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Steve Jobs Macworld Expo Key Note Address
Macworld Live Keynote Address: Jan 5, 2000 Summary of Announcements at Key Note
Opening Remarks and Observations Steve opened by saying, "it's going to be a long show, so I hope I keep you glued to your seats." Indeed, the master showman kept us glued for over two hours. As a view of the hall revealed a giant Think different poster of Woz, Jobs mentioned that Apple was in the process of being reinvented and that Apple needed to get "beyond the box". Not that selling boxes hasn't been profitable for Apple. Quite the opposite, Apple last quarter shattered a record and shipped more than 1.35 million Macs. "That's 1 Mac every 6 seconds for the entire time of the quarter", Jobs noted. Apple has many reasons to celebrate its financial performance and Jobs will go over those in detail in their upcoming quarterly review this month. In acknowledging the hard work of Apple's employees and executive team, Steve also wanted to thank everyone in the Macintosh community for sticking with them through the tough times.
Apple's Financial and Strategic Fitness With every quadrant now filled out Apple is selling more Macintoshes than ever before, 1.35 million units last quarter alone -- a huge record! In the portable computer market, Apple's two portables garnered 11% market share for US retail/mail-order, led by iBook, for the month of November. The iBook was the number one consumer portable in October and November (Apple doesn't yet have data on December). iBook Data. 11% first time buyers and 17% Wintel switchers (28% total new Mac users). 56% of iBook buyers are introducing their first portables in the home. And 11% of all iBook users are connecting to the Internet wirelessly with Apple's Airport technology. iMac Data. New iMac DV Special Edition was the "hit of hits" for iMacs. Market research showed 30% were first time buyers, 14% Wintel switchers, with a total of 34% new Mac users. 93% were on the Internet and 62% got on the first day. Better yet, 66% did not seriously consider any other product. Jobs mentioned Apple's simplified product strategy with its four product quadrants and the strategic strengths of that simplification and market focus. The iMac has generated a huge positive response from the developer community, providing Mac users with many new awesome peripherals and software. Cool New Products. Apple will be shipping AppleWorks 6 next month. The product is the number one productivity suite on the Mac platform and Apple has completely redesigned it. AppleInsider has a special preview look. When it ships it will cost $75. Jobs showed off a really neat USB Microscope. It looked awesome -- an ideal item for kids who are into science and discovery. The next awesome item was a super-thin USB Canon scanner and after that a VST FireWire RAID with 100 gigabytes of room. That product was totally cool and amazingly small. (We will be looking at these items over the next few days.) Jobs spoke about AirPort as well. iMovie and the iMac DV: The Desktop Digital Video Revolution Next Jobs showed us three new television ads touting the iMovie software with the new iMac DV's. The second of the ads was based on a movie an Apple executive made as part of an internal contest at Apple. Jobs mentioned that was a part of getting Apple's executive team all on the same page in regards to making desktop video a central focus at Apple. Sina's iMovie was a real treat! Great! As Jobs said, "anyone with kids understands why you need iMovie!" Going forward Apple was going to honor great film producers/directors. This is part of Apple's new directed focus at touting desktop video at Apple.
Apple's Internet Strategy: Beyond just the Box! Jobs mentioned that Apple has been working on their Internet strategy for years. In looking at this task they wanted to leverage four key assets at Apple: QuickTime, Mac OS 9, Apple.com, and the Apple Store. QuickTime and QuickTime TV have been a huge hit for Apple. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the three biggest Internet video players are RealPlayer (in first), QuickTime (in second) and Microsoft's MediaPlayer (in third).
Since, unlike Real and Microsoft who both charge money for serving video over the Internet, as well as viewing it in some cases, how will Apple make money with QuickTime as both the viewer application and the server are FREE? Not only free but the source code is "open source". Jobs answered that question by saying that while Apple does sell a "pro level" version of QuickTime for just under $30.00, they make money through their investments in streaming video through Akamai -- the Cambridge-based technology company Apple invested $12 million in before they went IPO. That $12 million investment in Akamai is now worth over $1 billion, as Akamai's stock skyrocketed on the NASDAQ. In addition, the Apple Store has garnered over $1 billion in sales annually in 1999, with Mac OS 9 updates accounting for one million units shipped since its introduction. Apple's New Apple.com Internet Strategy Building on these four items -- here is what Apple has done. Adding Tab bar to Apple.com. On the top of Apple.com's main page and all of their pages is a new tab bar with links to all of Apple's primary Web site areas, new and old. The primary new areas which constitute Apple's new Web services are: iReview, iCards, and iTools. iReview. This area does to Web sites what Amazon does to books and videos -- that is provide guides and rankings, complete with editor-level review, features and a place for visitors to provide their own reviews. Categories include music, parent, health, shopping, and news -- to name a few. You can check it out for yourself here. iCards. One of the biggest activities on the Internet is sending e-cards to loved ones, etc. iCards is Apple's free e-cards service where you can send beautiful cards to people around the world via the Internet. Apple went out and licensed some great art work for the cards, something other sites don't have. The cards can be viewed inline with e-mail greetings. The service is completely free and there is nothing on the Internet like it. You can even make your own cards. iTools. Is a totally revolutionary thing! This is a new class of Internet services from Apple created exclusively for Mac users. The first four iTools are: KidSafe, e-mail via Mac.com, iDisk and HomePage. There are some neat features here but it will require you to have a Mac with OS 9 or greater to use these free features. iReview and iCards are free to everyone regardless of platform. Some key features with iTools. Apple's KidSafe Web protection system is totally different from the concept of filtering sites with harmful content for kids. Instead the technology provides kids with a certified subset of Web sites from the Internet. Kids using Sherlock can still search the entire Web for content that would be deemed potentially harmful but they would not be able to access it. So far Apple has 50,000 certified sites linked through its KidSafe servers with 10,000 new sites added monthly. As part of its Internet strategy Jobs announced that they have partnered with Earthlink network, investing $200 million. Earthlink will now be the ISP service for all shipping Macs (optional) and will have Earthlink striving to provide the best Mac web service in the world. The two companies will be working together to ensure the best Web access possible and Jobs made a point of telling Mac users to switch to Earthlink for the best service. With just under ten million users a week hitting Apple.com this is Apple's initial deployment of its long anticipated Internet strategy -- one which provides unique Web services to its members all totally free. The real cost only involves being a Mac user running OS 9 or greater, something all Mac users will eventually get to anyway as they move up to Mac OS X. To see these services go to Apple.com
Jobs went over Mac OS X from top to bottom. The preview was awesome in many respects. Some of the items were well known from previous shows, while others -- like Aqua -- were totally surprising. You have to see it to believe it, and see it you can at Apple.com or at Mac OS X. While we wont get into any details here, since Apple is doing a pretty good job of that for you on their website (and you can watch the Jobs presentation for yourself and see it in action), there were some items worth repeating. First, Jobs said Apple's goals with OS X were to have a "single OS strategy, unlike some other company". Another goal was to have "state-of-the-art" plumbing in the OS (This involves the kernel and other fundamental core technologies - which you can read about at Apple). Next, the new OS was to have "killer graphic support" -- and judging from what we saw today it will, indeed! Lastly, it is designed for the Internet from the start. And, of course, an easy migration path. Apple is today introducing Mac OS X and its 12 month role-out schedule.
Closing Comments Well, this was a very different Macworld Expo than many are used to. No hardware announcements! No new software for sale or download either! Instead, we were treated with a new Apple.com and Apple Internet Strategy which we can participate in today! Missing from anticipated announcements were the Pismo PowerBooks, new G4's (possibly multiprocessor-based machines) and an Apple-branded Palm computer. Some may criticize Apple for this, while others may say, "hey!, we've been waiting for an Internet strategy and waiting to learn about Mac OS X." In fact, this is true. At last Macworld Expo in New York many criticized Apple for not announcing any Mac OS X info. And while we may be beginning to tire about a Newton replacement, having Mac OS X so close within our grasp seems almost too good to be true. In fact, at the Apple Business Center in Boston, the audience watching the Key Note didn't even cheer when Jobs announced Mac OS X -- obviously, like us, they were too stunned to cheer!
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