Lighthouse Design
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 .
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 ),
Diagram!,
TaskMaster (a project management program), and
Concurrence (a presentation program).
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 environment, 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 million, 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 competitor 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, abandoning the office application market for many years.
It was not until 1999 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 Lighthouse application suite will probably never again be offered to the
public. .
Kalin, Sari (June 1996). "
PC Expo: Sun buys object developer". Accessed on April 21, 2006.
A Lighthouse Design announces Quantrix 2.0. Accessed on August 30, 2005.
McMillan, Robert.
Does Sun want to become the next Microsoft? Orlowski, Andrew (September 2003).
The Register: "Sun's ‘MacOS X' suite to remain in Sun morgue". Accessed on August 30, 2005.
*
Archive of Lighthouse Design's products. Accessed on April 25, 2006.
*
Petition to open-source the Lighthouse application suite.
