Roger Rosner, one of the founders of Lighthouse (before Jonathan Schwartz was in the company), now bears the title "VP iWork", and gave the demo of "Pages in the Cloud" for the WWDC keynote. Roger's demo starts at minute 92 in the keynote, http://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2011/ .

So yeah, Jobs seems particularly interested in the relationship of NeXT, Lighthouse, and iWork/Keynote.

In fact at one point Apple threatened a patent lawsuit against Sun, and Sun responded by pointing out that they could easily sue over how similar Keynote was to Concurrence. Neither lawsuit ever got filed. See http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/former-sun-ceo-schwartz-d... for verification.

Sigh... Imagine if McNeally decided to base his Office-killer on Lighthouse's codebase instead of StarOffice...

It could have actually killed Office.

Sadly no it couldn't.

Office's dominance or otherwise isn't down to functionality, it's down to corporate habit, compatibility, user familiarity and a big ol' dose of FUD about using something different.

Until you find a way to deal with those for major corporate clients you could produce the best productivity suite in the whole world and you still wouldn't shift Office.

Strongly disagree here. Functionality wise, Office (read Excel and Word) murdered everything else in the early-mid 90s.

There are certainly other reasons that contributed greatly to Office's monopoly but I don't see FUD as one of any consequence.

I'm not saying that's how it got where it is, I'm saying that's one of the things that's keeping it there.

Agreed, but just because they dominated a competitive field with features doesn't mean that strategy will work now, where there's a near-monopoly.

No way!

Look at the Office 2007 transition. They fundamentally changed the UI, broke alot of (poorly conceived and implemented) customer-implemented applications and changed the file format. They were in many respects new applications.

I worked for a very large organization that very strongly considered a major embrace of OpenOffice. The lawyers loved it, ODF scratched number of political itches, and Microsoft Office spend is incredible. User preference is weak when you're converting a $10,000,000 annual Office subcription spend into $500k of support staff expenses.

Problem was, when the time for talking ended and testing began, the application was universally reviled. The problem wasn't that users didn't like the apps, but they couldn't get things done.

Office 2007 was a pretty specific case where MS gave people an opportunity. The UI hasn't changed that much since Office for Windows arrived and it won't be repeated for at least a decade, probably more.

As an aside, the interesting thing is once people get their heads round the UI they pretty much universally like it, it's just the instant reaction that's so bad.

That's my point -- you can change stuff and people will deal with it, as long as it's better.

Take an extended tour of OpenOffice for an afternoon, then use Office 2010 for a few minutes. It's no contest.

I did try OpenOffice for a month (pre-Office 20070 and you're right, it's horrible.

But even if it was functionally equivalent there are still reasons Office wins - because it's safe and because it's the defacto standard.

Even the cost isn't that big a deal for companies because they get security in exchange and that's one of the things big companies value above all else.

Imagine if Sun had stayed in the openstep project. You'd have gotten osx in 1996 rather than 2001. and it'd have the lighthouse apps to go with it.

That would have been power.

The Lighthouse design apps got me through college. I wrote all my papers in openwrite with mathematica on a NeXT turboslab. Truely fantastic software years ahead of everything else.

I still want a native Quantrix clone on osx. (Java just won't do.)