Apple’s Software Strategy (’98)

On Monday, May 11th, 1998, Apple opened its World Wide Developers Conference by quickly reiterating its hardware strategy — w/ a twist, in particular, how iMac will increase Mac OS software sales, and how Apple wants games bundled w/ it —, and then by laying out its software strategy. Apple has its fingers in all kinds of cool software — AppleScript, ColorSync, WebObjects, etc. — but for this morning, it would focus on just three — QuickTime, Java, and the Mac OS.

QuickTime is the great facilitator. Many people may think it’s something that only allows them to watch QuickTime movies on their Macs — it’s much more than that. It solves the problem that is the Tower of Babel of different, competing and incompatible “standards” for audio (.aif, .mid, .wav, etc.), graphic images (.bmp, .gif, .jpg, etc.), moving video (.avi, .dv, .mpg, etc.), and almost all other forms of “multimedia,” and working w/ them, especially on the Web.

* QuickTime 3.0 incorporated streaming video and went fully cross-platform, supporting many Windows formats, and now Apple is proud to demonstrate its latest ability to be made available this fall, support for Real Time Format, allowing people w/ only a computer (Mac or PC), QuickTime, a video camera and an internet connection, to broadcast live video across the web, w/o any other special hardware, client software, server software, etc. Very cool. Very exciting.

Java is of great importance to Apple. As the world converges on the Web, Java is the platform-independent means to expand a person’s or a company’s website abilities. Java for a long time sucked on the Mac. Mac OS Runtime for Java 2.0 improved performance (on the CaffeineMark scale, ~300 or so), but relative to Windows (~800 or so), it still sucks. Apple is working to make MRJ unified, compatible, and fast (well past 800) by this fall.

And the Mac OS is a great operating system, but since last year, people thought its future was... the Trash can. Au contraire, Apple currently has over 22 million people using the Mac OS running over 12,000 applications, and far from trashing it, Apple is going to polish it and extend it. Since last year, people thought the future of Apple lay in something called “Rhapsody,” and Rhapsody *was* a good idea, but it didn’t go far enough.

* Rhapsody would have required Apple’s developers to completely rewrite their apps to take advantage of its strengths, a process that could take over a year, so instead, Apple went through the Mac OS, ~8,000 function calls, w/ a fine tooth comb and identified ~2,000 that prevented the Mac OS from having Rhapsody’s biggests strengths, preemptive multitasking, protected memory, etc., and by simply removing those 2,000 calls, overcame Rhapsody’s biggest weakness, a 100% rewrite.

* “Carbon” is what Apple calls the remaining 6,000 function calls, all life forms will be based on it. The missing 25% of the Mac OS function calls on average only affects about 10% of each app, and in fact, Apple has written a “Carbondater,” available now and for free, to test apps to find out how *little* a tune-up will make apps Carbon-compatible, a process that will only take a matter of weeks, rather than months. And w/ that, Apple is proud to announce the future of the Mac OS...

_ Mac OS X (ten) will be the result of the forthcoming Rhapsody release (Fall ’98, for servers) and the next couple of Mac OS updates, Allegro (Fall ’98, Mac OS 8.5, “themes,” PPC AppleScript, PPC everywhere, PPC only) and Sonata (Spring ’99), will be made available to Apple’s developers Spring ’99, and will be available for sale to the general public Fall ’99 (a “modern” OS “optimized for G3s” or better).

* Avie Tevanian then introduced representatives, in their turn, from Macromedia, Microsoft and Adobe. Norm Meyrowitz of Macromedia came on stage and said that for the past three, four years Mac users have been loyal..., patient..., frustrated..., and certainly zealots, but most of all, Mac users have been waiting, and w/ Mac OS X, that waiting would come to an end. Apple finally gives to users and developers what they’ve wanted, *and* a very good way to get there.

* Then Ben Waldman of Microsoft (who has been w/ Microsoft for nine years now <personal> and who is for Microsoft as Stephanopolous was for Clinton — an intelligent, articulate and very handsome(!) spokesperson </personal>) came on stage and said how happy Microsoft is to support Mac OS X. And then Adobe came on and actually demonstrated Photoshop 5.0, tuned-up in the chaos of its 5.0 release schedule, running under Mac OS X. Very cool. Very impressive.

And that was pretty much the presentation. For more information, you may also want to check out macintouch.com. ->