WebObjects

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

But then towards the end of that era, they do start to have some success with WebObjects.

Can you tell us a little bit about that story? Because it seems like if Next hadn't ended up combining with Apple, there might have been another pathway for the company.

So the web, the World Wide Web, was naturally at home on Next.

So please, you know, don't don't shut down this computer by accident.

That's how small the web was at the time.

So WebObjects came later, six years after the web itself was invented.

And it was a breakthrough because it solved the problem that Steve was facing at Next.

as we all like to say.

WebObjects was a great product that cost $50,000 per server at one point, and I remember being in the room post-Apple merger when Steve announced the price was dropping to $699 and eventually to $0.

Our next sales guys, whose recent careers had been built on selling one or two copies of the $50,000 versions a month, were not exactly enthusiastic about this change.

We systems engineers, on the other hand, thought this was a great chance to get WebObjects in front of more people.

So anyway, we used to bring customers out to Redwood City for a day of meetings with sales, support, and engineering leaders.

And at the end, Steve Jobs would drop by for a little informal question and answer session.

So, this is an example.

We think we do too, and that's one of the reasons we've bundled it in Mac OS X Server.

After leaving Apple, he founded NeXT to build high end workstations for academia.

It never captured significant sales, but pioneered OS X's foundation and WebObjects.

At the same time, buying Pixar allowed him to steer computer graphics into mainstream entertainment with Toy Story.

The studio grew into a cultural juggernaut.