Omni Group is well known to most Mac users and NeXT ones back in the day. Omni Group today is a MacOSX-only company, writting high quality applications in Cocoa, apps like OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and 3D game ports. Today, we talked to its CEO, Ken Case, about the company and its products, Apple's strategies, Safari and the future.1. OmniGroup's best known product is OmniWeb, a modern web browser for OSX. Recently, Apple released Safari, which seems to have already captured the interest of the OSX userbase. What market problems would you think this release from Apple will bring to your product? Is the OSX community big enough for seven browsers, especially after the Safari release?
Ken Case: OmniWeb is a browser which provides a very rich browsing experience, and is a very successful product for us despite free competition from the web industry's giants, Microsoft and Netscape. OmniWeb's biggest weakness has been a lack of compatibility with some web pages, and solving this by implementing newer web standards is the focus of our current efforts on OmniWeb.
Safari appears to be a great alternative to Internet Explorer as a free web browser which ships with the operating system. It seems to be quite fast, small, and easy to use (much like the new 12" PowerBook), and I'm very glad to see Apple basing their product on standards and open source technologies.
I don't really see Safari as competition to OmniWeb: they're aiming at capturing the entry-level browser user (that currently sticks with the bundled Internet Explorer), while we sell OmniWeb to those who really want the most efficient, powerful browsing experience possible.
Until we finish our work on newer web standards, we're our own worst enemy: I don't believe that other browsers are pulling any of our customers away from OmniWeb, but that we're pushing our own customers away from OmniWeb while that work remains incomplete. Fortunately, I think we'll be there soon!
2. On a similar subject, recently Apple stirred up some controversy online with its release of the new version of Sherlock, which does most of what the popular shareware app Watson does. Do you think that Apple, as the producer of the OS, should also be a major application creator? Do you think that these "iApps" will create problems in the development community and limit their profits in the long run?
Ken Case: Apple is unique among mass-market computer companies in that they provide a complete integrated solution which includes the hardware, the operating system, and a number of (bundled and unbundled) applications. This allows them to innovate in ways that involve the complete integrated package, rather than being limited to innovation within each level.
This may make them better competition than the average competitor (because they're hopefully providing better solutions than average)--but I don't see it as fundamentally different from any other competition from any other source, as long as they make the same information and API available to third party application developers as they make available to their own application developers.
3. OmniWeb has its roots to NeXT. How close to NeXT do you find OSX today? Are there features (as a user and developer) that you had on NeXT but you miss on OSX? What are your favorite features on OSX and what features do you think that OSX lacks?
Ken Case: We developed applications for the NeXT platform because we found it was an incredibly productive development environment for us: it was a wonderful blending of UNIX with a modern object-oriented toolkit. In that respect, Mac OS X definitely takes up where NeXT left off: we have a more modern (and better supported) UNIX, and Cocoa is a wonderful evolution of the NeXT toolkits. And on top of that we have a lot of wonderful Macintosh software through Carbon and Classic.
But Mac OS X goes even further than that: we not only have UNIX, and Cocoa, and Carbon (and the ability to leverage them all from within the same application), but other great standards like OpenGL, and all within a new Aqua interface which encourages application designers to avoid unnecessary complexity within their applications without being overly restrictive in their simplification, through dynamic elements like sheets, drawers, and expandable interfaces.
As a developer, though, I do miss one thing from the NeXT heritage: their Enterprise Objects Framework for OpenStep, which made developing powerful database applications a dream.
- "Ken Case Interview, Part I"
- "Ken Case Interview, Part II"
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