New York Ð After establishing a pilot program with 50 NeXTstations in its emerging markets trading division, J.P. Morgan and Company has dropped the NeXT from consideration as the platform of choice in its global trading departments. Senior executives decided instead to standardize all development for trading activities in the C++ and Smalltalk programming languages.
Details of the decision, which caught many in the NeXT community by surprise, came from a leaked memo that appeared in the August 10 issue of Trading Systems Technology, a New York trade publication.
A spokeswoman for Morgan confirmed that NeXT was out, despite users' enthusiasm for the NeXT's development speed. Work done on the NeXT will be ported to Suns or Macs." Morgan has not said what it will do with the 50 NeXTs.
Sources attributed the decision to pressure from technological interest groups. "The project was a success. We had delivered all of the initial functionality [on the NeXT] we had committed to," said a source at the company, adding that Morgan's NeXTSTEP developers were "on the eve" of the first global implementation across three continents. "But the decision to switch was not a technological decision. It was a business decision. There was incredible pressure because of the sizable Sun and Apple group installed [here at Morgan]."
NeXT Financial Services Market Manager Jim McCrory agreed. "Political pressures in the bank won't let [the applications developed under NeXTSTEP] be deployed. There's a tremendous amount of resistance to change."
Morgan executives have made no decision on NeXT's future in other trading or banking divisions. But, McCrory said, "Morgan will look back at its past experience with NeXT and say, 'I shoulda married that gal I dated in high school.'