NeXTWORLD Interviewed Steve Jobs (1992)

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NeXTWORLD Interviewed Steve Jobs (1992)<br>They discuss NeXT transition to software company. Jobs also had some thoughts about this competitors.<br>May 29, 2026

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From the Fall 1992 issue of NeXTWORLD magazine<br>Reinventing NeXT

Steve Jobs goes on the record about technology, marketing, and Ross Perot<br>By Dan Ruby<br>By May 1992, NeXT had completed its transition to a marketing strategy based on object technology and custom development. Steve Jobs was by turns evangelical, combative, and reflective as he sat down with NeXTWORLD Editor in Chief Dan Ruby for a wide-ranging discussion.

NeXTWORLD: It’s been six years since NeXT was founded. Are you where you thought you’d be?<br>JOBS: No, I would say we’re behind where I thought we would be. Not so much because we’re much different than a lot of companies, but I’m impatient. I think we’re like a year behind where I’d like to be.<br>We changed the whole strategy of our company last fall. We changed our marketing strategy. We changed our sales focus. We’ve been focused consistently on mission-critical custom apps for a little over six months and it’s really working.<br>Why is custom apps such a potent idea?<br>Getting applications written is the number one problem in corporate American information technology. And even though we’re downsizing to client-server computing and the apps are on the desktop, the bottleneck is still getting them written.<br>This is even more true when customers want to use computers for operational productivity as opposed to management productivity. You can’t buy shrinkwrapped software to do stock trading or run your hospital or do order processing. You’ve got to write custom apps. Now, in the past, these operational applications were written in COBOL or some more modern language on a mainframe or minicomputer. Starting in the very late ‘80s, some companies started downsizing to client-server computing. They could buy a Sun and spend like two years writing a good app, or as good as you could write on a Sun. Now, we roll in and say, look, you can write that custom app five to ten times faster on a NeXT<br>Who is writing all these apps? Is the market large enough to support a company like NeXT?<br>It’s incredibly important in some markets. Take financial services. When they roll out a new product it’s only three things: an idea, a sales force, and a custom app running on a desktop banging SQL databases on a server. Without the app there’s no new product.<br>Take health care, which is starting to explode. People in that industry are starting to realize they have to automate the core operational activities of that business. Or legal, which we think is a very ripe environment for writing some custom tools.<br>These are vertical markets, but we view custom apps as a horizontal benefit in the same way that desktop publishing was in 1985. Eventually, everybody is going to realize they need to have mission-critical custom apps.

The custom-apps strategy tends to de-emphasize the need for third-party apps.<br>No. I disagree. There was some concern at first on the part of our third-party developers. But we’re finding that it’s actually helping to sell more apps. When Apple focused on desktop publishing, Microsoft sold more spreadsheets because desktop publishing was the Trojan horse that got the Mac into corporate America. So mission-critical custom apps is the tip of our arrow, getting us into these major corporate accounts.<br>Some people have said that custom apps is a really smart strategy that gets NeXT’s foot in the door, but that it needs to be followed, or supplemented, by some other approach.<br>Well, I would say two things. Number one, we didn’t make up mission-critical custom apps. Our customers told us this. So this is a strategy that’s being generated by the marketplace, not by some marketing person in some secret room at NeXT We’ve hit bedrock. There’s a fundamental need that’s about to explode out there in the marketplace that requires object-oriented technology. And we’ve got a three- to five-year lead on any competitor.<br>Now, does that mean mission-critical custom apps aren’t going to get supplemented with other things? Of course not. We have the best collaborative-computing environment in the world.<br>What you used to call interpersonal computing (IPC).<br>You could give it any name you want. You could call it groupware. You could call it interpersonal computing. You could call it collaborative computing.<br>What do you call it these days?<br>Well, that’s not the biggest problem. The problem is that people are not running around thinking they have a problem. In other words, I don’t run into customers who are pulling their hair out saying my collaborative computing environment isn’t good enough, not the way people are saying they have to get their custom apps done faster.<br>So we have this wonderful thing, this collaborative environment. It’s the PC that everyone hopes is the PC of the mid-1990s....