Late-breaking industry news, for those who care:

On Saturday, December 21st, Apple announced a friendly buy-out
of NeXT, Inc. for $400 million. Jobs will report directly to
Dr. Amelio, head of Apple.

Previous reports from industry publications had picked Be, Inc.,
started by another former Apple executive, as the target of a
buy-out. Reportedly, the sticking point was price -- Apple only
wanted to pay $100M, while Jean-Louis Gassee wanted $300M. The
fact that Apple paid even more for NeXT seems to be a slap at
Mr. Gassee.

For Steve Jobs, it's ironic (to me) that the technology he launched
after Apple (but didn't do well), then ported to the PC platform
(with seemingly minimal impact) ends up at Apple, where it will
find a much broader user base.

Personally, I'm excited about the prospect of using NeXTStep, or
some form thereof. The one area that bugs me a bit -- and I suppose
it's pretty small in the overall scheme of things -- is NeXT's use
of Objective C.

Metrowerks, the premier Mac-based compiler developer (with a recent
version of their C/C++/Object Pascal environment designed for Windows)
has announced forthcoming support for Objective C, so it's not like
that dialect is going away. Does anyone know the major differences
between Objective C and C++ ?

It looks like 1997 won't be dull. ;)

Season's Greetings to all, with best wishes for the New Year!

--Glenn Cole
  Software al dente, Inc.
  [log in to unmask]

P.S. I won't be able to respond to any comments for a week. It's road
     trip time! (Cupertino to Lost Wages to Grand Canyon to Tucson
     to San Diego to Cupertino.)

P.P.S. Apologies to all who find this post irrelevant.