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The following is a reprint of an
article that appeared in Information Week
a CMP publication. It continues the "Apple
Bashing" the press (The online MacinStuff
Times excluded) continues to bestow on
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Can Anything Save Apple? -- If the
computer maker's presentation at MacWorld
is any indication, it'll take nothing
short of a miracle
Source: Information Week
"In the movie Independence Day, an
Apple Powerbook saves the world from
extinction. Apple CEO Gil Amelio used the
film as the theme of his marathon keynote
speech at the recent MacWorld Expo in San
Francisco. But when it was all over, you
could be excused for thinking that saving
Apple from extinction might take powerful
alien forces.
With occasional breaks for
demonstrations, commercials, and personal
appearances by Apple founders Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak, Amelio rambled on for
more than 2-1/2 hours. By the end of his
presentation he looked downright punchy,
and the crowd was thinking only of food,
plumbing, and the nearest exit. Instead of
a clear statement of Apple's past mistakes
and future plans, the audience got
excuses, platitudes, and cameo appearances
by the likes of Gregory Hines and Sinbad.
Maybe only Mac fanatics understood these
show-biz connections, but even I could
understand why Muhammad Ali was there:
Like Apple, his best days are sadly behind
him.
Jobs, not Amelio, articulated the
company's mission: "To provide relevant,
compelling solutions that customers can
only get from Apple." Did he check his
slides with the boss? Amelio talked of
Java and the Net as leveling the playing
field. But even if compelling Java
applications will run on the Mac, what
about the "only from Apple" part? If Java
works the way it's supposed to, those apps
will run on anything, including cheap
commodity boxes.
Jobs is as charismatic as anyone in the
industry, but even he has problems. His
Next technology is the linchpin of the
Macintosh OS strategy, but if it's so
stunning, how come it's been around for
years without capturing more than a sliver
of the market? Jobs' drag-and-drop
programming demonstrations would have
dazzled not too many years ago; in today's
world, however, they barely seem out of
the ordinary.
Now Apple plans to deliver revisions of
System 7 every six months, bring out a
couple of early releases of Rhapsody, the
new operating system, within 12 months,
and release a version with MacOS
compatibility by mid-1998. That's a pretty
ambitious schedule for a company whose
last "next-generation" operating system
never got out the door. And software
developers may sit on the fence with
Rhapsody as they did with Windows 95. As
long as there's a compatibility box,
there's no rush to develop for a new
platform. The graphics and multimedia
companies that are Mac stalwarts will no
doubt port their products, but other
developers are likely to see Windows
versions as more critical.
On the evidence of Amelio's
presentation, Apple's shelves look
suspiciously devoid of the forward-looking
stuff the company has seen as its
hallmark. The technology demonstrations
included an organizer for Web categories
with a 3-D fly-through interface that
resembled many I've seen over the years
and a text- to-speech program only
modestly better than what it claimed to be
improving. There was also a program that
could produce summaries of text; too bad
it looked amazingly like the one that
ships with the latest version of Microsoft
Word. When your research labs are demoing
what your competitors are shipping, you're
seriously out of touch.
Still, Apple has brought a lot to
computing over the years. The company
still has a tremendous reservoir of
goodwill among its fanatics, along with
$1.5 billion in cash, so it can hang on
for a while. Amelio said
the latest quarterly loss was caused by
lack of demand only in the consumer
market. In his words, "Santa Claus forgot
to come."
Maybe so. But it's sad to realize that
Apple may still be frozen out of the
mainstream, even if Steve Jobs regrows his
beard and the Next elves really do come up
with some form of magic.
Stephen Manes is co-author of the
biography Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul
Reinvented an Industry (Touchstone/Simon
and Schuster)
Copyright 1997 CMP Media Inc.
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