Apple Excitement
This afternoon Apple had a campus-wide meeting to hear Steve Jobs talk about the release of iBook and generally give us a pep talk about the state of the company generally.
Steve is a terrific speaker, as you may know. He's full of entertaining anecdotes, and seems to effortlessly find the best way to phrase things. This is, of course, highly effective when he's preaching to the converted - the Apple staff.
I don't think any of what he said is confidential. It's certainly no secret that Apple has finally got its full line of hardware products in place, with the release of iBook. The iMac is selling like gangbusters, and iBook looks poised to do the same. (I received mail from a friend of mine today who works in Mac retail, and he says they're already taking orders for iBooks and he hopes Apple can meet demand for this product when it ships in September.)
He also underscored the advantage Apple has in being pretty much the only company around which manufactures the complete package: Hardware, interfaces, OS, and some software. This is why Apple has been able to move its hardware to use the USB peripheral interface, and the FireWire networking system. Steve told a story that Intel invented USB, but was unable to persuade anyone to use it in five years. Hardware vendors didn't want to ship systems with it until software was in place to support it, and software vendors didn't see any point in developing support for it when no one was shipping with it. But Apple could commit to it since they own both the software and the hardware. True? Maybe and maybe not, but Apple seems to be the company which has pushed the rest of the industry to head to USB.
Apple does seem to be in a nice position to innovate in ways the rest of the industry can't - or at least won't. Apparently Bill Gates recently said that the only way in which Apple is innovating is in its colors iMacs, and that it shouldn't take Microsoft too long to catch up to that. Not only does this pretty much miss the point, and miss Apple's other innovations, but someone suggested that Microsoft will provide five different colors of the Blue Screen of Death with their next version of Windows!
IMO, all of this hardware stuff is very cool, but it will probably be overshadowed by the release of Mac OS X next year. This is a huge technology change, and who knows how well it will be received? I certainly think the potential is there for it to be awesome, but it's still a major landmark yet to be reached. (I don't know much about Mac OS X which isn't already public. I've barely seen it since Pre-Release 1 went out at WWDC. So don't think I have any useful insider dope on it.)
I will say this, though: Apple's been gaining market share fairly strongly with all of the hardware releases of the past year. If Mac OS X is well-received, then I think Apple will be very well-positioned to become a major player in the PC market unlike anything the market has seen in the last ten years. A modern OS with great potential for innovation on top of similarly-designed hardware? What do you think?
It's very exciting.
Afterwards, there was free food, and free iBook T-shirts and posters for the Apple faithful. My cow-orker Tom and I stuck around for all of these. Tom said, "Can you imagine working for a company that doesn't give out free T-shirts and posters?" Well, yes, I can. Of course, Silicon Valley is just a different climate from Madison.
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