NEWSWEEK: What’s so great about object-oriented programming?
JOBS: Software has become one of the key competitive weapons of the ’90s. So it’s important that we can create software much faster than we’ve ever been able to. There haven’t been big advances in the way we create software in over 20 years. It’s gotten worse. The Mac’s ease of use and now Windows made software harder to write for developers. Objects are the first real revolution in the way we write software to come along in the last two decades. And they let us write software 10 times faster.
People will eventually do four different things on the Web. The first is static publishing, where someone creates a Web page that doesn’t change unless they themselves change it. Second, dynamic publishing, where the computer constructs the Web page on the fly based on input from the user and information from a database. A perfect example is the Federal Express Web site, where you type in your package number and it tells you its delivery status with no human intervention. Third, commerce. To do it, you have to hook the Web up to your internal computer systems so you can take orders from the Web. And fourth is internal custom applications, in which a corporation puts its own applications-like a brokerage’s program to buy and sell stock–on the Web so that any department, whether it’s running Macs or PCs with Windows, can access it. The latter three of those four things are all custom software. We said, that’s what we’ve perfected over the last 10 years-the ability to write custom software 10 times faster.
Our new software-development tool, Web Objects, has connections that allow the computer to go out to a database of, for example, all the cars a company makes, and then sort them by make or price according to your specifications. And the objects can create Web pages by themselves. The programmer doesn’t have to know about connections to databases and networks, doesn’t have to know about connections to the Web. And you can write these Web applications 10 times faster.
I think the Web is the most exciting thing happening in computers today. It is really punctuating the movement of the computer from a computation device to a genuine communications device. Also, it’s very exciting because Microsoft doesn’t own it, and there is more innovation happening on the Web these days since anything I’ve seen since the early days of the PC market, since the Macintosh. On the Web, a little company can look as big as the biggest company in the world if they just put a lot of energy into their Web site.
The way to look at the Web is, it’s the ultimate direct-to-customer distribution channel. I think you’re going to see more and more Web sites where you feel like you’re driving, where you’re asking questions. It’ll go to a lot of different databases, pull out the information that you want to see and build a dynamic Web page just for you. You won’t be looking at a Web page that 3,000 other people are looking at. You’re looking at one that’s exactly what you want to see, whether it’s information on that new Chrysler Neon that you want to buy, with exactly the color you want and the dealers that have it in your area, or whether it’s Merrill Lynch showing you your portfolio of stock, updated every time you check in. It’s really going to be customized. They’re going to be much more responsive. And I think its going to happen pretty fast.
