Lighthouse design
Lighthouse Design Ltd. was an American software company that existed from 1989 to 1996. The company developed software for NeXT computers that ran under the NeXTStep operating system . Lighthouse was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan I. Schwartz , Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner in Bethesda , Montgomery County , Maryland , but later moved to the city of San Mateo in California . In 1996 the company was taken over by Sun Microsystems .
history
Two of the first products Lighthouse developed were Diagram! and Exploder . Diagram! was a program for creating program flow charts , similar to Microsoft Visio , in which the objects were connected to one another via "smart links ". Exploder was a programming tool for storing objects in Objective-C in relational databases . Lighthouse marketed Diagram! himself and in 1991 relocated Exploder to the newly founded startup company Persistence Software . On June 25, 1999, Persistence Software went public.
Lighthouse continued to develop its own products. A separate office package for NeXTStep was brought onto the market, with ParaSheet , a traditional spreadsheet software , Quantrix , a program based on Lotus Improv , Diagram !, the project management tool TaskMaster and a presentation program Concurrence . Lighthouse only had eighteen developers. Steve Jobs called Quantrix 1997 the best spreadsheet he has ever used. Lighthouse took over Lotus Improv because Lotus did not want in-house competition for 1-2-3.
Sun began a partnership with NeXT in the early 1990s to develop OpenStep - primarily a cross-platform version of the lower layers of NeXTStep. OpenStep should provide a NeXT-like environment for every possible operating system, in Sun's case Solaris . Sun had big plans for distributed IT environments, with users using OpenStep as a desktop solution and servers running their own SunOS operating system in the back office area , which handle the computationally intensive processes. Communication was supposed to run via NeXT's Portable Distributed Objects technology, which was also known as Distributed Objects Everywhere , later NEO.
In the summer, Sun finally acquired the company for 22 million US dollars and turned Lighthouse Design into an internal OpenStep application group. Sun CEO at the time, Scott McNealy , had the vision of making his company a real competitor to Microsoft , and to do that he needed an application similar to Microsoft Office . The products from Lighthouse were not equivalent, but could have been developed into a powerful competitor through further development.
Despite the successful integration of Lighthouse, Sun devoted more attention to frontend applications and neglected the DOE / NEO idea with OpenStep. The new strategy was called " Java Everywhere" . Java was seen as a better alternative to entering the application market because it worked on all platforms, not just those it supported like OpenStep. Soon after, Lighthouse was incorporated into the JavaSoft division and called the Java Applications Group .
The only problem was that the graphical user interface from Java was only a weak imitation of the OpenStep GUI and any attempt to port the applications from Lighthouse to Java seemed almost impossible. In addition, Sun worried that after releasing its own office suite, the OpenStep platform might be less interesting for other developers. Ultimately, the idea of competing with Microsoft in the office software market was abandoned for several years until Sun took over the Hamburg software manufacturer Star Division and its software package StarOffice in 1999 . Jonathan I. Schwartz , the former Chief Executive Officer of Lighthouse, said the old office suite was not offered to the public again.
Until February 4, 2010, Jonathan Schwartz was CEO and President of Sun Microsystems.