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second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times. Although NeXT failed to sell its elegant and infamously buggy black box, Jobs's fundamental insight - that personal computers were destined to be connected to each other and live on networks - was just as accurate as his earlier prophecy that computers were destined to become personal appliances.

Now Jobs is making a third guess about the future. His passion these days is for objects. Objects are software modules that can be combined into new applications (see "Get Ready for Web Objects"), much as pieces of Lego are built into toy houses. Jobs argues that objects are the key to keeping up with the exponential growth of the World Wide Web. And it's commerce, he says, that will fuel the next phase of the Web explosion.

On a foggy morning last year, I drove down to the headquarters of NeXT Computer Inc. in Redwood City, California, to meet with Jobs. The building was quiet and immaculate, with that atmosphere of low-slung corporate luxury typical of successful Silicon Valley companies heading into their second decade. Ironically, NeXT is not a success. After burning through hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, the company abandoned the production of computers, focusing instead on the sale and development of its Nextstep operating system and on extensions into object-oriented technology.

Here at NeXT, Jobs was not interested in talking about Pixar Animation Studios, the maker of the world's first fully computer-generated feature movie, Toy Story (see "The Toy Story Story," Wired 3.12, page 146). Jobs founded Pixar in 1986 when he bought out a computer division of Lucasfilm Ltd. for US$60 million, and with Pixar's upcoming public stock offering, he was poised to become a billionaire in a single day. To Jobs, Pixar was a done deal, Toy Story was in the can, and he was prepared to let his IPO do the talking.

A different type of executive might have...