Programming Windows: Meanwhile, in Cupertino (Premium)

In March 1996, Steve Jobs experienced a professional nadir when he appeared on stage at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC). The theme that year was “building Internet applications,” and the software giant promised that executive vice president Paul Maritz would present Microsoft’s strategy for integrating the PC with the Internet how Win32 and OLE developers could “extend their investments in this area.”

At the time, Jobs was on the receiving end of over a decade of failure: his firm NeXT had never attracted a meaningful customer base, forcing him to switch strategies again and again in turn. NeXT originally offered expensive workstation-class computers for the education market, but it was eventually forced to drop the hardware and adapt its advanced, object-oriented NeXTSTEP operating system into a cross-platform programming environment and application layer called OpenSTEP that would run on successful enterprise platforms of the day, including Sun Solaris and Microsoft’s Windows NT.

Despite its business failures, NeXT had some key technical assets, among them a rapid application development (RAD) called Interface Builder that developers could use with the Xcode integrated development environment (IDE), and a web application framework called WebObjects that could create dynamic, data-driven websites at a time when most of the World Wide Web consisted only of static web pages with light gray backgrounds and blinking text. WebObjects, like most NeXT products, was far too expensive and years ahead of its time.

It was also the reason Jobs appeared at PDC just one year after he had testily explained to “60 Minutes” that the company hosting the conference, Microsoft, “had no taste.”

“They don’t think of original ideas, don’t bring culture into their products,” he said, clearly in a testy moment as Microsoft was flying high while NeXT was not. “I don’t have a problem with their success. I just have a problem with the fact that they make really third-rate products. They are very pedestrian … Microsoft is just McDonald’s.”

Onstage at the Internet PDC, Jobs employed the fake humble persona that would later become quite familiar to fans and critics alike after his return to Apple. But on that day in March 1996, Jobs was an outsider, a has-been. And it’s unclear whether the Microsoft-centric crowd at PDC had any idea what to expect. I assume it was eye-opening to most. It certainly was to me, as I ordered a VHS tape of a nearly identical WebObjects presentation by Jobs via the NeXT website that year and I watched it again and again, transfixed. Both by his presentation style and by the futuristic web software he was shilling.

Unfortunately, WebObjects, as noted, wasn’t cheap. Potential customers who called NeXT by phone---the only way to discover pricing in the mid-1990s---were shocked to discover that a single license cost well over $50,000. There were few takers. Fo...

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