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PDC 1996 Keynote with Bob Muglia and Steve Jobs [video]
- Austin_Conlon 7y agoHe takes questions from developers at 25:00.
- xmodem 7y agoWebObjects was very ahead of its time, but unfortunately crippled by its high price tag
- jasoneckert 7y agoThat statement also sums up NeXT in a nutshell.
- iamgopal 7y agoAlmost all apple products are high priced. Even the cheaper one.
- Austin_Conlon 7y agoThe high prices crippled the cube and cylindrical shaped ones.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- lostgame 7y agoThe cylindrical shaped ones were just crippled, de facto, according to Apple's own admission.
- rytis 7y agoI thought "charge more" is a good thing? /s
- coldtea 7y agoOn the other hand, a lot of Apple products have no as-good rival -- at any price -- at least for a year or so after their introduction. Consider the iPhone and the then Android phones (which appeared later anyway). Consider the iPad and the vastly worst first competing tablets (back in 2010 or so), which in addition cost $100-$200 more than the iPad. Consider Apple Watch today and what's available from the competition (at the same category, which includes e.g. the Samsung watches and so, I know there are e.g. Garmin watches that last 2 weeks, but they have different target group and functionality). Consider the AirPods as well. (And, again, for all of those, I'm talking at launch and for the first 1-2 years. For some of those we have decent competition now).
- blihp 7y agoApple products would be considered inexpensive compared to what NeXT charged. IIRC, a WebObjects license at the time was $50,000. There were good reasons for this, but when you hear 'NeXT was expensive' you really shouldn't be thinking Apple-level expensive... they were at another level.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoI always assumed they were mostly sold to academics and R&D departments. Super-expensive workstations were a thing back then, so NeXT were competing with other super-expensive desktops from SGI, Sun, etc - not with the Mac/Windows consumer market.
- blihp 7y agoExactly. So they had orders of magnitude fewer customers with orders of magnitude higher prices than Apple today. But by the time WebObjects became a thing NeXT was out of the workstation business so the price was purely for the software. The good news is that in the talk, Steve mentioned that the Enterprise WebObjects (probably the one you needed: EOF was for WebObjects what Cocoa was for OS X) license was $25k so it had started to drop. Even back then free was tough to compete with...
- rbanffy 7y ago> Even back then free was tough to compete with... At the time, even though it was easy to see that free software would eventually reach a critical mass and overtake all the system software space, the market was not nearly there. While I used a lot of Perl (which was free) to write dynamic pages, all my software was running on Solaris and IRIX on very expensive hardware. HTTP was served mostly by Netscape's proprietary server with some traffic on NCSA HTTPd. Linux, IIRC, had terrible SMP support back then and Windows was a joke.
- kartickv 7y agoWhy didn't they give WebObjects away for free? Since it's just software, it has no marginal cost to NeXT, and any NeXT workstations it sold would be profit. Put differently, any platform needs a critical mass to survive, and if they price it so high, it won't have that critical mass, causing it to die, in which case the development cost would be wasted. Surely people in the 80s weren't so dumb as to not understand network effects, so what am I missing?
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoIn 1996, pre-NeXT aquisition, I attended a 3 day WO seminar where they did a good job selling us on the product. But then the cost was revealed and my employer had no interest.
- TooCreative 7y agoDisplays with wrong aspect ratio for me. Which makes Steve Jobs look pretty fat. On YouTube, it has the correct aspect ratio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmCu97u35Ek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmCu97u35Ek How do we find the car of the uploader? Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1187/ https://xkcd.com/1187/ Some perspective on the presentation: At 13:20 or so, Jobs says "Of course you need a compiler, because a scripting language would be too slow for the server if it is used by a lot of users". Little did he know ... PHP was out for about a year when this presentation was given. Still lives today and powers most of the web.
- bibinou 7y agochange the video quality to High and you get the correct aspect ratio.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cma 7y agoBut Facebook compiles PHP into C++ or something right (I think now they have a newer approach than c++)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HipHop_for_PHP
- rgoulter 7y agoThe top-of-my-head story is that PHP5 was quite slow, Facebook's HHVM was PHP-compatible and fast. PHP7 was competitively fast with Hack. In terms of "performance needed for many users", Facebook doesn't use PHP (a "scripted language") for everything. etc.
- lclarkmichalek 7y agoIt's a JIT compiler nowadays: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/ https://github.com/facebook/hhvm/
- saagarjha 7y ago
- jka 7y agoThe segment from 18m10s onwards -- a demo of making a flight reservation via an application built for OAG -- is pretty wonderful in a tech-nostalgic kind of way. Simpler times!
- bluedino 7y agoDid WebObjects live on? I wonder if Apple could have positioned Mac OS X server to run that sort of thing
- protomyth 7y agoThey dropped the price but converted it to Java for version 5. Java just isn't suited for anything based on Cocoa. They stopped development so it didn't transition into the JavaScript driven world.
- Austin_Conlon 7y agoI've seen it in the URL when using App Store Connect, I'm curious as to what other services Apple uses WebObjects for.
- tootie 7y agoI was a dev when WebObjects was new and absolutely no one ever used it for anything serious. CGI was already the default standard for web servers by 1996 and by 2000 there was a raft of commerical products from Microsoft and Java-based systems that were adopted much more widely. Instead of Stack Overflow, we had Matt's Script Archive https://www.scriptarchive.com/ https://www.scriptarchive.com/
- setpatchaddress 7y agoDell’s online store would like to have a word.
- omarhaneef 7y agoWithout going back in time, one has the impression that people didn’t “see” a particular technology coming. You’ll hear people claim that a particular CEO didn’t see the web, or mobile, or VoIP and other technologies rising. But when you go back and read their work or view their videos — like this one — it’s remarkable how clear and detailed their vision is of how things will be. Jobs is famous for this so you might think it’s a cherry picked example but I think it’s largely true (no doubt you’ll find an exception) of almost any big time tech executive. They have a clear, detailed, largely accurate view of how things will turn out.
- Roritharr 7y agoI find this to be true at many levels. I'd even say that getting it wrong is rather the exception at that level, although there are of course the famous quotes where basically details were misjudged. I notice it in our industry (Accounting Software) a lot. All players, when talking to them on a C-Level basically know where the puck is going, but the capability to move the company there is for various reasons extremely different. This doesn't just mean that small agile startups have the advantage, there are also lots of moats and synergy requirements that can restrict new entrants of reaching the level necessary to perform at the expected level in the future.
- theferalrobot 7y agoAs an aside and for my own curiosity, where do you think accounting software is going in the future? (It isn't my industry but I hear occasional mentions of it more frequently than I would expect)
- Roritharr 7y agoLot's of vertical integration & automation, with the depth depending on business size. There are only a couple of "ground truth streams" flowing into a businesses accounting. Making sure you own as many as possible of them goes a long way towards automating the tasks necessary to properly model the business and do the accounting. I was referring to the entry barriers here because being able to offer for example a business bank account, credit card etc. with proper APIs to trigger payments and receive transactions in realtime still carriers regulatory hurdles in most countries that are not negligible, even if it got cheaper in most countries. Same goes for loans, factoring... Lot's of areas to earn money with, pretty much everyone in that space has it in their slidedeck as a revenue channel somewhere down the road. I could further elaborate but at the end of the day it's moving offtopic. I'd say predicting the future is less hard than arriving there.
- physicsguy 7y ago'Not really sure why anyone would wanna do that, but that's what you can do!' Web technology in a nutshell...
- alexis_fr 7y agoInteresting how he doesn’t mind criticizing his customers. He spent “a week” (3 devs) developing a service for this customer, probably asked them the permission to showcase it... Next thing you know, “I don’t know why anyone would do that” or, in the positive, other opinions like “We like Internet Explorer very much” etc. I’m not understanding whether it was a way to gain a connection with the developer audience, or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud. Also interesting is that he rehearsed the presentation several times using the production database. Perhaps dev/staging environment were not widespread at that time, and a separate Oracle instance would be expensive.
- solarkraft 7y ago> or whether it was a mistake to say that out loud Why should it be considered a mistake to say good things about a competitor? I know many company representatives avoid it very strictly, but to me it shows intelligence, honesty and awareness of the rest of the industry, which are all good things. Notably though Apple very rarely compares their products to competitors', because they want to show it as in a completely different class.
- Austin_Conlon 7y agoThis describes part of why I thought Steve Jobs interviews at the D conference were so interesting. Nowadays interviews with Apple executives are them just sticking to a PR script and pretending competitors don’t exist, except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi.
- rbanffy 7y ago> except maybe if it’s with Craig Federighi. He must be a decent stand-up comedian.
- imglorp 7y agoWhen you could buy a car under $10,000.
- coldtea 7y agoDo you know how much some enterprise software / specialized SDKs charged then and even today? Those are not uncommon prices... You can get into the million territory easily...
- gtirloni 7y agoI have no idea. Could you share some rough numbers?
- pizzapill 7y agoSAP - Price for the base package of a couple million. Price of customization can bankrupt international corporations.
- enjoy-your-stay 7y ago>Price of customization can bankrupt international corporations. Doesn't stop them trying though!
- reimertz 7y agoVery inspirational to see Jobs being so sure about what is the future of the web. Dynamic Servers.. Server-side rendering.. Almost like Windows, but in the browser.... At the same time, I feel sorry for him and his alikes; it most have been tough to constantly work upstream, trying to inspire people that just don't get it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- theboywho 7y agoI find it amusing to think that today's equivalent would have been kind of like if Mark Zuckerberg was introducing GraphQL.
- Austin_Conlon 7y agoZuckerberg seems similarly deflated in public appearances as Jobs was at the time.
- xeromal 7y agoI'd say a closer example would be Elon Musk. He definitely is * the face of the company * drives the products of his companies with a unified vision * works his ass off * is an asshole to people under him * a visionary and a bit eccentric Jobs has Musk beat on charisma though by a long shot. Musk is kind of Woz and Jobs combined.
- dboreham 7y agoI remember not understanding that talk.
- scotth 7y agoBring back this JavaScript logo! https://imgur.com/a/O4IVJum https://imgur.com/a/O4IVJum
- lr 7y agoStill my all-time favorite web framework. To date, I still find so many other frameworks lacking the vision that brought about WO.
- trixie_ 7y agoLooks like it's still kicking https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder https://github.com/wocommunity/wonder
- pyreal 7y agoI was already using the beta of Microsoft Active Server Pages when this presentation was given. ASP 1.0 was released in December 1996 and changed my web development career.
- tbyehl 7y agoBuried in this video[1] are a couple demo sites built on Internet Database Connector (IDC/IDX). IDC launched with IIS 1.0 in NT 3.51 SP3, late '95 or early '96. Microsoft was iterating incredibly fast -- the famous "Internet Memo" was mid-1995. https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keynote-with-Todd-Warren https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/PDC/PDC-1996/PDC-1996-Keyno...
- pyreal 7y agoThanks for this link! I was trying to remember the predecessor to ASP while watching the Jobs video. I hoped that one of the others might have contained an ASP demo, but never realized they would be still demoing IDC. I recall the pace of change being incredibly fast, as you said. I was experimenting with IDC for a client project at the time but quickly switched to ASP as soon as the beta became available.
- someonehere 7y agoStrange to see a Jobs keynote and you can see audience members getting up and leaving, “like who the eff is this guy?” A couple years later that mentality gets flipped on its head.
- ralfd 7y agoThere are other meteoric rises. Facebook is only 15 years old. I wonder if it must feel surreal to Zuck. Still, Steve Jobs has such a unique comeback story of being in 1996 head of two interesting but commercially mostly failing companies, one of which is shortly later being bought by an Apple skirting on going out of business and riddled by intense technical debt. And only a decade later he presents the iPhone and had Pixars stunning success.
- weinzierl 7y agoAt the beginning Jobs introduces a few websites: NeXT, Microsoft, Intel. Then, at 1:59 he mentions a fourth one but I can't understand what he says and there are no subtitles. Could anyone understand what website he mentioned? EDIT: I think it is Toy Story. I thought this was much later but apparently it fits the time frame. Unfortunately Wayback Machine doesn't have: 302 redirecting to Disney:-(
- watersb 7y agoI might have been at this one. Object remoting via NeXT Smalltalk (Objective C) messages seemed so much easier than CORBA or DCOM. Or Sun RPC. HP was a big supporter of the NeXT approach. It was a complicated time.
- blazespin 7y agoIt's one thing to talk about it, it's another to build.