Lighthouse Design
Lighthouse Design Ltd.. was a U.S. software company that existed from 1989 to 1996. The company developed software for the NeXT computer, running under the operating system NeXTSTEP. Lighthouse was founded in 1989 by Alan Chung, Roger Rosner, Jonathan Schwartz, Kevin Steele and Brian Skinner in Bethesda, Montgomery County ( Maryland ), but later moved to California in the city of San Mateo. In 1996 the company was acquired by Sun Microsystems.
History
Two of the first developed by Lighthouse products were Diagram! and Exploder. Diagram! was a program for the creation of program schedules, similar to Microsoft Visio, in which the objects were connected to each other via "smart links". Exploder was a programming tool for storing objects in Objective-C in relational databases. Lighthouse marketed Diagram! itself and shifted 1991 Exploder in the newly founded startup companies Persistence Software. June 25, 1999 Persistence Software went public.
Lighthouse continued to develop their own products. A private office suite for NeXTStep was put on the market, with Para Sheet, a traditional spreadsheet software, Quantrix, a program based on Lotus Improv, Diagram! , The Projektmanagingtool Taskmaster and a presentation program Concurrence. Lighthouse decreed it just over eighteen developers. Steve Jobs described Quantrix 1997, the best spreadsheet that he had ever used. Lighthouse took over Lotus Improv, because Lotus did not have in-house competition for 1-2-3.
The company Sun began in the early 90s of the 20th century a partnership with NeXT to develop OpenStep - mainly a cross-platform version of the lower layers of NeXTStep. OpenStep should provide a NeXT -like environment for each eligible operating system available in Sun's Solaris case. Sun had to use big plans for distributed computing environments, with users, the OpenStep as a desktop solution and servers under their own operating system SunOS in the back office area, which can handle the computationally intensive processes. The communication should be on the nexts Portable Distributed Objects technology that was known as Distributed Objects Everywhere, later NEO.
In the summer Sun finally acquired for 22 million U.S. dollars, the company, and transformed Lighthouse Design in an internal OpenStep Application group. The then CEO of Sun, Scott McNealy, had the vision to develop his business into a real competitor for Microsoft, and he needed an application similar to Microsoft Office. However, the products of Lighthouse were not equivalent, but would have to be expanded by further development into a powerful competitor.
Despite the successful integration of Lighthouse Sun devoted his attention more on front-end applications and neglected the DOE / NEO idea with OpenStep. The new strategy was called " Java everywhere". Java was seen as a better alternative to penetrate into the application market, because it worked on all platforms and not as OpenStep only to those who supported it. Soon afterwards divided Lighthouse in the JavaSoft division and called it Java Applications Group.
The only problem with it was that the graphical user interface of Java represented 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 saw that after a publication of its own Office suite, the OpenStep platform for other developers could be less interesting. Ultimately, the idea was to compete with Microsoft in the office software market, abandoned for several years until 1999, Hamburg-based software manufacturer Sun Star Division and its software package StarOffice took over. Jonathan Schwartz, former chief executive officer of Lighthouse, according to the old office suite was not even offered to the public.
Until 4th February 2010 was Jonathan Schwartz CEO and President of Sun Microsystems.