San Francisco Ð NeXT came to the Seybold Conference here with its first coherent plan for selling systems in the electronic publishing market. After months of struggling to define a distinct market in the publishing universe, NeXT has brought its developers in line around a strategy that positions its technology in both vertical and horizontal applications.
The computer-publishing conference was held September 23Ð25 at Moscone Center. "NPE [NeXT Publishing Environment] leverages the object-oriented nature of NeXTSTEP to enable customers to quickly build mission-critical custom-publishing solutions for workgroups," said Dave LaDuke, NeXT's publishing market manager. "These solutions can be completely customized in-house or assembled by users from off-the-shelf applications."
The strategy targets four market areas:
Third-party developers said that they were genearlly pleased by NeXT's new, inclusive definition of NPE.
"NeXT got sidetracked by the earlier debate over objects versus shrinkwrapped. These targets are reasonable and NeXT has a reasonable chance of meeting them," said Rand Schulman, marketing director for Pages Software, located in San Diego.
The company exhibited its new page-layout software running under NeXTSTEP '486 at the Seybold show.