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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Sunday, January 30, 2005Webmania: NeXT Software launches WebObjects 1.0By any measure, Steve Jobs' Next was a huge failure. Losing billions of dollars over its decade-long lifetime, NeXT was first known as NeXT Computer, though it later changed its name to NeXT Software, and then finally NeXT, as it pathologically shifted its product focus to meet the ever-changing needs of the time. First, NeXT was a hardware company, making gorgeous but extravagantly expensive workstations that sold only in the low thousands over several years. A failure in the hardware market, NeXT shifted its beautiful NeXTStep operating system to other, more mainstream, hardware platforms, including Intel's 486, and eventually renamed the system to OpenStep. That, too, was a failure, so as the Web emerged as the next big thing, NeXT decided to use its object-oriented expertise to create an engine for developing dynamically generated Web sites. It was called WebObjects. And it would be the company's last major failure, though the product still exists today (So does OpenStep, of course, as Mac OS X). After that, NeXT found itself an acquisition target by Apple Computer, which was looking for a next-generation operating system. That it would choose the moribund OpenStep system is somewhat ironic: NeXT hadn't actively developed the system in years by that point.For those who don't remember what the Web was like in early 1996, however, WebObjects and other products like it were quite an innovative concept, and one might argue that NeXT--i.e. Steve Jobs, because as with Apple today, Steve Jobs was literally NeXT--was ahead of his time. In the video from which I took these screenshots, Jobs explains how WebObjects (or, as it turned out, other products like Microsoft's Active Server Pages) would take the Web from "Act One" (i.e. statically created Web pages) to "Act Two" (dynamically created Web pages with a database-backed backend). It's typical Steve Jobs, though you have to remember that at the time he had spent a decade in a loveless wilderness, moving from failure to failure, and his recent success at a re-energized Apple had yet to happen. Thus, it is a humbler Jobs that appears in this video, and there is precious little of the excited applause that occurs today when Jobs is basking in the glow of the Apple faithful at a MacWorld keynote. (Jobs does get some polite laughter when he discusses NeXT's "new pricing model" while a slide displays the price of the entry-level version of WebObjects is free. Ironically, Jobs killed the free version of WebObjects when he took over Apple; that product is $600 today.) Anyway. Here are some shots of the event. 
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