Steve Jobs describes how NeXTstep, software that let developers build apps 5-10 times faster, found its real market not with software companies but with large enterprises building internal tools. The company pivoted its sales strategy and grew four-fold in a year, mirroring how the Macintosh unexpectedly became a desktop-publishing machine.
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We came up with this software called NeXTstep, which lets you build apps 5 to 10 times faster than anything anyone's ever seen. And after you build them, they're deployable and usable by mere mortals, because it's really easy to use, this computer. And you can interoperate your custom apps seamlessly with a bunch of off-the-shelf productivity apps. So we go to these companies that use Suns and take 2 years to write their apps, or are thinking about using Suns, and they can write their apps in about 90 days on a NeXT. Now, if you're on Wall Street and you can write— you can create a new product in 90 days versus your competitor in 2 years, that's 8 new products you can field for their every one. And you can start to see the competitive advantage that can be created this way. Now, we had no idea that we were any good at this when we started NeXT. A lot of times you don't know what your competitive advantage is. When you launch a new product. When we did the Macintosh, we never anticipated desktop publishing when we created the Mac. Sounds funny, because that turned out to be the Mac's compelling advantage, right? The thing that it did not 1.5 or 2 times better than everything else, but, you know, 4 or 5 times better than anything else, where you had to have one. We never anticipated it. We anticipated bitmap displays and laser printers, but we never thought about PageMaker or that whole industry really coming down to the desktop. Maybe we weren't smart enough. But we were smart enough to see it start to happen 9 to 12 months later. And we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to focus on desktop publishing. And it became the Trojan horse that eventually got the Mac into corporate America, where it could show its owners all the other wonderful things it could do. Likewise, when we created NeXTSTEP, this revolutionary object-oriented software, that we have. Our target customer coming from the PC world, where shrink-wrapped apps were king, was Lotus and Adobe and WordPerfect and all the shrink-wrapped apps developers. And the purpose was to let them create their apps 5 to 10 times faster, these shrink-wrapped apps. And it worked. We have a ton of shrink-wrapped apps now, best of breed in almost every category. But it wasn't until early '91, early last year, a little over a year ago, that some really big companies came to us and said, you don't understand what you've got. The same software that allows Lotus to create their apps 5 to 10 times faster is letting us build our in-house mission-critical apps 5 to 10 times faster. And this is the biggest problem we've had. This is a huge problem for every big company and almost all medium-sized companies. And you have the solution in your hands, and you dummies don't even know it. And it took them about 3 months before we finally heard it. And last summer, we changed our whole sales and marketing strategy around to focus on that. And it's taken off like a rocket. And we grew about 4x last year, and probably grow about 2x this year. And our customer list is now very, very strong and growing like crazy. We just got back from spending a few days in DC and in New York. And we're talking to customers we only dreamed of talking to a year ago.
