Lighthouse Design

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Lighthouse Design Ltd. was an American software company that operated from 1989 to 1996. Lighthouse developed software for NeXT computers running the NeXTSTEP operating system. The company was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan Schwartz, Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner, in Bethesda, Maryland. Lighthouse later moved to San Mateo, California. In 1996, Lighthouse was acquired by Sun Microsystems Template:Ref.

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History

Two of the first products developed at Lighthouse were Diagram! and Exploder. Diagram! was a drawing tool similar to Microsoft Visio, in which objects are connected together using "smart links" to contruct diagrams such a flow charts. Exploder was a programming tool for storing Objective-C objects in a Relational database. Lighthouse marketed Diagram! directly, and in 1991 spun off the Exploder into a new startup, Persistence Software. Persistence Software went public with an IPO on June 25, 1999.

Lighthouse went on to develop and acquire more software products, and marketed an office suite for NeXTSTEP, which included ParaSheet (a traditional spreadsheet), Quantrix (a spreadsheet program based on Lotus Improv Template:Ref), Diagram!, TaskMaster (a project management program), and Concurrence (a presentation program) Template:Ref.

Lighthouse was unique in that it offered most of its products for sale over the internet. This was generally not possible at the time due to the low uptake of the internet on most computers, but the NeXT platform, being based on Unix, was generally connected even in the "early days". Physical copies were available, but only on request and at a higher price. Generally users downloaded the application from the 'net or an online service, and then purchased a license from Lighthouse to fully activate the product. This was a fairly common sales technique for shareware applications, but it appears that combining this with a self-serve internet site was extremely rare, if not unique.

In the early 1990s, Sun entered a major partnership with NeXT to develop OpenStep, essentially a cross-platform version of the "upper layers" of NeXTSTEP. Basically, OpenStep would provide a NeXT-like system running on top of any suitably powerful underlying operating system, in Sun's case, Solaris. Sun had big plans for a distributed computing enviornment, with users running OpenStep on the desktop, and the "heavy lifting" being processed on servers in the back-office. The two would communicate with NeXT's Portable Distributed Objects technology, which was known as Distributed Objects Everywhere, and later NEO.

In mid-1996, Sun purchased Lighthouse for $22 millionTemplate:Ref, turning them into their in-house OpenStep applications group. At the time, Scott McNealy had visions of turning Sun into a powerhouse that would compete head-to-head with Microsoft, and a real applications suite was a requirement for any such plan. Lighthouse's applications were not up to par with Microsoft Office as a whole, but certainly could be developed into a powerful competetor with additional development.

But even as the purchase of Lighthouse was going through, Sun was already turning their attention from DOE/NEO on the back-end and OpenStep on the front-end to "Java everywhere". Java was seen as a better solution to infiltrating Sun into the applications market, as it ran on all platforms, not just those supported by OpenStep. Lighthouse was soon moved into the JavaSoft division, becoming the Java Applications Group.

The only problem with this move was that Java's GUI libraries were a pale imitation of those in OpenStep, and any attempt to port Lighthouse's applications to Java was almost impossible. Additionally, Sun was worried that releasing their own suite would make 3rd party developers less interested in the platform (see Claris) as they would have to compete with Sun directly in the office application space. Sun eventually gave up on the idea, if they ever entertained it seriously in the first place, adbandoning the office application market for many years.

It was not until 199 that Sun once again entered this market. Oddly, they did so not with a Java suite, but by purchasing the C++-based StarOffice suite. According to Jonathan I. Schwartz, the former chief executive officer of Lighthouse, the office suite will probably never again be offered to the public. Template:Ref.

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