Clawing back any credibility after the debacle of its withdrawal from the hardware manufacturing business looked a well-nigh impossible challenge for Steve Jobs and his NeXT Computer Inc, but the Redwood City, California company begins to look as if it could achieve it. The company has already won Hewlett-Packard Co and Sun Microsystems Inc as licensees – Sun plans to use NeXTstep as the front-end for its OpenStep version of Solaris, which will become the standard version of the operating system, while Hewlett-Packard will bundle a native version of the object-oriented operating environment with its workstations for users that ask for it – and now it is ready to announce Digital Equipment Corp as a licensee for NeXTstep on its Alpha RISC machines. Meantime Canon Computer Systems Inc in Costa Mesa, California has launched the Canon object.station 41 workstation, built around the Intel Corp 80486DX4/100 chip, which it says is built from the ground up to optimise NeXTstep. The new object.station uses a proprietary Canon video subsystem that speeds video throughput at NeXTstep’s native resolution while maintaining compatibility with the major video standards used on other personal computers. The object.station includes NeXTstep 3.2 pre-installed and a demonstration version of SoftPC from Insignia Solutions Ltd to enable users to run MS-DOS and Windows applications under NeXTstep. Out now, it costs $6,500 configured. Steve Jobs told the Wall Street Journal that he expects NeXT to move into steady profit with software sales of $50m this year, $8m in the first quarter, an expected $10m in the current quarter – actually down on the $11m from software in second quarter 1993. But he says NeXT is winning large corporate customers at 50 to 70 a quarter.
