Industry bad-boy Steve Jobs stormed into Unix Expo last Wednesday, used the keynote speech for an extended demonstration of NeXTStep, and slammed the Object Management Group’s efforts (CI No 1,795) as hundreds of people working on 3% of the problem. Jobs agreed that where standards make sense, let’s use them, but went on to claim that his NeXT Computer Inc has something much better, and will share it freely. Remote Objects, part of the next release of NeXTStep, includes the concept where a process can send a message to any other process in the same address space – and we will be extending that to any process on any machine. It’s much cleaner, and will be available within six months. And Jobs revealed that the NeXTStep environment was now running on four processor families internally, but would not confirm reports that iAPX-86 and Sparc versions of NeXTStep are on the cards. Jobs also said that he would be taking NeXT public within the next year and a half (CI No 1,793). Although he would not disclose sales and profitability, Jobs promised that when he did reveal the figures (give me one or two more quarters) they would be impressive. He gave the Wall Street Journal an estimate of $60m sales this quarter, putting a target of $150m this year in reach.
