By Dan Ruby

One measure of NEXTSTEP’s superiority as a development environment is the exceptional suite of third-party applications that runs under it. This month, we honor the best of those products with our Best of Breed (BoB) awards for NEXTSTEP product excellence.

In naming the awards, we resurrected a phrase that was once commonly used at NeXT to suggest that NEXTSTEP offered better application-software choices than other operating environments. Two or three years ago, that was not truly the case. But last year, the editors and reviewers at NeXTWORLD have witnessed an explosion of new software that really does live up to the name Best of Breed. In some cases, the products are designed with similar functionality to traditional best-sellers on other platforms, but with added features or improved performance. In other cases, the products embody entirely new approaches that improve on familiar software models.

Best of Breed trophies were awarded in 14 product segments and three special categories. To keep the project manageable, we defined the product categories as broadly as possible, so in some cases competing products were not necessarily directly competitive. For example, instead of individual awards for word processing and desktop publishing, we have a single category for document creation.

The judging panel was composed of 12 NeXTWORLD editors and contributing reviewers. The judges met numerous times and exchanged voluminous e-mail before reaching decisions on the nominees and winners.

To be as timely as possible, products were eligible for consideration if they were in wide beta release by April 25, 1993, and had shipped by the opening of NeXTWORLD Expo. Several nominated products – Pages from Pages Software, Frontface from nPoint, and Complete Access from Ocean Software – were scratched at the last minute when they failed to meet the second qualification.

The Best of Breed winners were announced at a gala awards ceremony during NeXTWORLD Expo. Practicing what we preach, we used many of the products honored here to produce the event. In particular, we want to thank Talus Imaging and Communications Corporation for its assistance in preparing the slide presentation for the BoB ceremony.

The 1993 BoB Awards are just the beginning. As hotly contested as some of our award categories were this year, we expect that our Best of Breed choices will be even harder to make next year, now that NEXTSTEP for Intel Processors is bringing its software base to a much larger potential market.

No show is complete with just blue-ribbon winners. The NeXT year past also boated plenty of mutts, mongrels, and crossbreeds. Here’s our solute to the people, products, and events that made NeXT-watching entertaining during the last 12 months.

Most Over-Hyped Piece of Vaporware Consistently Mentioned in Conjunction with NEXTSTEP:

Windows NT by Microsoft

Most Confusing Upgrade Path:

Lotus, for forcing Improv 1.0 users to move to Windows in order to user Improv 2.0

Most Aggressive Contestant for Smallest Potential Market:

Talus, which would fight to the death for the rights to rubles

Most Eagerly Anticipated Nonproduct:

NeXT RISC Workstation

Most Irritating Capital Offense:

NeXTstep, er,

NeXTSTEP, er,

NEXTSTEP

Best Severance Package in the Industry:

Former NeXT President Peter van Cuylenburg

Reverse Polish Notation Award:

Hewlett-Packard, which plans to replace Drag and Drop with Drop and Drag

Greatest Concentration of NEXTSTEP Knowledge:

General Magic employee cafeteria

The Addams Family Award:

Uncle Fester from Appsoft; Morticia from Millennium; and Lurch from Adamation

Best Dressed at a Convocation:

Don Frisbee, Chairman of the Board, Reed College Board of Trustees

Most Brutal Customer Purchase Plan:

Sun Microsystems’ buy-and-grind program

Celluloid Hero Award:

Glenn Reid, for his uncanny resemblance to Michael Douglas's vigilante character in Falling Down

Lost in the Ozone Award:

Intel, for the Pentium processor’s contribution to global warming

Most Innovative Customer Service Policy:

Neuron, which shipped faulty fax-modems and then closed its doors

Would You Like Fries With That? Award:

NeXT, for the "Happy Meal" evaluation kit offering no upgrade path

Beauty is Skin Deep Award:

Appsoft, for designing packaging before software

Best Excuse For Anything Not Done in Q3 ’93:

"I was at Andy Stone’s party."

Breakfast of Champions Award:

John Perry Barlow, who couldn’t decide if it’s a magazine or a nutritional supplement

Angus Demming Quality Award:

Pages Software, which will ship no app before its time

Most Dramatic On-Again, Off-Again, On-Again, Forget-About-It Sale:

JP Morgan

Least Journalistic Integrity:

G. Pascal Zachary, whose warmed-over Wall Street Journal hit piece appeared on the first morning of NeXTWORLD Expo.

Oliver Stone Conspiracy Theory Award:

Millennium Software Labs, which combines secrecy with salesmanship

By John Perry Barlow

Winston Churchill once said that there is no meal quite so nutritious as that of one’s own words. In that case, the astonishing NeXTWORLD Expo ’93 certainly improved my diet. (Actually, I found Expo a cornucopia in general...but I digress.)

As you may recall, I last used this space to write what might be called a premortum of NeXT, saying that if NeXT were anything but dead or mighty moribund by late May, I would use the occasion of Expo to eat my own words.

Well, I wish to hell we used tastier newspring for this rag.

Not only does it appear I still have Steve Jobs to kick around, I may have a longer future in this community than I could have imagined back in March. And no, I don’t believe my faith in this most recent and miraculous resurrection is simply a product of the ol’ Reality Distortion Field.

For one thing, the RDF – or at least that large part of it that relies on smooth theatricality – was barely discernible during Steve’s keynote speech. He suffered a series of audio problems that would have strained the patience of Job, let alone Jobs. He was down to his hole cards, and they looked surprisingly good.

Of course, he’s still got NEXTSTEP, which most sensible people who have actually experienced it agree is the best – I could say tastiest – operating system in the universe. (I ran into Sun founder Bill Joy on the plane to Expo and he expressed both this sentiment and his genuine sorrow over what both of us, at that point, took to be its last hurrah.)

But now we’ve got NEXTSTEP on hardware that doesn’t require a crazy act of faith to buy. NEXTSTEP for Intel shipped on schedule, it works, and it’s packing a whole bunch of cool new features.

Further, NeXT has lined up a very credible group of computer manufacturers, nice beige outfits like Dell and Epson, who will preload NEXTSTEP on the machines they market and sell.

Most importantly, NeXT now has the ObjectEnterprise arrangement with Hewlett-Packard, which will provide terrific integration, depth, and development speed to any company using HP servers and NEXTSTEP clients.

In the wildly unlikely event that I were running MIS for some oil-futures brokerage house, I would go ahead and gamble on NEXTSTEP whether or not UnixWorld knows of its existence.

There remain a couple of watch-outs that might bear attention. I’ll get into those next month. But right now, I’ve got that nice feeling I get after dinner.

By Geoffrey Moore

As a consultant reviewing NeXT’s 1993 marketing strategy, I’ve read a lot of doomsday reports and analyses of the company’s prospects. But my own assessment is that the sky isn’t about to fall on NeXT. The company’s destiny, in fact, is in its own hands.

NeXT is a case study in the "chasm", a concept related to the Technology Adoption Life Cycle: Whenever a radically innovative product is introduced, it will go through a cycle of acceptance by innovators and early adopters before winning over the early majority, the late majority, and finally, the laggards. As the cycle moves for a market dominated by visionaries to a mainstream market dominated by pragmatists, there is an adoption lull – what I call a "chasm" – during which there is fundamentally no market.

NeXT is experiencing this chasm even as I write. It has successfully captured the enthusiasm of the early market – witness the virtually universal accolades given to NEXTSTEP – but is now floundering in search of a loyal following that could give it a sustainable mainstream market. Indeed, NeXT hit the chasm head first in 1992 and, recognizing that, abandoned its hardware shortly afterward.

Whenever a company hits this chasm, everyone in the industry believes the company is finished. But this isn’t the case. First, the chasm is inevitable, like adolescence – painful beyond belief but essential to growth. Second, crossing the chasm is a well-understood discipline, with well-established principles that NeXT’s marketing organization is following. Third, it is far easier to cross the chasm carrying NEXTSTEP rather than a bulky Cube. Finally, the tougher the chasm is to cross, the higher the reward – if it’s hard for the innovator, it’s hard for the followers. The chasm can be a great moat.

To cross that chasm, the company must accomplish some key goals in the near future. NEXTSTEP is the first comprehensive object-oriented operating system, so it must position itself correctly relative to the other operating-system alternatives. In this light, its competitors are going to be Cairo and Taligent – not UNIX, not NT, not Windows. And in this competition, NeXT has a two-year head start.

NeXT must also make objects commercially viable. Today, the universe of objects exists at the subprogram level; there are data objects and communications objects, text objects and window objects, and so forth. But at this level, objects are interesting only to computer scientists. This will all change when users hear about comprehensive libraries of objects with names like mortgage basket, currency hedge, or CD and know they can manipulate these objects – combining, trading, or monitoring them. Now the idea of objects becomes very interesting indeed, and as users commit more and more of their business practices to NEXTSTEP development, they become more and more vested in NeXT’s ongoing viability.

Given this, NeXT’s marketing strategy should capitalize on its head start by creating a critical mass of objects for one or more target customer communities. And NeXT is in a very good position to do this: NEXTSTEP is not only a superb product, it is relatively mature and available now on a low-cost open-systems platform; NeXT has already established a beachhead in the financial-services industry and recognized the need for partners with broader channels of distribution and support, reflected in the HP announcement; and NeXT has found at least one systems integrator, Systemhouse, which has already set up an object factory for NEXTSTEP.

But challenges exist. NeXT must remain focused. The sales force will find plenty of opportunities outside its target markets, so the company must adopt a clear discipline about how it will invest and when it will pass over opportunities, or at least park them under some other prime contractor.

The second challenge is money. A critical mass of objects is worth millions in the long term but is not likely to be a generator of short-term cash. Nonetheless, this is where the company must invest.

A third challenge is overcoming the Steve Jobs mystique, for it is the irony of chasm crossing that assets in the early market tend to be liabilities in the mainstream. Fortunately, however, there is a company just up the road from NeXT pointing the way to a solution. At Oracle, the Larry Ellison mystique is in the process of being overcome by the integration of increasingly autonomous layers of senior executives. If the model can work there – and it is showing every sign that it will – there's no reason why it can’t be ported south.

For the next two years, NeXT has the opportunity to control its own destiny. It should be able to cross the chasm, solidify its beachhead in an initial target market, and begin to branch out from there. How far that branching out will go is anybody’s guess, but there is no reason that this point to set any limits on it.