Photograph, Washington, DC, 1988.
Ross Perot, Steve Jobs, and NeXT marketing executive Kathy Kilcoyne enjoy the brief afterglow from a promising series of days presenting the NeXT workstation to their key market at Educom ’88. After three years of exhausting, almost superhuman development with his small team, Steve Jobs’s redemption and return from the technology wilderness seemed at hand. It was not to be. The launch was a massive PR success, but ultimately his key partners in education felt betrayed by the workstation’s $6,500 base price, more than double what was promised. This was just days after the glittering San Francisco launch, and Steve and his team were utterly spent, yet still months away from having a finished product. Sadly, the company slowly faded as sales stalled. Steve had to close the NeXT hardware division in 1993 in a painful, public failure. A few years later, he’d almost run thorough all his money between funding NeXT and Pixar and was close to broke. But then Pixar released the megahit Toy Story, and the subsequent Pixar IPO made him a billionaire. And the intense effort at NeXT finally paid off: the software was years ahead of its competition, and in 1996 Apple bought his object-oriented operating system called NeXTSTEP.
- 17” (43.18cm) Height
- 22” (55.88cm) Width
- Signed on verso by the artist