT DATABASE MARKET SURVEY
13.IS YOUR COMPANY HIRING?
14.NEXTSTEP DEVELOPERS NEEDED
 a)MANAGE A $20 MILLION DOLLAR NEXTSTEP PRODUCT
 b)BECOME A NEXTSTEP PROJECT MANAGER
 c)BECOME A NEXTSTEP CONSULTANT
 d)NEXTSTEP CORPORATE GURU NEEDED
 e)OBJECT DATABASES IN AUSTRALIA
 f)WEB (OBJECTS) MASTER SOUGHT
16.BPG NEWS
17.HOW TO SUBSCRIBE


 1. NEXT LOOKS POISED FOR GROWTH
For the first time in many years I am bullish on Next's future
growth.    Steve Jobs is focussed on the business issues.   Web
Objects looks well positioned.  Sun is close to releasing NEO with
OPENSTEP technology embedded.   NeXT is investing heavily in making
OPENSTEP for NT a reality.  With Pixar's success, Steve Jobs has a
lot of money, so NeXT is a safe bet.  NeXT is receiving lots of
publicity.   The NT and Solaris operating systems lower the barriers
to OPENSTEP adoption.    Independent Software Vendors are porting
their wares to NT or Solaris as they see fit.   It is a great time to
be in this market.

 2. WEB MANIA  BOOSTS NEXT'S FORTUNES
By all accounts NeXT's Web offerings look very interesting.  Check
out their web server (www.next.com) for more info.  Download your
free version of Web Objects for Solaris, NT, or NextSTEP 3.3.  The
market  is interested.   There were over 100 members of the press in
attendence, as opposed to 50 at NeXT's presentation at Object World.
Steve Jobs  was extremely gracious  and enthusiastic.  He has
developed a wonderful way to poke fun at Microsoft.  When Windows 95
crashed, interrupting the demo, he started to talk, then said: "This
commercial break brought to you by...Microsoft".  The audience loved
it.

 3. SUN WILL SOON SHIP OPENSTEP
Sun plans to ship the OPENSTEP technology licensed from NeXT as part
of their next release of NEO.  NEO is currently Solaris plus Corba
distributed objects.  Sun has integrated the OPENSTEP software from
NeXT into NEO.  My sources tell me that NEO stands for NeXT's
Excellent Objects, although Sun officially denies it.  There are now
two completely separate code-trees: one at NeXT and one at Sun.  The
Sun version is deeply tied into the static binding of C++.  Basically
messaging is being added as an option on top of Sun's static view of
the world.  They have a very slick way for Interface Builder to
access Corba objects on the network.  The network Corba objects would
just show up as icons in Interface Builder.  Sun would not release
figures on what percentage of their customers use NEO, but they did
indicate that eventually NEO would be rolled into the mainstream
solaris release.

 4. NEXT IS REALLY MOVING TO NT
In my December 1st Newsletter, I indicated that the NT port was not a
serious effort because they did not make the investment to fix the
GNU debugger and were just using the Microsoft linker/debugger which
did not support Objective-C native-mode debugging.  That has now
changed.   NeXT is now making a significant investment in moving to
Windows NT.  They moved their 18 developers from porting NextSTEP to
Berkeley Standard UNIX to porting OPENSTEP to Windows NT.   The new
release of the GNU debugger now works on Windows NT, although a few
bugs are still being worked on.     Does anyone know when the Gnu
Objective-C patches will become publicly available?

 5. NEXT MAY BE DROPPING MACH
First NeXT tried migrating to Berkeley Standard UNIX.  When that
proved too difficult, NeXT decided to move to Windows NT.   OPENSTEP
for NT has  a divergent code tree from the MACH code tree, and it
looks like MACH is being dropped.  Currently NextSTEP is using an
older version of the GNU debugger than is the OPENSTEP on Windows NT
project.  So much for keeping their black and HP hardware customers
up to date.   At least the Sun customers can move to NEO.  HP
customers are upset, but it is their own fault for not having a
backup plan in case something happened to NeXT.

 6. STEVE JOBS IS ACKNOWLEDGING POWER POLITICS
It looks like the reason that NeXT is abandoning their MACH operating
system is because they have chosen not to compete against Netscape.
Netscape is the 800-pound gorilla that sets the standards in the
pInternet market, and companies are desparate to work with it.  In
exchange, companies have to agree not to tread on Netscape's turf, or
else.  So NeXT is positioning itself as an add-on component to
Netscape servers, rather than as a competing server.   That being the
case, there is no reason to keep the operating system; in fact, it is
a liability.   Congratulations to Steve for responding to power
politics.

 7. NEXT LOOKS OVERCONFIDENT
Everyone in the NeXT community is talking about going public, and
acting on the assumption that NeXT will go public soon with high
probablity.  For example, NeXT employees are declining significantly
better paying jobs because of the perceived value of the stock that
they are currently vesting.   I agree that NeXT is doing well but, in
my opinion, their confidence is overrated.   To me, NeXT is looking
solid for the first time.   They need to keep this up for two years
before they can go public.  A good reference case is Parc Place
Smalltalk.  They profitted from a major market shift to Smalltalk.
There has not yet been any such shift to Web Objects.  Furthermore I
believe that NeXT is making a major strategic error.   They are
planning on abandoning their proprietary operating system.  If they
do so, it will be difficult to distinguish them from other NT tool
vendors. For years I have said that they should abandon their
operating system, and they failed to do so.  Now, just as they are
about to abandon MACH,  I see a reason for them to keep the operating
system.  Web servers need to run on operating systems that are
optimized for serving Web applications.   Sun's Solaris does well as
a general purpose sever; Silicon Graphic's IRIS is good for serving
video; NeXT's MACH could have been optimized for serving three-tier
web applications accessing corporate databases.   This would have
been a very significant niche, one that easily justifies going
public.  A lot of people in NeXT are also saying this.  Let me help
them be heard.    I would be interested in your opinions on the
matter, and a discussion of the technical issues.   What operating
system modifications would be required to make Mach an optimal web
server?  How would it then compare to Solaris, and NT?

 8. BEHIND THE WEB MANIA DEMO
During the demo, Steve Jobs showed a Windows 95 Netscape client
accessing a Web Objects server tied into the Official Airline Guide
(OAG) Mainframe, and booked a reservation for a United Flight, which
he then confirmed by telephone.    Many people were impressed with
the demo; I was impressed by what went on behind the scenes.  At one
point, Steve clicked on the month of March, with no response.   The
developers in the back room dynamically loaded in the March calendar,
and when Steve clicked the next time, the correct image appeared.   A
very impressive demonstration of real-time software development,
which I suspect NeXT did not do enough to highlight.  To their
credit, the whole show was only conceived a month ago.

 9. OPENSTEP FOR WINDOWS 95 DROPPED AS EXPECTED
In March of last year, I predicted that OPENSTEP for Windows 95 would
not happen.  There was no mention of it at Web Mania.  It was good
confirmation that market hype cannot overcome technical limitations.

10. D'OLE AND EOF FOR NT EVALUATION
I have on my desk EOF 1.1 for Windows NT, and D'OLE 3.5 for Windows
NT.   I am looking for someone to evaluate the products and write a
review in time for the next newsletter on March 1st.  D'OLE does not
require NextSTEP, instead it uses the Microsoft Visual C++ Linker and
Debugger.

11. ERRATTA
There were a number of errors in the Web Mania presentation.  Allow
me to correct them for NeXT.  Web Objects has competition.   The
customers all know that.  NeXT does a disservice to its customers by
failing to educate them on how Web Objects compares to its
competition.  Perl, and SGI scripts are used for automating Web
Servers.  The language vendors such as Smalltalk and I believe Delphi
offer Web Server automation tools.  The database vendors are
certainly offering Web-Form based interfaces.  Other tools are
available on the Macintosh.   Please let me know if there are any
tools you recommend as an alternative to Web Objects, and I will
publish the list next month.  Please include your comments on how the
tools compare to Web Objects.

Despite Sun's potentially buying apple, it is extremely unlikely that
Web Objects will be ported to Macintosh.   The technical issues are
significant, and the owners of the GNU compiler  (The Free Software
Foundation) are against a Macintosh port because they dislike Apple's
business practices in the copyright area.

12. OBJECT DATABASE MARKET SURVEY
NeXT is focussed on connecting Relational Databases to the Web.  How
much interest is there from the newsletter readers in Object
Databases?  What applications are you interested in building on an
object database?  What characteristics are you looking for in an
Object Database?  What databases have you considered?  Has the era of
Object Databases arrived, or are we still waiting?

13. IS YOUR COMPANY HIRING?
If your company is looking for NextSTEP developers, consider using
this NextSTEP newsletter.  The newsletter reaches some 2400 people,
mostly NextSTEP developers and the subscription list is growing
rapidly.   The newsletter is a very effective way to find just the
right kind of person for your position.

14.NEXTSTEP DEVELOPERS NEEDED
If you are interested in any of these job opportunities, please give
me a call at [phone].  You can also NeXTMail me an RTF version
of your resume, or fax it to me at [phone].   I can treat your
resume in great confidence, or I can multicast it to all the hiring
managers I know.  Let me know what I can do for you.

14a MANAGE A $20 MILLION DOLLAR NEXTSTEP PRODUCT
This is probably the largest NextSTEP  product in the world.   They
need someone to manage the entire  thing.   It is a financial
application, so the company is wealthy, and it is an important
position, so you will be well treated.   There will be 50 people
reporting to you.   You will be based in Texas.

14b BECOME A NEXTSTEP PROJECT MANAGER
This is an opportunity to put your career in hyperdrive and become
the project manager for a 7-8 person project currently being
developed and eventually deployed internationally.   You do not need
much management experience for this position, but you do need an
ability to think in terms of schedules, deliverables, and resources
required.  The company is willing to offer a salary of $65-70K,  and
if you are really good,  have no relocation expenses, and are willing
to wait for their management to approve more money, you might even
get up to $75K.   It is a year-long project, that will probably take
a bit longer, and when it is successfully completed, your
opportunities will be fantastic.   The project is located in Boston.

14c BECOME A NEXTSTEP CONSULTANT
This is an opportunity for people who have 6 months or more of
NextSTEP experience to become a NextSTEP consultant .   It is a
one-year-plus project  located in Boston. When the assignment ends
you will be an experienced NextSTEP consultant with great
opportunities.   I expect the position will pay $50 per hour, but the
client will go up to $60 /hr they need to in order to find a good
person.  They will also go higher for someone with greater
experience.   AT $50/hr the position pays $100,000 for a 50 week
year, so it looks like a good opportunity for someone with 6 months
experience.   I was a consultant on this project, and it is a very
interesting project with a large number of different software
platforms being integrated together.  I highly recommend this
company.  The positions are in Boston.

14d NEXTSTEP CORPORATE GURU NEEDED
This is opportunity to become the corporate fountainhead for NextSTEP
related information.  The ideal candidate should know the internals
of  NEXT's product line,  and should ideally know all the key support
people at NeXT.  The company is building a challenging Wide-Area
Distributed application, with a central corporate database  and 30
regional databases.  The company is using  EOF, Foundation Kit, PDO
and Sybase, and will be connecting to Informix.   The company is
getting beta versions of OPENSTEP for NT, D'OLE, and WebObjects.   NT
experience is a plus.    The company is in the San Francisco Bay
Area.

14e OBJECT DATABASES IN AUSTRALIA
I am looking for a person with Objectstore or OO database experience
who knows some NextSTEP and wants to work in Sydney, Australia, for a
while.  Sydney is a great city: clean, interesting, beautiful.  I was
just there on vacation.   All visa issues will be taken care of.

14f WEB (OBJECTS) MASTER SOUGHT
The San Francisco Bay Area company is looking for an experienced NeXT
developer to be their Web Master.  They are about to get heavily into
Web Objects, and need someone who knows a lot about the web to lead
the way.

15.BPG NEWS
My wife and I just bought a new house in Menlo Park, California
within walking distance of Kepler's Book Store.   If you are near
there and would like to get together, please let me know.

16. HOW TO SUBSCRIBE
This newsletter is published monthly.  Subscriptions are provided
free.  If you would like to subscribe, please send email to
[e-mail].  I am very interested in subscribing email
distribution lists.  Please specify whether you prefer NeXTMAIL or
ASCII mail.   Feel free to tell me a little about how you are using
NextSTEP.









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