A few weeks ago, amidst the barrage of pot-shots that NeXT Computer Inc chief executive Steve Jobs was taking at Sun Microsystems Inc, Sun president, Scott McNealy, privately swore Jobs was fried. Last week, McNealy got to turn the heat up under the skillet when NeXT co-founder and key NeXTStep architect Bud Tribble moved over to SunSoft Inc as vice-president of end-user software. The move, said to have been initiated by Tribble, will undoubtedly prove to Jobs that there are at least two kinds of sizzle. Tribble was unavailable for comment but left a statement voicing an interest in serving a volume market. However sources at NeXT claim Tribble lacked management skills and suffered a vote of no confidence prior to his departure. Tribble, one of the original Mac architects at Apple Computer Inc responsible for its now famous user interface design and less famous operating system, is one of the few real experts around on object-oriented programming. At SunSoft he will be working on the DOE Distributed Objects Everywhere side of the house, developing an object desktop and enhancing Solaris’s desktop productivity tools and information management software. In addition to managing all aspects of Solaris’s end-user environment, he will also be responsible for expanding SunSoft’s multimedia application programming interfaces. He reports to vice-president of the user environment Steve MacKay. One of NeXT’s six founders, he had management and technical responsibility for all aspects of NeXTStep including the object-oriented design and user interface. Meanwhile, NeXT has plucked up one of Sun’s men, hiring Bob Lawton, an Interactive Systems Corp legacy, away from Solaris-on-iAPX-86 product marketing to become its NeXTStep 80486 programme manager, a newly created position. It has also picked up Jeff Spirer, formerly in charge of the Intel Corp-IBM Corp relationship at Intel, to be NeXTStep 486 marketing manager.
