Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Jonathan Schwartz
Jonathan Schwartz is president and COO of Sun Microsystems. He's got a blog. He's a bright guy -- except for his tendency to diss my employer. I don't know him but he seemed familiar to me. I finally figured out why. Back when we were developing Improv for NeXT there was a small company called Lighthouse Design that developed cool NeXTstep applications. Jonathan was a product manager and then president of Lighthouse (see a picture here). We'd see them at product demos and NeXT conferences. Improv moved on to other platforms shortly before NeXT discontinued making its own hardware. But Lighthouse kept building more cool NeXTstep and then OpenStep applications. In 1996 they were acquired by Sun Microsystems.
What happened next is unclear. I don't think that Sun really knew what to do with Lighthouse. They also bought another OpenStep application startup called Sarrus Software. Sarrus had ported their calendaring application called "Pencil Me In" from OpenStep to Java. I talked to one of their developers back then. They used the Netscape IFC toolkit which was modeled after the NeXTstep AppKit. That made it easy to move from OpenStep to Java. Great, except that Sun didn't want two GUI toolkits for Java so they "partnered" with Netscape on development of Swing which effectively killed off IFC. The Lighthouse and Sarrus folks were put into the Java Applications Group under Jonathan Schwartz. As far as I know Sun never released any Java desktop applications based on these acquistions.
What happened next is unclear. I don't think that Sun really knew what to do with Lighthouse. They also bought another OpenStep application startup called Sarrus Software. Sarrus had ported their calendaring application called "Pencil Me In" from OpenStep to Java. I talked to one of their developers back then. They used the Netscape IFC toolkit which was modeled after the NeXTstep AppKit. That made it easy to move from OpenStep to Java. Great, except that Sun didn't want two GUI toolkits for Java so they "partnered" with Netscape on development of Swing which effectively killed off IFC. The Lighthouse and Sarrus folks were put into the Java Applications Group under Jonathan Schwartz. As far as I know Sun never released any Java desktop applications based on these acquistions.
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