Third-party NeXTSTEP developers reacted to NeXT's strategy reversal with cautious optimism about their long-term prospects while acknowledging they may face a near-term revenue shortfall.
"The big win is that NeXT-STEP will become a mainstream operating environment. Right now, NeXT has the best, most solid, most powerful, easiest-to-use, and best-to-develop-under operating environment in the world, bar none," said David Pollak, president of Athena Design in Boston. "It will be one of the two or three dominant operating environments of the next ten years."
"This move means new opportunity for everyone in the NeXT market," said W. Frank King, president of Pencom Software, who added that he sent two dozen roses to Steve Jobs the day after NeXT made its announcement. "Selling NeXTSTEP in the corporate market is not going to be easy, but when NeXT was selling hardware it couldn't even start the conversation. Now NeXT can at least make the bid."
"Long term, it's good for every-body. What we're really talking about is increasing potential real users of NeXTSTEP," said Scott Love, president of Millennium Software Labs in San Mateo, California.
Several developers, however, expressed concern about their sales prospects in the next six months, before NeXTSTEP for Intel is shipping in volume. "We don't expect to see a large in-stalled base of Intel users this year, so we need to continue selling our products to Motorola users in the meantime. With no new sales by NeXT, we may face tough going in the short term," said David Peter, president of Mountain View, California-based HSD Microcomputer U.S.
Marc Munford, marketing manager of Insignia Solutions in Andover, Massachusetts, echoed Peter's concerns. "The onus doesn't fall on NeXT but on its third parties. We are forecasting six months of very flat revenues."
Some developers doubted NeXT's prospects for success in the mainstream system-software market. "If Steve couldn't make it work in hardware, why would we believe he can succeed in software?" said one developer who asked to remain anonymous.
Few developers expressed concerns about possible competition from NeXT itself, which has said it plans to sell ObjectWare products and groupware applications. As NeXT supplements its system-software revenues with application software, it may squeeze into niches now occupied by third-party developers.
"I'd worry if they weren't planning to do that," said Randy Adams, president of Appsoft in Palo Alto, California. "I don't know of any operating-system software company that doesn't also have a business selling applications."