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MacWorld 2000 SF Trip Report |
APPLE KEYNOTE ADDRESS 2000.
(Bonus: thoughts on the Investor's meeting, and ideas from the show floor)
By John M McIntosh.
The keynote.
Unlike last year I will not give a blow by blow account of the keynote. You can find QuickTime movies of the broadcast at Apple, and other people's personal movies of the event can of course be found on the Web because quite a few people were using camcorders to tape the event. Maybe next year we will see people doing realtime streams from videocams using firewire, laptops, and Airports talking to QuickTime TV servers on the show floor. Perhaps timelags will allow said vendors to insert, horror of horrors, commercials into the feed.
Later I noted transcripts of the event on the web typed as the event was going on. Information lag in 2000 is non-existent.
However my thoughts:
Steve introduced the fact that 1.35 million Macs were sold last quarter, unlike last year he did NOT introduce any earnings figures. Wise choice, last year when he announced the figures various investment houses revised their figures upwards, then 2 weeks later when the real numbers came out they all said, "Hey Apple just met/didn't meet our expectations" (Which of course wasn't true, and of course un-informed investors just thought Apple didn't do any earnings surprises, which of course wasn't true). This year of course the investment houses are still in suspense since they don't know what Apple's profit margins are after the memory shortage last fall, or how many high profit G4 systems Apple actually shipped, thus Yahoo will be forced to report that large earning surprise.
Steve then did some review of market numbers, and then onto iMovies, and choosing commercials. Then some new stuff: Apple's investment in EarthLink, and free offers of email, iReview, iCards (Yes I did get some of those dreadful PC based crayon like cards this fall), Kidsafe, and 20MB of AppleShare IP on Apple's servers, along with homepages. (Yes you can use the network browser to access your disk at idisk.mac.com). The email is neat, I picked up johnmci at mac.com, which is much shorter than johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com, easier to spell and remember too, many people can't figure out how to say/spell/type smalltalkconsulting. Other family members picked up email ids which of course all forward to the Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd domain.
Maybe Apple should spin off a tracking stock to track their EarthLink investment, Akamai, and their pure internet portal service. Oh and since the Apple store will expand to carry third party stuff, is Apple now an Internet company? For a great article on all this see Fortunes Jan 24th/2000 issue on Apple Gets Way Cooler
Then the meat of the presentation, Mac OS X. Translucent stuff and the gel-tab look. Neat, much thought to interface issues, and much CPU required to do the cool visual tricks, I wonder how fast the older 60Mhz machines will run.
Boy I'm sure I saw the dock, and the magnification trick as part of a article in Byte about Xerox Parc about 20 years ago, Parc called it a video wall. I guess I should dig through my library and pull that article.
Much of this part of the presentation was visual, hard to put on paper, but maybe come Feb as an Apple developer I should be able to get an early copy, since they are talking about shipping it by the summer to the public. (Of course I might not be able to talk about it)
Later at a talk on OS technology the MacWorld editors discussed Mac OS X in odd terms. "Well we suspect the Finder will allow multi-tasking of programs". "Perhaps Darwin the open-source kernel of Mac OS X will run on older G3s". "Oh, maybe you can replace the finder with some other interface…" (Boy talk about hedging their opinions)
My remark to them was why think from OS 9 to OS X, when one should think from Unix to OS 9. Of course Unix is preemptive mulitasking, given that then how to prevent event input into other windows when a dialog is up? Oh, neat solution, tie the dialog to the application's window event stream. Other application can run, just the one with the event dialog is blocked awaiting input to the dialog window, of course a visual indicator is required to figure out which dialog is tied to which application so tie the dialog to the window. Nice solution.
If the open-source community can figure out how to make Linux run on a Quadra 950, (our webcam server) then I'm sure they can get Darwin to run on ANY powerPC.
Other interfaces? Wait until someone codes up a classic System 6 Mac interface, using Gnome, KDE or any of the other X-windows related interfaces out there, after all the Finder is only an application.
Lastly of course Steve announced that after 2 1/2 years he was dropping the iCEO title to become the permanent iCEO. Pandemonium reigned, people jumped to their feet and cheered, then chanted "Steve" "Steve". Do they do that for Bill Gates? I wonder.
I was pleased to see that the WSJ immediately updated their profile of Apple that night to state Apple's CEO was Steve Jobs.
The Show:
Lots of people, more booths. I talked to a number of dads with kids in tow. Mostly new users, having fun, goggling at the software. Most if not all were spending money. All the vendors I talked to were cashing in. For example at the Delorme booth the cashier was doing continuous sales of their GPS USA map product, it took me 10 minutes to snag an upgrade. Lots of firewire products: disks, scanners, USB converters, even speakers! Speaking of speakers, I noted Bill Machrone's PC Magazine columnist introduces firewire in his Jan 18, 2000 column as HPSB (High Performance Serial Bus), I guess they can't say Apple's Firewire without gagging… Oh and the magazine was only 170 pages due to the impact of the Internet has had on technology magazines. Lastly note that www.firewire.org points to Apple's site.
PS touch sensitive iMac screens are really neat, and I really want a HandSpring Visor.
Investors Meeting.
Eric Yang put together a really neat meeting. There must have been 50 people present, most interesting was a group of 1/2 dozen from Switzerland, and a 1/2 dozen university students who double as Apple education representatives. Investors ranged from newbies to old time investors from nearly the beginning of Apple's stock offering. Also Lou Mazzucchelli of Gerald Klauer Mattison attended, nice to see such a person of importance there.
From statements Apple made at the User group meeting that morning, plus info gleamed from other sources, Apple will increase supply 40% and maybe open Apple stores. I'm sure someday we'll see stores ala Gateway which are internet café like settings that have access to the Apple store with sale people to help you use the Apple store to buy hardware and software. A key change to allow this was the change in Apple's new 2000 contract to allow firms to sell Apple's products without having to service them, and to sell product via Apple's store and get credit/kickbacks. In effect Apple is doing away with old contracts that prevent this business model from working. That of course doesn't apply to Apple owned stores, but Apple won't/can't open stores everywhere.
We then agreed Apple's past tactic about announcing product before being able to ship was viewed as a bad thing, and maybe since Apple didn't do any hardware announcements at the show this tactic has stop. We'll see.
Alas I had to leave Eric's meeting early, my mistake, next year that won't happen.
In all a fun exciting wonderful MacWorld. Much different, more exciting that the last four years.