NeXTStep turned some of that vision into reality. It incorporated the world's first truly commercial object-oriented system, and really was the most networked system in the world when it came out. I think the world has made a lot of progress in networking but hasn't yet crossed the hurdle into objects and what's happened with NeXTStep. It's starting to get adopted by some very large corporate customers. It is now the most popular object-oriented system in the world, as objects are on the threshold of starting to move into the mainstream.

The company last year recorded its first profit in its nine-year history, and sold $50 million worth of software. I think we're going to have some significant growth this year and it's fairly clear that NeXT can get up to being a few-hundred-million-dollar software company in the next three or four years and be the largest company offering objects -- until Microsoft comes into the market at some point, probably with a pretty half-baked product.

Of course it's true. I remember being at Xerox at 1979. It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments. I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way some day; it was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't require tremendous intellect. It was so clear. The minute you understand objects, it's all exactly the same. All software will be written using object-oriented technology some day. You can argue about how long its going to take, who the winners and losers are going to be, but I don't think a rational person will debate its significance.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are clearly the most exciting thing going on in computing today. They're exciting for three or four reasons.