This is the letter we sent Steve Jobs in January 1990. (We were a little unclear on the relationship between T/Maker, WriteNow, and NeXT.) We did finally receive a call from NeXT - about a year later, long after we had sold the program to Claris.

Ironically, Steve Jobs ultimately wound up owning ClarisWorks anyway. After he returned to Apple, he brought ClarisWorks from Claris to Apple, and renamed it AppleWorks.



Spartacus Software
3595 Londonderry Drive
Santa Clara, CA 95050
(408) 248-6876

Steven Jobs
President, NeXT, Inc.
900 Chesapeake Drive
Redwood City, CA 94063

Dear Mr. Jobs,

We are offering for sale an integrated package for the Macintosh. The program integrates word processing, spreadsheet, database, and graphics. The primary markets for this software are education and first time buyers; the upcoming low cost Mac is a major consideration. Obviously, NeXT is not in the business of marketing Macintosh software. The result we have in mind is similar to what happened with WriteNow; the distribution rights could be licensed to T/Maker, while the code is ported to the NeXT machine.

The proposal we are offering is the acquisition of our code and our development team, for a sum and/or royalties to be negotiated. The program is now approximately four months away from alpha. In comparison to Microsoft Works, our program is cleaner, simpler, more powerful, more integrated, and requires less disk space and memory.

If you wish to see a demonstration, please call or write us at the above address. We will provide you with a non-disclosure agreement before the demo. Please consider this letter strictly confidential.

Sincerely,

Robert A. Hearn
Senior Partner


Copyright © 1969 Robert A. Hearn

Last Modified: December 31, 1969
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