Jobs Says '90s Will Be Era of "Interpersonal Computing"
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
NEW YORK (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- The 1990s will mark
an era of a new kind of desktop computing, according to Steve
Jobs, chairman of NeXT Inc. and ousted founder of Apple Computer.
If the 1980s were the era of "personal computing," Jobs told a
group of analysts here last week, then the 1990s will be the era
of "interpersonal computing," an environment that transcends
connectivity, electronic mail, and shared data.
 
Jobs' remarks came during a speech to Salomon Brothers analysts
and clients at a two-day seminar on desktop computing. He began
by trying to explain the difference between PCs and workstations.
As he did in his monologue during the rollout of the NeXT
Computer last year, Jobs divided the world of desktop computers
into two camps, represented by the volumes of systems sold, with
parallels drawn to their distribution, support, and engineering
philosophies.
 
At the low end of the volume scale are supercomputers, such as
Crays, which are sold by the tens, Jobs said. Mainframes and
large minis from IBM and DEC sell in the thousands, while
workstations, such as Sun's, sell in the tens of thousands. These
products represent one camp. The other camp in Jobs' model
includes "high-performance PCs," represented by Compaq, that sell
in the hundreds of thousands, and entry-level PCs, such as IBMs
and Macintoshes, that sell in the millions.
 
The low-volume camp tends to use direct sales, while the
high-volume camp tends to use retail, Jobs said. The engineering
philosophy of low-volume systems stresses power, while that of
high-volume systems emphasizes ease-of-use; similarly, large
systems rely on people to support them, whereas small systems use
product design to minimize the need for support. In other words,
mass-producers could never afford to back up their computers with
the human resources typical of large systems, so they rely
instead on off-the-shelf software and add-ins, easy-to-use
interfaces, user diagnostics, and unbundled training.
 
Naturally, Jobs said that the NeXT machine bridges this gap,
because it delivers the performance of a workstation yet is sold
through retail, designed to be managed by the user, and
incorporates an intuitive graphical interface and program
development tools. But most important, he says, it integrates
capabilities that will take computers beyond mere networking or
file-sharing, into a new style of computing that stresses
interpersonal communication.
 
Jobs said he had come to this realization recently, after
observing his staff work with networked NeXT machines at the
company's headquarters. The ability to annotate e-mail messages
with sound and images and to send them simply by dropping one
icon onto another has opened up a new type of interaction between
employees, he said. The fundamental shift in work style enabled
by this technology will transform the workplace of the '90s and
elevate computers to a new plane of usefulness, according to
Jobs.
 
 
Coming to NeXT: Applications That'll "Blow People Away"
With typical bravado, NeXT inc. chairman Steve Jobs claimed that
by next summer there will be applications available for the NeXT
Computer that will "blow people away" and won't be available any-
where else. In the works are a spreadsheet, which Jobs declined
to name, that he said will make all others now available pale by
comparison. He called FrameMaker, a workgroup publishing package
for the NeXT, the "best package available" for desktop
publishing. "Application development for this machine is going
much better than we expected," Jobs told the Salomon Brothers
seminar. "We're way ahead of where I thought we'd be."
 
Sometime during 1990 NeXT will offer a machine with color
capability, and Jobs assured the audience that it will be
photographic-quality color, with 32-bits per pixel. The
demands of 32-bit color on a megapixel display will require
graphics acceleration, he said.
 
He would not elaborate on NeXT's plans for using Motorola's
upcoming 68040 chip, except to say that "everybody working
with the 68030 is looking at it." And he expressed no concern
over the Canon rewritable optical drive included with most
NeXT systems, which is incompatible with the emerging ISO
standard used by the Sony magneto-optical drive subsystem.
"Ours is better," he concluded.
 
Yet Jobs was realistic about the challenges NeXT faces. He
admitted that he wished the system were less expensive and
conceded that NeXT can't compete on scale with other
workstation players. "We don't have as many ad dollars to
spend," he said. His solution: "We'll only win by out-thinking
them and having better products."
 
With a software architecture already in place that Jobs
believes is at least 3 years ahead of the Mac, NeXT can "ride
the hardware cost curves down" while others are struggling
to implement new architectures without alienating their
installed base, he said.
 
NeXT, Jobs said, sees Unix as a means to an end, not an end in
itself. Referring to OS/2 without mentioning it, he said: "We
think Unix will win, for a simple reason: Why roll your own
when Unix is already there?" Microsoft and IBM face an uphill
battle to convert the world to OS/2; meanwhile, Jobs said,
"We spent our time writing something on top of Unix that is
incredibly rich."
 
Contact: NeXT Inc., 900 Chesapeake Dr, Redwood City, CA 94063;
(800) 848-6398.
 
                              --- Andy Reinhardt
 
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