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Hands-On: Worldwide Developers Conference 2000
By Brian Nakamoto
May 16, 2000
Attendance at Apple's WWDC in San Jose, CA was up this year. Over 3,000
developers literally stormed the San Jose Convention Center exhibit hall to
insure that they would not be relegated to the overflow rooms. In fact,
after opening his bottle of Evian, this year's attendance was Steve Jobs'
opening remark. There are 3,579 developers registered for this week's
conference up from 2,563 last year and 1,801 in 1998. Not bad for an event
that costs more than an iMac to attend.
Speaking of iMacs, Apple sold a whole lot of them. After recapping last
month's financial report, Steve gleefully displayed Apple's percentage
growth in the categories of units, revenue and earnings versus Dell, Gateway
and Compaq:
Apple: 37, 32, 56
Dell: 34, 31, 22
Gateway: 17, 9, 22
Compaq: 9, -1, -35
As if to remind Apple COO, Tim Cook of his roots, Steve did his impression
of the Wicked Witch's "I'm melting!" after displaying Compaq's last negative
number. How times have changed (for the better)!
Apple's market share is up (by percent) due to selling over 4 million units:
U.S.: 5.1
Europe: 4.1
Japan: 7.8
iMac alone in the past two years (this month being its second birthday) has
sold over 3.4 million units. Steve took pleasure in pointing out that there
is still no credible competition. He showed last quarter's market research
as if to prove the point (by percent):
First time buyers: 28
Wintel switchers: 17
New: 45
On the Net: 88; 1/3 on the Net in first day
Online purchase: 65
Didn't consider other computer: 61
On to QuickTime!
QuickTime may be third over all when it comes to streaming media behind Real
and Windows Media Player but Steve is wonderful in pointing out that it's
number one in numbers practically everywhere else with over 36 million
downloads that equates to over 50 million copies on Mac and Windows. But he's not done yet. Apple estimates that there are over 100 million copies of
QuickTime installed due to multi platinum distribution on Enhanced CDs such
as Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit; 11 new titles released every day. Then
for the ultimate in creative marketing are the 5 million Frosted Cheerios
boxes complete with Toy Story 2 CD-ROMs loaded with--you guessed it--
QuickTime!
Returning to online, Apple.com receives more than 10 million unique visitors
a week. Nielson.com ranks Apple the number one place to download movie
trailers beating AOL and Film.com. Steve is also proud of movie studios
doing exclusives such as Paramount's MI:2, Disney's Dinosaur and Fox's
X-Men. Lord of The Rings alone had over 12 million downloads with 7 out of
10 people choosing the largest download. At 30 MB each, that's over 200 TB
of data!
Most exciting, is that a new version of QuickTime is due out this summer
with MPEG 1 and 2 decoding, encoding over local and streaming. In addition,
Macromedia's Flash 4 will be supported and the qdesign codec will be updated
to take advantage of Velocity Engine making it 3 times faster to encode
QuickTime movies. At long last, QuickTime VR will be updated to handle near
360 degree „cubic panoramas‰. With so much great QuickTime news, this
prompted Phil Schiller to pop up for a demo.
Phil showed off the latest X-Men trailer via a live MP1 and MP2 stream. He
then showed QuickTime VR as we know it now on BMW and Jeep. Then he took us
to the St. Paul Cathedral, taking advantage of the new QuickTime, where you
could read the Latin on the floor or admire the artwork above. Finally, he
showed us the Eifel Tower but thanks to the new QuickTime, we learned that
it was really the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. Apple is determined that
QuickTime become number one all around.
Note to Apple: Want to beat Real and Microsoft? Bring QuickTime to Linux!
After Phil's QuickTime demo, Steve returned onstage to talk about Apple's "best kept secret" WebObjects. WebObjects lets developers create web
applications ten times faster and is the number one web application platform
used by over 3,000 customers that paid over $50,000 for unlimited server
use. Because it runs on Mac OS X, Solaris and "those other platforms", HP/UX
and Windows 2000, WebObjects Enterprise can be found in use by many Fortune
500 companies.
Of course, that's not good enough for Steve and Apple. Because the next
version of WebObjects will also run on Java, something that Mac OS X happens
to run really well, Apple lowered the price of WebObjects for a single
server to only $699! This drove the crowd crazy as Steve brought Avie
Tevanian up to wow the audience with just what Apple's best kept secret
could do. Being a developer's conference, he then got somewhat technical so
I shall spare you'll just have to trust me that it's really cool and has a
lot of potential especially combined with Mac OS X and the Net.
Returning to Steve, we arrive at the "main entrée" also known as Mac OS X.
Steve outlined Apple's five goals for Mac OS X:
1. Restore simplicity and elegance
2. Super modern and reliable
3. Killer graphics
4. Best Internet device, period
5. Gentle migration
So how's Apple doing? Steve proceeded to review the well-known architecture
diagram from Macworld in San Francisco this past January. New to the same
slides, was an updated rollout schedule or „the same thing reworded‰. Any
reports of "Mac OS X delayed" are inaccurate. Apple promised DP3 in Feb and
delivered. They said DP4 would be out in May and developers roared when the
learned they could pick one up on their way out from the keynote today. In
January, Steve led us to believe that Mac OS X would ship this summer. Well,
it will but in widely requested public beta form. Mac OS X 1.0 will ship
preloaded in January 2001. This is definitely not Microsoft vaporware as
Steve setout to prove by showing off DP4.
Developer Preview 4 is "developer complete". That is, there are 99% of the
API's required for developers to bring their applications to Mac OS X. DP4
also incorporates a lot of feedback such as Platinum sized controls, more
Mac like Finder, application name in menu and a tuned dock. The just
launched Mac OS X tab at Apple.com does a much better job of explaining
these new features than I ever could with mere words.
Steve brought Ed Zander, President and COO of Sun up to talk about the "Jobs
revival" and other bad humor. After asking Steve to remain on stage, Ed
thanked Steve for the black shirt and then queried where his jeans were. I
think that Steve feigned amusement at Ed's wardrobe mockery of sorts.
Fortunately, Ed made up for his lame introduction by spouting phrases such
as "vision focus". He then went on the comment that Sun and Apple beat Dell,
Gateway, Compaq and even IBM, MS and Intel, referring back to one of Steve's
earlier slides. Java is 5 years old and Sun is naturally enthused to have
Apple creating an awesome (emphasis on) desktop operating system. Although
entertaining, it was nice to see Ed close with a cheap rip on MS and then
exit stage.
Coming back, Steve sat down to give a demo of Mac OS X similar to Macworld
this past January. He showed off an improved QuickTime, that all system
applications are OS X native or Carbonized and the Bomb.app. Steve is so
meticulous that he started the Bomb.app, used to simulate a misbehaved
program that tries to crash the OS, to execute at the same time Tom Cruise'ssunglasses self destructed in the MI:2 trailer running in the background. Ingenious!
Steve finished with a demonstration of the powerful integration of Quartz
and OpenGL playing around with real time alpha channel (transparency)
adjustments of an image mapped onto an animated 3D object. This impressed the crowd.
Phil came back to show off featured applications from Palm and id. Palm
Desktop is Carbonized and id's Quake Arena running in bloody full glory for
the pleasure of the developers emphasized that Apple still is aiming to be "the best gaming platform in the world".
Steve introduced Bruce Chizen, President, Adobe to demonstrate InDesign 1.5
fully Carbonized in three weeks using a plug-in that was Carbonized in less
than one and a half weeks. They showed off the layout for the recent issue
of Fortune with Steve on the cover. It was a great endorsement of how easy
it is for developers to prepare to their applications for Mac OS X.
However, Steve's last guest was perhaps the best endorsement. Alias
Wavefront announced Maya for Mac OS X that will be ready at Macworld San
Francisco in 2001. Maya is the 3D animation program used to create most of
the cool special effects seen in movies and television. Steve mentioned that
Apple uses it to design their products.
After over an hour and a half, Steve recapped on Apple's growth and
innovation and the products that he covered. He then went on to emphasize
the number of WWDC sessions:
8 QuickTime
18 WebObjects
62 OS X
Steve emphasized that there is absolutely no more excuses. "The train is
leaving the station. The time is now." As if to squeeze even more applause
from the audience, Steve concluded that Apple will be spending lots of
co-marketing dollars making the best OS X applications poster children in
2001.
As a final gesture, he brought out Avie for a salute to him and his hard
working team that is making something that was thought to be impossible
reality.
Now is a good time to buy Apple stock
. . [Go to Macs Only!'s Daily News]
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