San Francisco Ð They were supposed to explain their visions of object technology, but the five industry leaders sharing the podium at Object World ended up using much of the keynote for verbal fencing. When the dueling ended, it seemed that NeXT Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs, who emphasized "real objects today," had the advantage.
The panel featured the "rock stars" of the industry, including Philippe Kahn of Borland International, Taligent's Joseph Guglielmi, Steve MacKay of SunSoft, and Microsoft's Jim Allchin.
"The only thing we all have in common," said Jobs after two hours of demos and one-liners, "is that we all have to go to the bathroom."
Allchin, vice-president of advanced systems for Microsoft, opened the door to criticism by saying, "We haven't done a very good job at all of communicating what object technology is to Microsoft."
Emphasizing Microsoft's "evolutionary" approach to objects, Allchin outlined plans for object technology in Windows NT, including OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) technology.
But Borland CEO Kahn dismissed Microsoft, saying, "The only thing object-oriented about OLE is its name."
Kahn stressed the advantages of objects for end-user development and demonstrated an application developed by the San Jose Police Department using Borland's tools. But Jobs dismissed the applications as just another database front-end tool. "We'd better be careful about the way we use these [object-oriented technology] terms, or they'll end up meaning nothing," said Jobs.
SunSoft's MacKay, vice-president of user environment software, was also cautionary. "You can't shake objects out of a box and fix all the problems of a multivendor, heterogenous environment."
MacKay explained SunSoft's "phased approach" to its Project DOE (Distributed Objects Everywhere), including the ToolTalk object-oriented application messaging system and planned CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) implementation, called DOMF, to be introduced this year.
For his pitch, Taligent CEO Guglielmi outlined his vision of a "Generation III" operating system that is completely object-oriented. Although Guglielmi relegated NeXTSTEP to the category of "Generation II" environments, Jobs opened his demo by saying that he agreed with everything Guglielmi had described. "And I'm going to give you a free demo today," said Jobs.
On the verbal offensive in his critique of non-NeXT technology, Jobs seemed to steal the show with his demo of NeXT technology and announcement of conformance with OMG (Object Management Group) standards.