Over in the UK touting the advantages of his NeXTStep object-oriented environment to the City of London’s financial services market, NeXT Computer Inc founder and chief executive Steve Jobs revealed that the long-awaited implementation of NeXTStep for Intel Corp’s 80486 architecture will not be generally available until the third quarter of next year. Plans for NeXTStep 486 were revealed at NeXTWorld Expo back in January, and the environment was to have gone into beta test in June: that won’t now happen until the New Year. Jobs claims there will be 250 third party developers working with the beta release by May and says a six month beta period will increase the robustness of the environment. Personal computer manufacturers like Compaq Computer Corp and Dell Computer Corp have been touted as potential OEM customers for NeXTStep 486 since details first emerged, but Jobs has nothing in writing yet. Although versions of NeXTStep for other architectures, including RISC CPUs, are expected, Jobs says there are definitely no plans to put NeXTStep on Sun. As well as NeXTStep, the NeXT Computer, which currently uses Motorola’s 68040 CPU, will also be upgraded to use RISC architecture. Jobs says the company has now decided on the RISC it will use, but declined to name it, or indicate when a RISC-based NeXT box would be available. NeXT has been widely expected to endorse Motorola’s 88000 RISC CPU as a matter of routine. However, much publicised defections from the 88000 camp have thrown the future of the part as a mainstream CPU product into doubt, and observers are wondering whether NeXT might not just hotfoot it straight to the IBM-Apple-Motorola PowerPC. In the past, Hewlett-Packard Co’s Precision Architecture RISC has also been mentioned as a possible direction. Jobs says NeXT has left its loss-making days behind and claims the privately-held company will be in a position to make a profit in 1993. However this is unlikely to be realised, Jobs says: he plans to raise spending on research and development and sales and marketing efforts. Jobs says NeXT has enough cash to keep it going for at least 18 months and that an initial public offering is now unlikely before 1994. He expects to have over 50,000 NeXT users by the end of the year – a figure he claims will double in 1993.
