Raines at Seybold
By Raines Cohen, keynote-report@raines.com.Greetings from NYC!
Here are some observations minutes after the Jobs keynote here at Seybold.
Craig Kline, Seybold VP of Content, introduced Eric Hippeau, chairman of Ziff-Davis, who introduced Jobs as a "technologist" - "still pretty young as industry icons go."
As expected, the keynote led off with all 3 recent Apple commercials: Think Different, the snail, and the bunny-suit one. The snail got notable applause, and the new "toasting the Pentium" one really big applause. [The Javits Center main lobby features several new Think Different people, including Ansel Adams]
Jobs spoke of publishing technology as "one of four things we do," and promised to talk about Software (ColorSync, WebObjects, AppleScript and QuickTime 3) and Hardware.
ColorSync: Accomplishments include Version 2.5 ship; AppleScript and multi-processor support, and calibration improvements. It'll be in Internet Explorer 4.1 for the Mac, due in April. It'll be available for Windows by late this year or early next. As a result of going cross-platform, Adobe committed to fully support ColorSync in all its publishing products, including the PDF ones, PageMaker, and Premiere.
Adobe CEO John Warnock joined Steve on stage, praising the Windows support. "A lot of us prefer one machine over another, so this is helpful to developers." An Adobe technology demo showed not only ColorSync in Illustrator but also AppleScript to automate the creation of weathermaps from ASCII data from weather bureaus, a process that "used to take 45 minutes," done in about a minute for the demo.
Jobs briefly touched on WebObjects, calling it "Just in Time, Just for Me" publishing. "It's fundamentally a dynamic publishing technology for the Internet. It can create Web pages on-the-fly dynamically tailored." A list of new customers including Adobe, AOL, BBC, Daniels printing, DDB, Seybold, and World Color.
He announced the formation of a consulting and training operation for WebObjects, and said more than 300 alliance partners have WebObjects applications already built. He said it is cross-platform, MacOS and Windows -- but it was unclear whether he was just referring to the WebObjects adapters in GoLive CyberStudio and WebStar or there really is a MacOS version available. This would be big news if so, because the industry was expecting a Rhapsody version, but not a MacOS port.
AppleScript also got a minute of the talk. Jobs listed an Adobe Illustrator 7.0 plug-in for AppleScript, a publishing solutions CD-ROM available at the booth, FaceSpan 3.0 interface builder (from Digital Technology Inc.), an AppleScript ColorSync droplet, and commited to native AppleScript in Allegro. "We believe in AppleScript," Jobs said. "It's this wonderful object-oriented script language. It's easy enough for mere mortals. We're working on speed and getting it more integrated into the system."
QuickTime 3 is "just about ready to ship," Jobs said. As we move into the era of digital video, "It's a mess. We've got standards coming out of our ears," he said, listing some of the different standards for Audio CDs, music creation, and the like. "QuickTime is how creators manage to repurpose content to these different areas. They're not only sources, but destinations of content."
QuickTime started twelve years ago at Apple. It is to digital media as PostScript was to applications and printers. "A few" people at Apple realized that video could be not just a $1,000 add-in card to the computer, but instead free, digital software. A first only a tiny window, it got bigger. The developers at Apple "realized that the coming digital revolution would be a Tower of Babel, and they asked what they could do to insulate users.
It's like before PostScript, every application had to know about every printer. WordPerfect, in its ascendancy, had 500 people writing printer drivers. QuickTime delivers the power to developers but completely isolates applications" from the details of the process. For instance, with the DV support in QuickTime 3, users can just plug in FireWire and download froma digital camera. "The apps just have it, they don't have to add a line of code."
He summarized QuickTime as "A unifying format and platform for multi-source and multi-destination content".
The International Standards Organization (ISO) recently picked QuickTime as the basis for the MPEG 4 standard, which will be implemented in "4 to 5 years". The decision was "hotly contested," Jobs said. "Microsoft had their own stuff which really isn't real," while Apple, Sun, Oracle, and many others put their support behind QuickTime.
Phil Schiller came out to do Peter Hoddie's standard QuickTime demo. He showed using Photoshop to do rotoscoping on a series of frames from a QuickTime movie, and QT3's new ability to play a series of images as a movie, directly reading the Photoshop files while retaining the layering, etc.
"We've gotten rid of a lot of cruft," Jobs said. "There's a lot of energy being focused on these technologies. 3 of the 4 are cross-platform, and "we're working on taking them all across by next year."
Hardware
[I won't reprise the specs of the Apple Studio Display here, but Jobs said it will be available in May.] He contrasted the $1,999 price to the $3,500 Compaq charges for a flat-screen today.
While Apple invented FireWire (now IEEE 1394), it hasn't released products based on it for several years. The $299 card he showed will be available in April, with a Premier plug-in.
Jobs also showed the UltraWide SCSI card, available now for $1,070 over the standard 4 Gbyte price. It uses Conley's SoftRAID for in-place striping, mirroring.
On the G3's: "this is fun stuff." He denied rumors that Motorola, IBM and Apple have had a falling out, and vividly demonstrated how in benchmarks the PowerPC is "literally twice as fast" as the Pentium II. "A 266-MHz G3/266 has the performance of a 500-MHz Pentium II, which you can't buy."
For a demo, "let's do a bake-off," he gleefully cackled, comparing a Compaq Workstation 6100 with a Pentium II/333 at $4,342 to a G3/266 "at $2,169, half the price." A series of tasks with Photoshop finished 15 seconds faster on the Mac.
He then showed the 300-MHz G3, available today, breaking the 1,000 barrier (1060) on MacBench, ten times as fast as the first PowerMac 4 years ago. It breaks 10.2 bytemarks, "giving you several extra hours with your family each day."
The technology demo of the G3/400, using IBM's copper fab technology, drew big applause. Jobs said it'll be available from Apple in early 1999. "Motorola and IBM are working very aggressively and there will be even faster processors coming next year." He said it's equal to an 800-MHz Pentium II, "which they can't even make today." At 13.7 bytemarks, it's 3 times as fastest as "the fastest Pentium II available for love or money today."
In questioning afterwards by Seybold's VP of Content Craig Kline, Jobs tried to refute concerns that Apple is losing the education market, claiming market shares in the 59% range in design & publishing markets and 30-some % in education. "It's going strong in spite of the fact that Apple does not right now have the least expensive products."
As for the lack of a low-end offering, "It seems strange that Apple has not built a great consumer product over the last several years - you'll see that change this fall. Apple is uniquely positioned in some ways to be there."
As to the Microsoft alliance, "Microsoft is many things. They're a large application software company. We certainly want their applications on the Mac. The agreement we announced last fall insured our customers will get not only Microsoft Office but the best version for the next many years. As for the system software platform, we have to recognize that Microsoft plus Apple equals 100% of the market. If we can agree on a few things, it makes it easier for customers." Technologies from both will be adopted by the other. "We're not giving away the company store here, and neither is Microsoft. ColorSync can help the Microsoft world. We work with Sun on Java as well. We want the Mac platform to the best. It doesn't really matter in the end if we can integrate it together to be the best platform. We control some of the technology, and that's important."
As to publishing customers moving to NT and Windows: "You can take the best PC or NT system, run a worse version of the applications, spend all your time futzing with cards and install files all day long. When you get all done with it you're gonna run half as fast. This is America - people should do what they want to."
On the lack of Mac internet server software: "More people are using NT than Macs as servers. Because Apple's not in the server business today per se. We don't sell beefy servers. Sun is giving [Microsoft] a run for their money. Apple is traditionally not a server company - they're a client company. Netscape says that 25% of the computers that come to their site are Macs. Apple's market share is lower than that. A disproportionately higher number of people are using the Internet than on the Windows side. That's why Netscape, and Microsoft are constantly vying to work with us because we have a large market share. We don't measure our success by which Internet tradeshow you see more Macs at."
On Rhapsody: "We have a software devleopers conference [WWDC] mid-May. You'll hear a very clear layout of our software roadmap at that time. So come, please."
On Columbus: "It's anti-gravity technology. It gets 300 miles to the gallon. I can't talk about that stuff." [he did early mention a new announcement of something in Spring]
"It was supposed to be something extraordinary this morning - but it was just a faster Mac," said Dave Burstein, DTP System Director for Exedi Printing Inc., a pre-press manager based here. "As someone who spent many hours of my life waiting for Photoshop, a faster Mac is itself extraordinary."
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