4 ms·
As noted in the comments of the article, Jobs was a big fan of Concurrence which was developed on the NeXT platform by Lighthouse Design. http://en.wikipedia.o
by arn 15y ago
As noted in the comments of the article, Jobs was a big fan of Concurrence which was developed on the NeXT platform by Lighthouse Design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design
Wikipedia also says that's what he used:
Prior to using Keynote, Jobs had used Concurrence, from Lighthouse Design, a similar product which ran on the NeXTSTEP and OpenStep platforms
Jobs spoke highly of Lighthouse design during the 1997 WWDC video that was circulating around recently. Keynote was inspired by Concurrence. People noticed the similarities right away: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=218463&postcount=33 http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=218463&postco...
- mturmon 15y agoRoger Rosner, one of the founders of Lighthouse (before Jonathan Schwartz was in the company), now bears the title "VP iWork", and gave the demo of "Pages in the Cloud" for the WWDC keynote. Roger's demo starts at minute 92 in the keynote, http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2011/ http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2011/ . So yeah, Jobs seems particularly interested in the relationship of NeXT, Lighthouse, and iWork/Keynote.
- btilly 15y agoIn fact at one point Apple threatened a patent lawsuit against Sun, and Sun responded by pointing out that they could easily sue over how similar Keynote was to Concurrence. Neither lawsuit ever got filed. See http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/former-sun-ceo-schwartz-discusses-apple-lawsuits-and-microsoft-royalty-demands-20100310/ http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/former-sun-ceo-schwartz-d... for verification.
- rbanffy 15y agoSigh... Imagine if McNeally decided to base his Office-killer on Lighthouse's codebase instead of StarOffice... It could have actually killed Office.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoSadly no it couldn't. Office's dominance or otherwise isn't down to functionality, it's down to corporate habit, compatibility, user familiarity and a big ol' dose of FUD about using something different. Until you find a way to deal with those for major corporate clients you could produce the best productivity suite in the whole world and you still wouldn't shift Office.
- Steko 15y agoStrongly disagree here. Functionality wise, Office (read Excel and Word) murdered everything else in the early-mid 90s. There are certainly other reasons that contributed greatly to Office's monopoly but I don't see FUD as one of any consequence.
- Tyrannosaurs 15y agoI'm not saying that's how it got where it is, I'm saying that's one of the things that's keeping it there.
- neilk 15y agoAgreed, but just because they dominated a competitive field with features doesn't mean that strategy will work now, where there's a near-monopoly.
- Duff 15y agoNo way! Look at the Office 2007 transition. They fundamentally changed the UI, broke alot of (poorly conceived and implemented) customer-implemented applications and changed the file format. They were in many respects new applications. I worked for a very large organization that very strongly considered a major embrace of OpenOffice. The lawyers loved it, ODF scratched number of political itches, and Microsoft Office spend is incredible. User preference is weak when you're converting a $10,000,000 annual Office subcription spend into $500k of support staff expenses. Problem was, when the time for talking ended and testing began, the application was universally reviled. The problem wasn't that users didn't like the apps, but they couldn't get things done.
- spitfire 15y agoThe Lighthouse design apps got me through college. I wrote all my papers in openwrite with mathematica on a NeXT turboslab. Truely fantastic software years ahead of everything else. I still want a native Quantrix clone on osx. (Java just won't do.)