Pages by Pages

Wrestle WordPerfect. Futz with FrameMaker, Or simply use Pages

From the January 1994 issue of NeXTWorld

The Company

According to opencorporates, Pages Software Inc. was incorporated in February of 1992. The articles of incorporation list Larry Spelhaug and Victor Spindler as president and secretary of the company. Two years later, in November of 1995, the company was dissolved. (Interestingly, on April 2, 1992, Pages merged with a Massachusetts company named KVM Inc.)

I didn’t find any reviews for Pages, but I did find some interesting stuff. Bruce F. Webster, former Pages Software CTO, has written about his time with the company. In answer to the question “Can you start a software company with $15 million, and how successful will it be with that amount?”, Webster wrote the following on Quora:

I help start up Pages Software Inc (CTO and chief software architect) back in 1990. We ran for 18 months of one of the founder’s funds from a prior company sale until we closed on venture funding in early 1992, which would end up being about $7 million in total. We managed our funds very carefully, launched our product in early 1994, and shipped multiple versions, but unfortunately chose a target platform (NeXTstep) that never achieved sufficient market share to support us, and we closed our doors in 1995. If NeXTstep had, in fact, been popular, we would have been quite successful.

A few years later, the dot-com boom started, and I saw startups burning through millions of dollars each month with no obvious path to profitability. I sat back, shook my head, and said to myself — and to those who would listen to me — “This is all going to end badly.” And it did. The NASDAQ average peaked in March of 2000 and then went into a steady decline; NASDAQ would not get back to that March 2000 high for fifteen years.

So the issue isn’t the money, it’s the product, the opportunity, and the fiscal management. There were literally billions of dollars spent on dot-com startups that went nowhere. Yes, there were some successes here and there, but I have and keep a genuine Pets-com sock puppet on top of one of my bookcases to remind me of the mania of that time.

Following Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, Webster wrote a blog post entitled “So long, Steve, and Godspeed.” In it, he revealed a little more about the company.

But in late 1987, I was contacted by Addison-Wesley. They were interested in having me write a book about Steve Jobs’ new project at NeXT. Folks at NeXT had apparently suggested me to Addison-Wesley, probably due to my writing at BYTE and Macworld. I leapt at the opportunity, particularly since in coincided with our family moving from Utah to just outside Santa Cruz (where I would be doing technical writing for Borland on a consulting basis). Once there, I found myself invited to visit NeXT HQ on Deer Creek Road, sit in on meetings, and attend the 0.3 NeXTstep Dev Camp. And, yes, that meant getting actual face time with Steve Jobs as well — not a lot, but this was a man whose creations had been impacting my personal and professional life for over a decade at this point.

The writing of the book dragged out as I waited to get my hands on an actual NeXT cube, which finally happened (if I recall correctly) at the end of 1988 or early 1989. I wrote the first several drafts of the book on that NeXT cube itself. The book came out in the fall of 1989; it remains the single most successful book I’ve ever written, due to the intense interest in NeXT itself, more than any particular writing skills or technical insight on my part.

The following year, I found myself working with a world-class typographer (Mike Parker) and graphic designer (Vic Spindler) to create a design-oriented desktop publishing system. I was doing all the software prototyping on my NeXT cube, and we made the decision to make the NeXT our first target platform. For five years — 1990 to 1995 — I served as chief architect and CTO at Pages Software Inc, where we developed Pages by Pages and then WebPages, while spending nearly two years just trying to raise venture funding. We closed on funding at the start of 1992 and shipped our first version of Pages in early 1994. We quickly sold all that we were going to in the all-too-small NeXTstep market. My frustrations at seeing larger firm try to leverage off of NeXT’s incredible innovations led to an op-ed piece in the November 1994 issue of BYTE, “Whither NextStep?” The day that issue came out was the last time that Steve Jobs and I spoke — he called me from the back of a car somewhere to ask me what the hell I was doing writing that. I said, telling the truth. Pages would close its door the next year, unable to secure additional funding to move its technology to Windows.

When Steve engineered his brilliant reverse takeover of Apple — getting Apple to buy NeXT for $400 million, then slowly moving himself into the CEO seat — I was not optimistic. I still had unconditional praise for the NextStep technology, but I was dubious about Steve’s ability to sell technology to markets and to compete with Microsoft.

Boy, was I wrong. I was not only wrong about his abilities at Apple, I was wrong in my BYTE article about NextStep being on a downward slope. NextStep, of course, was the foundation of Mac OS X, and Steve transformed Apple into the most-admired, most-imitated, and most-valuable company in the world. And I was tickled that, when Apple brought out its own word processor, it was named “Pages”. Steve had always liked that name when we were developing (and shipping) our own product years before; glad he was able to use it.

Did you ever use Pages? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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