Seybold SF 1998 1 Sep 1998
Video Transcript (source)
Note: for some videos, timestamps on the transcripts might be off by a few minutes due to the original videos having been edited for YouTube (typically, sections with music playing may have been removed).
Maggie Canon: I'm the vice president of Seybold Seminars and I'm really glad you could make it today. We have a great show planned for you. We have an all star lineup, including Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer. Our show floor that's going to show you products and technologies that are going to help you do your job better is open for three days. Some of you in the audience may know me. I've been covering Apple for years, actually since 1980 when I started Info World magazine when the Macintosh was only a gleam in Steve's eye. I even did a stint at Apple for a couple of years in the late 1980s so I have a long history with Apple. Like most of you in the audience, I stuck by Apple through the good times and the bad because as a creative professional, I realize that Apple is truly the best platform for what I need to do. (Applause)In the past 12 months and 12 weeks since Steve took over as interim CEO I have had a lot of faith back in my blood that I won't have to give up my beloved Mac. Although you might not agree with all the decisions he's made, I think most of you would agree with me that he has done an awesome job of bringing Apple back from the brink of extinction. (Applause)
The company is in the best financial shape it's been in years. It's on focus. The successful introduction of this cute little product called the iMac and the consumer product marketplace has resurrected Apple's reputation as an innovative design company and a powerhouse marketing company. But as a publishing professional, I'm almost a little jealous with all the attention and the focus that's been on the iMac and what I’d really want to know and hear from Steve today is what his plans are for me, the publishing professional. I happen to know he's going to be telling you a lot of that. Without any further ado I would like to introduce Steve Jobs and Apple Computer, but first there's going to be a video before he comes up. So help me welcome him. (Applause)
(Video plays)
(Applause)
Steve Jobs (SJ): We got an Emmy for that commercial.
(Applause)
Our agency Chiat-Day led by Lee Clow and Apple together won an Emmy for Think Different and every time I see that, it chokes me up. I really feel grateful to all of the people that gave us permission to run themselves or their likenesses or the likenesses of their heirs in that commercial. We've got some fun things today. The first thing I thought I'd do is give you an update because a I know a lot of you do depend on Apple every day. Somewhere between 50% and 90% of you are dependent on this segment in publishing. I thought I'd just give you a quick update, tell you what Apple is doing and then we'll delve into some other stuff.
The first thing is I had the privilege of speaking at Seybold a year ago and boy, what a difference a year makes. It's been a great year. We're not quite done with our fiscal year yet but we've had three quarters and we've managed to go from losing $1 billion the year before to actually making over $200 million during the first three quarters. (Applause)
In addition to that, each quarter we've managed to generate about $200 million more cash in the bank, a little spending money. And that's good. Apple has now got the financial help it really needs to make the investments for tomorrow and to be very stable. Everybody knows Apple is going to be here for the next decade. That's really important. We were able to do some good marketing. As I mentioned, the Emmy and the Think Different campaign will continue to run. We're running some really fun stuff right now on iMac. We've been able to get out there and tell our message again. We've also restructured our distribution channel and we've gotten rid of a lot of folks that were not interested in investing in Apple. The buying experience was atrocious a year ago. It’s much better now and we're pushing it to be better still. We've also invested a lot in online, our Web sites, the main Apple site and the Apple store. What's really great is the number of hits per day has grown 10 times to 10 million hits a day in the last year. So what this says is that A, people are more interested in Apple, and B, we're giving them more information that they can come find. So I think these are just some indicators of what's happened over the last year. But, of course, the most important thing has been products. So I'd like to review with you what we've done in the product space in the last 12 months.
As you know, we started a year ago with scads of products and we thought of the products we really need to build. We talked to a lot of our customers. They told us that some of them wanted to buy consumer products and some of them wanted to buy pro products. Most of you would fall in the pro camp. In each category they wanted a desktop and a portable. We said you know, if we could make four great product platforms that's all we need. We can put our A team on every single one of them instead of having a B or a C team on any. We can turn them much faster. So that's what we set out to do. The first one, of course, was the desktop pro introduced last November, the Power Mac G3 and it's an awesome product. We've done very well with it. As a matter of fact, we just sold over a million G3 since November. (Applause)
We just recently announced some new configs. We've doubled the amount of memory you can put in the G3. That was the number one concern from publishing. It didn't hold enough memory. So we've doubled it to 768 megabytes. And we've got even faster versions out. The fastest being a 333 megahertz. Remember that the power PC chip is so far superior to the Pentium in its architecture that it gets a lot more done in each megahertz. If you look at benchmarks, the best independent benchmarks we know of are ByteMarks. We toast them. The fastest Pentium 2 you can get is a 450 megahertz. And it comes out at 6.2 ByteMarks. Right? Three hundred thirty three megahertz, G3 11.3. Close to double. So these things are just smoking their Pentium 2 counterparts. And we lowered the prices so you can now get a G3 at $1,599. All the way up. So that's what we've done on the pro desktop space.
What have we done on the pro portable space? Well, we introduced the PowerBook G3s. The demand for these things has totally outstripped our forecasts. We haven't been able to make enough and I apologize. We are making a lot more of them going forward. They're wonderful products. Again, incredibly fast. Because the Power PC chip uses 20% of the power of a Pentium 2. You can put your fastest Power PC chips in your portables versus waiting a few years like they have to do in the Pentium. And so the fastest Pentium 2 you can get in a portable is a 300 megahertz and it benchmarks at 4.3 byte marks. Even our close to double that and you can see what we can do at 300 megahertz. These are very, very fast products.
Now we have made a 12, 13 and 14 inch model of these new PowerBooks. We recently looked at this. We said, you know, let's go for it. What everybody lusts after is the 14 inch. So let's focus on that. We are not going to be making 13 inch PowerBooks anymore. We're just going to focus on the 14 inch. Now let's take a look at what 14 inch notebooks sell for today. They're too expensive. That's why we needed the 13 inch in the first place. The cheapest 14-inch notebook you can get from Compaq is $4,999. The cheapest one. The cheapest 14-inch notebook you can get from IBM is $3,348. Now that doesn't even have a Pentium 2 in it. The cheapest Pentium 2 is $3,800. Now Dell is besting them all at $2,799. The product is okay. So we've got a product that blows away in performance and in quality and in flexibility all of these other portables. And we are going to price our 14-inch notebook as of today at $2,799. (Applause) That's down from $3,500. And we're going for it. We've got our manufacturing lines turned on full blast to build 14 inch PowerBooks to catch up with the demand and I hope we will in the next three or four weeks.
So, to summarize, 14 inches, 233 megahertz processor blows away the fastest Pentium 2 notebook you can get. We have also, on this product, added a 512K backside cache at the entry level 14 inch config and priced at $2,799. This thing is a screamer. In addition, at the high end of the PowerBook line you can get DVD video. Ss you know, the PowerBooks are modular. We can slip in a DVD drive instead of a CD-ROM drive or a floppy or a Zip drive or whatever else you want. We can slip in a PC card which has the electronics to decode the video. So let me go ahead and show that to you now and you can see what it looks like. I've got a standard PowerBook here. Please go ahead and run the video.
(Video plays)
(Applause)
This is now the coolest way to watch movies on airplanes.
(Applause)
There are a bunch of parental control features built into this so you can set this thing, so your kids can't watch X rated movies and things like that as well. So it's pretty nice. This is what we're doing in the pro portable space. We think we've got the best pro desktops and the best pro portables that not only Apple has had in years but what we think the industry has in total today. Now on the consumer portable, we've said we are engineering a consumer portable and we will announce it sometime during the first half of next year. We're hard at work on that now and I think it's going to be quite nice.
That brings us to the consumer desktop and as you know, our product there is iMac which we introduced and started shipping on the 15th of August. We have had a phenomenal response to this product. We've not been able to keep up with demand. We're shipping tens of thousands and they're being sold like that. We just announced it in Japan this last Saturday and it went very well, except that we're sold out for the quarter already. We are now announcing in Europe over the next two weekends, depending on which country. So we're seeing a phenomenal response to iMac. As you know, we made a very big decision to put in a G3 processor, not some slower version, with a half a megabyte backside cache. It has a gorgeous 15-inch display. You've got to see this thing. Check it out in the booth. It's one of the best displays Apple has shipped at 1024 by 768. Thirty-two meg of memory expandable to 128. Four gig disk drive, fast CD-ROM, built in 100 megabit per second Ethernet. More and more consumers are starting to put in networks in their homes. Education loves the 100-megabit Ethernet and we have people buying these for business. As an example, in some of the Asian markets where the economy is doing not as well as here in the US, people are looking at iMacs as publishing machines. Twelve megabit per second USB with much better IO standard than what Apple has had in the past. It is an emerging industry standard in the PC world. So all these peripherals that ship on the PC, the manufacturers have to do a driver and they ship on Macs, too. A 56-K modem is built into every product, 4-megabit IRDA, surround sound, great keyboard and mouse. And, as you know, $1,299. One price, one model, one box, one decision. It is a very, very simple product to buy.
(Applause)
Now in this marketplace, this is our competition. This is what it looks like. And what's really great, of course, is it's powered by a Celeron 333. This is the latest version. And so let's go ahead and compare those two. What's really great is that we smoke them. IMac is a speed demon. And it is again, look at how much faster it is than the Celeron 333. But it's even cooler. Because let's go back and get the fastest processor that you can buy for any amount of money from Intel which is the 450 megahertz Pentium 2. Our consumer product at $1,299 smokes them. It's amazing.
We made a video called The Simplicity Shootout that's just fun. We just filmed some people doing this stuff. But I'd love to show it to you, if that's okay. So could we run The Simplicity Shootout.
(Video plays)
(Applause)
We've done a lot of surveying and people are taking them out of the box to surfing the Internet in less than 10 minutes on iMacs. Complete first time computer users, all around the country. I’d like to show you four 30 second commercials which I hope some of you have seen on TV for the iMac. But in case you haven't, I thought I'd run them now if you want to take a look at them. So could we screen those.
(Video plays)
(Applause)
So we have a lot more fun marketing plan for all the products, in particular iMac as we move into this holiday season. That's what we're doing on products.
Now I want to move to a completely different topic and talk about the next release of the Mac OS, Mac OS 8.5. This is going to be a really big deal and it's happening soon. So I thought I'd give you a preview of it. We realized a year ago that we were the owners and caretakers of one of only two high volume operating systems in the world, and that this was a wonderful place to be. Mac OS was in many regards still way ahead of the competition. That we should invest in it. And we have been. We've refocused our software energies under Avi Tevanian just like laser beams on Mac OS 8, Mac OS X and just tons of investment are going into these things. We have 1,000 people in our software teams. So I want to just give you a highlight as to where we are. What we're shipping now is Mac OS 8.1. We've been coming out with releases of this every six months with a major release once a year. We've been really adding some great things, dramatically improving the stability and performance of the product and we're going to go a step further. We are soon going to ship Mac OS 8.5. The Mac OS 8.5 is a must-have upgrade. I want to go through this. There's a lot in this thing. It's a lot more stable with a dramatically higher performance in some areas. But I don't have time to show you all of it. I have time to show you four reasons why it's a must-have upgrade.
The first one is Sherlock. The second one is file copying. The third one is ColorSync and the fourth one is AppleScript. And I'm going to show you these things. We're going to do a few demos. So the first one I want to talk about is Sherlock. Sherlock is so cool that it's worth buying the release just for this, if there was nothing else. So I want to go find something on the Internet. I turn on my computer. I go launch a browser. I type in Excite or I pick one of my favorites. I go to Excite. I type in what I'm looking for. Well, I didn't quite get it. So I go back to my browser. Hit a few backward keys. Select Alta Vista. Go there. A different way to type stuff in. It's not quite there. I go to InfoSeek. Same thing. I'm just spending lots of time. And each one of these things works differently. Wouldn't it be great if I could just deal with all of them at the same time? That's exactly what Sherlock does. You can just go to your Apple menu and pick Sherlock. Sherlock has three ways to find things.
You can find things on your hard disk by name. You can find things on your hard disk by full content. And Sherlock automatically indexes your whole hard disk at nighttime. You can find anything in any file by any key word. But most importantly, Sherlock does the same thing on the Internet. So what you can do is you can type in "I want all the info on Titanic." Just in a natural language. You can select all of the search engines and Sherlock will dispatch queries to all of them simultaneously. You will have all these search engines working in parallel for you. They will send back their results which are automatically and in real time added to the list and relevancy ranked in real time and you can look at any of them. When you pick one, you don't go to the home page or the portal site, you go directly to the document on the portal site. Saves you tons of time. In addition to that, we go out over the Web. You can select to look at an encyclopedia. All of Apple's tech library, etc. You can just pick exactly what you want in these searches. And again, when it comes back, this is what it looks like. Just hit on any button, go directly to the document. In addition to that, Sherlock has a feature where you can point to any document and it will automatically summarize it in one or two paragraphs for you and it's really smart about it. It doesn't just throw away words. It's very intelligent.
So what I'd like to do now is invite up Phil Schiller who is our vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. Give us a little demo of Sherlock. Phil. (Applause)
Phil Schiller: Hi, Steve. There's nothing more fun than showing off one of the coolest new OS features to come in a long, long time. This is definitely one of the most fun. See by some of the things I'm showing you that I've had just a blast going in there and trying to find cool things up on the Web. Just as easy as Steve said. I pull in the Apple menu. I pull down to Sherlock. I bring up the Sherlock panel. In Sherlock you can just type anything you want and instantly it will go out over the Web and search a whole bunch of search engines. As I scroll, you see some of the search engines here. Excite, InfoSeek, Alta Vista. I can select any one of them. All of them. Any combination I want. And this is extensible. I can add search engines later as others want to join the party. For some of you who create content, you can actually create your own indexes, allow your customers to add them to their Sherlock engines and find your information. So let's just do a search here. Now I love to look good to my kids. I don't know if any of you like to do that. But answering questions can get really difficult. With Sherlock, let me just type in a typical question I get. "Dad, why is the sky blue?" Ever get that one? All we do is ask Sherlock and we're going right now out on the Web and getting a whole bunch of sites to come back to. And all the search engines are coming back. We see Excite, all coming back with answers. And it's ranked by relevance. Here they are ranked by relevance by the different search engines.
Now I can simply click on one and I get a summary down below, right directly from that search engine. And if I double click on it, it launches my browser and goes straight to the Web page and brings it up. Why is the sky blue? Never was it so easy, so quick, to find answers to questions. Let's get a little more advanced. Maybe my teens want to know how dinosaurs go extinct. Again, we can go out on the Web. Instantly we've got responses back directly from the Web. From all the different search engines brought up, ranked by relevancy, even though they're coming from different search engines. As you see some have popped up and a few more are coming in. I can simply click on any one of them and bring up Web pages on dinosaurs and how they went extinct. Learn for myself, tell my children how it happened, create reports. You can see how great it would be for students, college students, for any of us who search on the Web. Let's do one more. Maybe I'm not looking for information now. Maybe I want to see a picture. So I want to look for photos of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Again, up come Web sites and pages with photos on Mona Lisa. I pick the top one here. Again, it's relevancy ranked. Let's see how good a job it did. Here we go. A photo of Mona Lisa up on the Web. Is that easy? Does anyone here think they can do that themselves? (Applause)
Sherlock gets even easier. Not only can I do all of these great searches but if ever I want to, I can simply say save my search and it will save any of these searches you set up as documents in the desktop. You double click them. Instantly it brings up Sherlock and runs the search live right for you. So it's very quick to do as many searches as you want. I can also grab any one of these searches and simply drag the page onto my desktop and now with Mac OS 8.5 that search is simply a document on my desktop. It will be a live Internet document that works just like my local documents. And just like my local documents I can put them in folders. I can e-mail them to friends. I can send them around. And Sherlock and Mac OS 8.5 know exactly what to do with it. In fact, I have a folder here of Internet documents that I've now created in Mac OS 8.5. And not only does it have live HTTP Web pages, it has live FTP sites. It has live e-mail documents. Mac OS 8.5 knows the difference amongst all of those. In fact, here's one. Let me double click on it. And again, it knows it's a Web page. It brings up my browser. Live information coming from Japan. Of course, there's one other cool trick in this page. Look at the fonts. You've now rendered a Japanese page with a local Japanese font automatically for you. So even though this is an English version of Mac OS 8.5, you see the Japanese font rendered perfectly on a Japanese Web page. And that's work we've done between Mac OS 8.5 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer to make sure your fonts render properly in all the different languages that we support. Actually, scroll down here. This is a really nice Web page. For those of you who read Japanese, you can get an update on iMac and how sales are going in Japan. You see some hot news. There are those iMacs that Steve talked about in the stores of Japan. They came in and went out just as fast as we put them in there. In fact, so fast the picture is blurred. So, with Sherlock and Mac OS 8.5 you can find things on the Internet easier, faster than ever before and work across multiple search engines and your life just got a lot better working with the Internet. Of course, as Steve mentioned, Sherlock also finds information on your local hard drive. It has a built-in search engine and it catalogs all of your text files and all of your documents so you can search within any document you want. You simply click this tab, find by content. Now I can type in content of the kind of files I find on my own hard drive. I have a 4-gigabyte file of hard drive here packed full to the brim full of documents. So it might take a little while but what the heck. We have a little bit of time together. Let me type in a search here. Let's look for whole new USB devices for iMac. I'm now going to search 4 gigabytes. We just did it. Four gigabytes of text documents automatically indexed and searched across my hard drive and again, ranked by relevance to the text that I typed in and how relevant it is. And let's look at one, HP announces DeskJet. I double click on it and of course it launches the application. These documents can be in AppleWorks, in Quark Xpress, in Photoshop, in PageMaker, in all your favorite applications, Word, Excel.
But there's an even quicker way to find out about this document. I can simply select this document in Sherlock and ask it to summarize that file and there's the summarization. That long document has been brought down to a couple of paragraphs. I can quickly scan my documents and search them. So that's Sherlock. It allows you to find anything on the Web with lightning speed. It allows you to search all the content on your hard drives and your server hard drives and it's always easy as the Macintosh. Thanks. (Applause)
SJ: Thanks, Phil. Okay. Sherlock is a really big deal and we think it's an example of how you'll see Apple integrating the Internet into its operating system more and more over time. Second, copy performance. Especially in the design and publishing market, we are moving around bigger and bigger files. It's routine to be moving around 100 to 200 megabyte files. And I must say that we haven't done a good enough job of making that fast. So we have really focused on Mac OS 8.5 to dramatically improve the copy performance, both locally but in particular over networks. So here's what we're going to show you. How many seconds does it take to copy 185 megabyte file from client to server, or server to client over a dedicated 100 megabit Ethernet. Simple test. Let's take a look. A Mac running OS 8.1 took almost 35 seconds. That's a big file. Maybe there's nothing wrong with that. Well, there is something wrong with that because Windows '98 does it in 30 seconds. We're competitive guys. So even worse, NT does it in 25 seconds. And so our folks have been working very, very hard to dramatically improve the copy performance. In Mac OS 8.5 we copied that same file in 17 seconds. (Applause) We've made a two to one improvement over Mac OS 8.1 to Mac OS 8.5. And we are better than any other high volume operating system in copy performance. What I'd love to do now is show you that. So if Phil could join me for a second.
Phil Schiller: Do you want to use the Mac or the PC, Steve.
SJ: I'll use the Mac. Now we've got a Compaq DeskPro, a Pentium II-400 client and I believe we have the same server running NT4. We've got a Power Mac G3 running at 300 megahertz and our server is an AppleShare 6 IP server. Okay.
Phil Schiller: First, let's show the file. Adobe Photoshop file; 185 megabyte file that Steve asked.
SJ: Let's bring up our two folders and we've got a client and a server. And we're just going to copy from one to the other. So grab that file, Phil, and we'll do a countdown. Let's drop it in this folder and release on one, three, two, one, release. One hundred and eighty-five megabytes.
Phil Schiller: Off to the races. Looks like we're winning.
SJ: It sure does. We better.
(Applause)
So again, you can see that there. Let's go ahead and copy another file. Show it to them again. This is a 150-megabyte file. So ready, three, two, one, drop.
Phil Schiller: It's working. It's still not going to beat the Mac.
SJ: The Mac is done. (Applause) So that gives you an idea of what we're doing in copy performance. That works locally as well as over the Net.
Three, ColorSync. ColorSync is really blossoming. There are over one million users now using ColorSync. Now let me backtrack. Some people like the logo but they don't know what it is. What is ColorSync? ColorSync is very simple. When we move from the black and white world to the color world, people started seeing that what they saw on the screen wasn't what they got on their printer. Only in this case the printer wasn't just their local printer where they could reprint stuff after they tweaked it, their printer was a printing press where they just finished printing up 50,000 brochures and the colors didn't match. That can be a big problem.
So people started experimenting with software technology that could allow you to calibrate your displays, calibrate your scanners, calibrate your printers so that what you see is what you get. They started building that into some of the applications packages. The problem that was soon noticed was when you moved the picture from PhotoShop which might do it right to PageMaker or Quark or FreeHand or some other application, they didn't manage color the same way. It screwed it up again. It became very clear that color management had to be in the OS, not in the apps so that you had one unified way to look at color management. That's what ColorSync is. It has been adopted by almost every national and international publishing organization now in the country and in the world. It's being used all over the place. Now ColorSync allows you to plug in these color management modules. These are the algorithms that are used. Because not everybody believes in the same algorithms. So we ship with algorithms from Heidelberg and Kodak in Mac OS 8.1. In Mac OS 8.5 we are adding two CMMs from Agfa and from Imation.. They represent every philosophical point of view on CMMs and you can choose whichever one you want to use for ColorSync. We are very committed to ColorSync. We're even bringing it cross platform. You'll hear news about that shipping cross platform early next year.
We have ColorSync at work on a newsletter that we've printed up, that you can get inside of Media Arts at our booth. We've stuck it inside a Media Arts and a whole big thing on ColorSync at work. It might be interesting for you to see. So ColorSync has been dramatically improved in Mac OS 8.5. Which brings us to the fourth reason this is a must have upgrade and that's AppleScript.
AppleScript is a way to automate the OS. And what we've done in Mac OS 8.5 is dramatically enhance AppleScript. The first thing is we've made it native and it is up to five times faster. (Applause) We've made almost everything in the OS scriptable. Some examples. You can script the Finder now. You can script networking. You can script ColorSync. You can script Sherlock. You can script printing and you can script folders. You can actually associate any AppleScript now with any folder so that it is automatically executed the minute any folder action, like dropping something in a folder, taking something out, takes place. We'd like to show this to you now. If I could get Phil back up here, we're going to give a little demo.
Phil Schiller: Steve, this is one of the most powerful features we have in Mac OS 8.5. So many of the world's largest publishing organizations already use AppleScript and know its benefits. But to begin at the very start, let me show you some of the simplest things you can do. Then we can work our way up and show something more advanced like people using the real world in publishing workflows. To start with, as Steve said, I can take a folder and attach a script to that folder. Let me start from the simplest to the most complex thing. There's a script that's been attached to this folder. When you work in a desktop you'll see an S symbol for AppleScript attached to that icon. In this case, you simply attach the script from some very basic Finder actions. When I double click, open this folder, it actually opened all the folders inside that have been labeled as hot folders. Just by opening it automatically opened that. When I move the parent folder, it automatically moves all the folders with it. Just drag it around. That's AppleScript doing some very basic Finder actions. Let me grab that top folder again and resize it. All the folders underneath will resize with it automatically. That’s AppleScript attached to a folder doing simple Finder scripts. There are a lot of uses for things like that. But we can go a lot further.
Let me now open up a folder and it's got a bunch of images. You see I have three folders, each with a script attached to it. I'm going to take an image. I can take any image. I'm going to drag that image over to the first folder and the folder says rotate image. And I release it inside. It's going to launch Adobe Photoshop and will take the image. Now for anybody who uses AppleScript knows something very powerful just happened. (Applause)
Using scripting with Photoshop one of the most important apps you use. Now there's an extension available here at the show called PhotoScripter. It allows you to script all of the actions you want to do with Photoshop. Let's go back to the desktop and I'm going to drag that picture to the second one. It's called flip image. Guess what it will do? It will bring the image into Photoshop and flip it. And then the third folder, not surprisingly, says clouds. I let go. It's going to open up that image so it will do a magic wand selection and put in a background of clouds. It's a very simple, straightforward action you might do every single day. I can create scripts, create folders and just drag documents and automatically do those kind of actions without having to step through all the process myself. Now, of course, you can imagine just how far you can take this technique.
(Tape Turn)
You can automate your entire workflow. Of course, it's faster because AppleScript is now native. Let me bring up a third example and here I have the magic of AppleScript. I actually had someone write in AppleScript to set up the demo for me. So: the demo-doers dream. I simply pull the menu and now my demo is all ready and set up to go. It even tells me when it's complete. What I have here in purple on the left is a bunch of documents, content that I've had people in the organization give me. I have a template with pictures and texts. When I take these pieces and put them into my create folder, the script on the create folder will automatically take the pictures, take the text and create a document based on that script. So I'm going to grab those three items, drop them into the create folder, let go and now you'll see the script open up Quark Xpress, take the photos, take the text and start to automatically lay out and create a brochure for me. The first page is done. Now the second page is done. As you see, it's actually resizing the photos, cropping them and placing them appropriately and has now created my brochure for me. And it's done. (Applause) It's left me with a final folder called brochure files. Sure enough, there are the new cropped photos. There's the new brochure document itself in Quark Xpress.
Now, I’m going to do a second task that I might do in my job. I'm going to take that Quark Xpress document and turn it into HTML Web pages. The second folder with a script called Convert. I'm going to drag that entire folder right on top of it and let go. Now we're going to open the document up again and then launch Photoshop and here's where that PhotoScript plugin comes to work. Now Quark Xpress and Photoshop are talking to each other and passing off the documents, reading the text and creating text banners. They are also reading the pictures and reformatting them into appropriate sizes and bit depths for a Web page. They’re also reading the text, it's font size, it's character settings, bringing them into HTML text format. It's going through step by step making my Web pages for me so I will have an entire Web site built by the time this AppleScript is done. You see the power of AppleScript allowing applications to work together for you. See Photoshop reading the headline text, turning it into a bit map, creating a drop shadow automatically. (Pause) There, now it has now launched my browser. We are done. We have created a Web site from a document and we've launched the browser and here is that same document now turned into a Web page sitting on a server with links attached. I've actually created links behind the headlines to go from page to page. So AppleScript has automatically created my brochure and now created my Web pages for me and saved all that into another folder called brochure HTML. Look inside, sure enough, there are my HTML pages, my GIF files, everything waiting for me. I have one last task, something we all dread having to do which is to go in and put into a database all of our new images. Catalog them on a server. But, of course, with the power of AppleScript we can automate that as well.
I'm going to take this brochure folder, drag it onto my catalog folder and script, let go, and now it's going to launch a database and enter my new information, my images, into that database for me automatically. It’s going to launch a server and put into an image database on that server all the images I've created. So now everything has been backed up onto my server. And I have all the original artwork stored and cataloged out on the network. So that is a typical workflow and the kind of things you can do with AppleScript. It can automate everything from simple finder actions all the way up to your workflow, using all the major applications you like to use today. Quark Xpress and even Photoshop. (Applause)
SJ: I have to admit it. We wrote a big AppleScript and it's running the company. Isn't this awesome? There are a few people at Apple who kept AppleScript alive throughout the lean years. When I first got there, one of them dragged me aside and said you've got to see this stuff. We've got to keep working on this stuff. And I really want to thank the AppleScript team. They've done a hell of a great job. (Applause)
So Mac OS 8.5. These four things and about another 20 that we don't have time to go through make this a must have upgrade. We want all of you to upgrade all of your Macs to this. It is coming out in October. You'll hear about it. And it's going to be a really big deal for us.
The next thing I'd like to cover very briefly is WebObjects 4.0. WebObjects is an interesting thing. It was a technology and a product set acquired when Apple bought Next. WebObjects is not a consumer product. It actually sells to large and medium sized companies that allows them to build dynamic Web sites that do database publishing in extremely sophisticated ways. And WebObjects has now become the number one application server in this industry. It's bigger than all these other guys actually put together. We have over 3,000 customers. Huge Web sites. Not to mention our own. WebObjects 4.0, which we're announcing today, is five times faster than its predecessor which was already fast. WebObjects in the past has allowed you to dynamically make sites that admitted HTML. Now we're allowing you to make sites that dynamically admit Java using the swing UI stuff and the clients. In addition to NT and Solaris, we are also running this on Mac OSX which we're going to have a server for before the end of this year. So you'll be able to run it on Apple hardware and software as well. And we've dramatically lowered the price to $1,499. It took you the better part of $10,000 to develop and deploy prior to this, so it's a big move. And I'd strongly suggest if you're building Web sites you check this stuff out. It is the best stuff in the business. That’s WebObjects.
Now I'd love to tell you about something we're working on very hard for next year called Mac OS X. What developers and customers have told us is that whiest thing out there in many regards, they would like us to add some new features to it as we move forward. So we have decided to do that. The Mac OS X, which will be coming out in a little over a year is the OS that's going to do that. Mac OS X has two parents. One is Mac OS 8 and the other is the Rhapsody technology which was based on the stuff from Next. The most state-of-the-art operating system kernel in the business. It will offer full protected memory, so that each app runs in its own protected memory space. It has an extremely advanced virtual memory, preempted multitasking, full multithreading, very fast networking, very fast file IO, fully Power PC native. And it will run OS 8 apps. Now these apps, in order to run, the OS 8 apps will run as is, but in order to take advantage of all the features I just told you there's a small tuneup required by the developers. That tuneup requires them to basically take some of the old cruft out of their apps and to meet a new specification we have called Carbon. We posted the specification on the Web. We've been working with a lot of developers on it. It's sort of a cleaned up Mac API. We put this tool on the Web called the Carbon Dater. Any developer can run their app against the Carbon Dater and it will tell them what percent of their app doesn't need any changing at all. And, hence, what percent does.
Over 3,800 apps have been run against the Carbon Dater now. Ninety-four percent of the average app runs perfectly under Carbon. The developer has to change 6% of their app. We are providing the Carbon enhancements in OS 8 libraries, so that as the developers rev their apps they can rev them to Carbon, include these libraries, and run them on OS 8. So that when we get to OS X sometime late next year, these apps will just literally pop alive and give us all these great features. With a simple recompile. We think it's going to be a fairly smooth transition. And we think it's going to be great. So Mac OS X.
I’d like to invite Ken Bruskin, Product Manager for Mac OS X, to give you a little bit of a demo of Mac OS X. We're going to show you three of the most popular publishing apps in the world today running on OS X: Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia FreeHand, and Quark Xpress.
Ken Bruskin: Thanks a lot, Steve. I think the attendees of the Seybold conference are a perfect customer base. We're designing Mac OS X specifically for your type of needs and your type of usages. It's truly my pleasure to be able to show Mac OS X. Development is going exceptionally well and we've met a number of very important internal milestones and a couple of very important external ones. I'll walk you through that process very quickly. The first really important internal milestone was to get some of Apple's key technologies up and running on 10. QuickTime and QuickTime 3.0 were one of the first ones we focused on. I downloaded a couple of the great new iMac TV commercials from the Apple Web site. So let's get those movies playing. Just as you would expect, this is full QuickTime 3.0 but the little trick with Mac OS X is that my system is still completely interactive. I can navigate many commands. I can launch applications. I can get other tasks done. Everything continues to run perfectly smoothly. Let's just stop those really quick.
What's really important and obviously key and critical, as Steve mentioned, is having real applications that have gone through the tuneup process to Carbon. The first app that I'd love to show you is Adobe Photoshop. So I’ll go to my process menu here and bring up Photoshop 5.0. In a matter of a couple of weeks the Adobe engineering team was able to get Photoshop up and running, fully taking advantage of protective memory and this is full blown Photoshop 5. I'm on my lazy selector so I'll use the magic wand selector to select our white background. We can choose our gradient fill tool and do a very simple gradient fill. As you noticed, this is Photoshop 5 so our history panel is showing us all of these steps automatically. So I can go back to the original state of that document, if that's what I want it to do. This is Photoshop 5, running smoothly and great under Mac OS X.
Let me just hide that. The next application that we'd love to show you is a really killer illustration package from Macromedia, FreeHand 8. This is the first time that this has been demonstrated in public so let me just go up to my application menu and here is FreeHand. I've got a very complicated illustration entitled Parka and if I zoom out a little bit so we can see a little bit more of the detail, here is full blown FreeHand 8, all of the tools so I can zoom in. And, again, this shows one of the great benefits of Mac OS X in its print and multitasking. Let me get the QuickTime movie playing again. And now if I zoom to full size of the document for literally rendering tens of thousands of small vectors with a lot of gradient fills, you notice that QuickTime still continues to play full speed ahead very, very smoothly. I don't have to wait for one application to finish before I can move on to my next task.
(Applause)
First time in public. So that's great. We are creating a lot of images. We're focused on image processing with Photoshop, illustration with FreeHand and now we need to be able to do a layout. So let me just wait for this to render before I hide it. These are complicated documents here. And what we're going to bring up is an exceptionally important application, Quark Xpress. And here's Quark Xpress. This literally just became available to us. The Quark engineering team has been working really, really hard for the demonstration. This has just started running the last couple of days, again, full Quark Xpress 4.0. I can select some text. Let's change the font size and we'll see that everything renders and wraps properly. We can adjust the shading to 60%. I'm not going to go through all the features but this is full blown. First we saw Photoshop, then we saw FreeHand then we finish off with Quark Xpress. These are very, very important applications.
One of the benefits that Steve talked about when he talked about protected memory is having a really reliable, stable operating system. Now there's nothing we can do to prevent the software that has been programmed poorly from crashing. But we can try and contain the damage as best we can. Now to demonstrate that let me just resize that a little bit and we'll bring back our QuickTime movie. We had to write a special application that we called Bomb. This thing does one thing exceptionally well. It tries to cause as much damage to the operating system and running applications as it possibly can. So let me get that started. We'll have a bit of a countdown. When it reaches zero it's going to start overwriting memory. It's going to start trying to crash applications. But I think Mac OS X is up to the challenge. Kaboom. Instead of crashing, we get an alert. "The application Bomb has unexpectedly quit. You do not need to restart your computer." (Applause)
So we're working incredibly hard to make Mac OS X a great, great product. We're working with some of the most important developers of leading applications for the publishing industry and certainly other markets as well. It truly is my pleasure to be able to show you where we are today. Thank you. (Applause)
SJ: Thanks. Again, we've come a long way in a year. And we're moving. It's my pleasure now to actually invite a few of our partners up on the stage to talkt some of the things that have happened between our companies during the last year. So the first person I'd like to invite up is Bruce Crisum the executive vice president of Worldwide Products and Marketing for Adobe. Bruce.
(Applause)
Bruce Crisum: Thanks, Steve. We at Adobe are so pleased with Apple's success. It's great for the industry. It's great for our customers. And quite frankly, it's great for Adobe. So thank you, Steve. OS X is really cool. Our engineers are finding it much easier than they ever imagined to pull out applications. Being able to work on an operating system that doesn't crash makes their life a lot easier. Our customers will especially appreciate the fact that they will have true multitasking. As a reminder, as many of you already know, you tend to use many of our applications at one time or have them up and running at one time. And OS X will make life much easier for each of you. We're thrilled about ColorSync. Back in March of last year we announced support for ColorSync in PhotoShop 5.0. We will be supporting it with Illustrator 8.0 which we’ll be shipping the end of this month, as well as support in future versions of Acrobat. We believe that ColorSync is the first viable cross platform color standard. And we look to working with Apple to make that happen. So Steve again, thank you. We're excited about you're doing.
(Applause)
SJ: Thank you, Bruce. And now Rob Burgess, Chairman and CEO of Macromedia.
(Applause)
Rob Burgess: So there are a lot of folks who like getting up in front of thousands of people and talking to them and they're really good at it. People like Steve and Phil. I'm not one of those people, actually. But I spent a little bit of time just before the presentation here back in the green room with some of my colleagues from Adobe and Quark. And it's actually nice to be out here. It's really great to be out here. This turnaround of Apple. I'm a bit of a student of these things and I'll tell you, this is one for the ages turnaround. I've never seen anything like it. I don't know if there has been anything like it in such a short period of time. And it's really a testament to the hard work and the vision and the guts and the taste of the folks at Apple and this is really a big deal for a company like ours that is really very involved with the Mac. Our business is based on it. A lot of your businesses are based on it. A year ago, a year and a half ago, the situation was really pretty bleak. You look at the situation now and it's just so radically different.
A funny thing happened to me on my way to my earnings conference call, last quarter, Q1. My Mac revenue went up. After years of naysaying and everybody just saying that the platform wasn't viable, all of a sudden we've got topline revenue growth. It actually grew 14% quarter to quarter and 11% year over year. It's actually quite interesting, the breakdown of that revenue growth. FreeHand, a very popular application for a long time with Mac users has traditionally been about 75% Mac and 25% Windows. Last quarter it was actually 83% Mac. One thing that really surprised me is our new Web page products. Macromedia has really focused on adding life to the Web. Our three new Web products, Flash, DreamWeaver and FireWorks have just been shipping over the past year. Everyone of those, over 40% of revenue, is Mac. Which just shows you the creative community is still leading the way and still very involved with the Mac. That's terrific I think for all of us. Our product lines are growing and they're profitable. So from a viability standpoint for ISVs, this stuff is really exciting. I think the next year is going to be even more exciting. We're really happy about that. As far as OS X is concerned, you saw a demo here.
We got a call about three weeks ago asking us if we wanted to participate in this and show FreeHand. The team in Richardson, Texas that does FreeHand, thought this was going to screw up our engineering schedule to pull this task that we hadn't planned for. One of the engineers actually went to his boss and asked if he could do it. The boss said no. He asked if he could do it in his spare time. In the evenings he stayed up at night and got this done in a couple of weeks. So we are a very enthusiastic supporter of the whole strategy. Look at where the Web is today. I think we're just at the beginning of making this into the medium that it really can be and adding life to the Web. We couldn't be more enthusiastic about the progress you folks are making. Thanks. (Applause)
SJ: Thank you, Rob. And now Tim Gill, the chief technology officer of Quark.
(Applause)
Tim Gill: When Steve took over Apple a year and some ago I didn't know him really well. He came to me and said "Tim, what is the one thing that I can possibly do for you that will help you at Quark do the best job that you can for us at Apple?" I'm sure he was expecting me to say that you should make the system 27% faster or something. But what I said was, "Become profitable." Thank you very much. It is the coolest gift you could possibly have given me. (Applause)
Because Apple is very important to all of us. Actually, when I was up here on stage last year someone observed, I think in the press---I think probably cynically because the press tends to do that sometimes---that I was emotional. I really was. And the reason is I can program both on Mac and Windows. So I'm bi. But I really want to come out of the closet and tell you all that I have five computers at home and they're all Macs. (Applause)
So it was a very emotional thing. Because Macintosh has been very, very important to all of us. It's made the publishing industry what it is. And I cannot tell you how impressed I am with what Apple has done for themselves as a company in terms of financial performance. But also in terms of what they've done with OS X. Eighty percent of our installed base is on Macintosh. So Macintosh has to be very important to me. I program Macs much better than I program Windows, too.
OS X has things that we've really needed for a long time, improved performance and ColorSync, which is just fabulous. I just want to say thank you so much to the Apple team, the engineering team and the business team for doing something that I think is going to benefit not just Apple but all of us. Let us really move forward into the next century in a way that is going to be more profitable for us than we could possibly have expected. Their attention to detail, their focus on the Internet is going to become increasingly important. So everything they have done in OS X is phenomenal. We owe Steve and all the engineers and all the people who have made this possible a big round of applause.
(Applause)
I just have one little question. Maybe two little questions before I go. How many of you are not going to be on OS 8 by this time next year? How many of you are not going to be on OS 8.5 by this time next year? The answer for those of you is no hands went up. This is a really, really cool technology. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Apple for making it possible. Thank you.
(Applause)
SJ: When the team got to Apple a little over a year ago, the first thing we did was we called Adobe, called Macromedia and called Quark. We asked them: A, what do you think we should do? Because we'd been out of the Mac market for awhile. And most importantly, what do we do to get these companies working together again? Because we love the design and publishing market. I hope you can tell from the graphics and the advertising and everything else we do, we love the design and publishing market. Apple had not been paying enough attention to its developers, its customers and partners in general. We've put a lot of energy into that and I hope it's showing and we're always interested in hearing things that we're not doing well enough. So let us know. Our e-mail addresses are out there. Send us an e-mail and we do jump on these things. So by the fall of 1999, Mac OS X---I think when we meet again, hopefully a year from now, we'll be within six months of having Mac OS X out there in the market in a big way. So we do have a very clear strategy. Going from Mac OS 8 and 8.1 to in a few months Mac OS 8.5. We think it's going to be a must have upgrade. And then over the next year to 18 months, especially in the design and publishing market, starting to get everybody moved up on OS X. The apps are going to be there. The operating system is going to be hot. We are investing tons into the Mac OS. So these are the topics we've covered today.
And I've got a bonus topic. The first person I actually called when I got back to Apple was my old friend John Warnock, who runs Adobe. I said "John, tell me about all the craziness of working with Apple and how we can sort this out." We began a dialogue about how Apple could work better with its developers that turned out to be very fruitful. Adobe, I think, represented many developers in that it wasn't getting what it wanted out of Apple. It was starting to deinvest. I'm very pleased to say that with Adobe and all of our developers we've really turned that around in the last year. An example of that is something we're going to show here today.
We got a phone call from Adobe a few weeks ago that said hey, we're working on a new technology for a new paradigm of page layout applications that we're going to bring to market in the future. We would like to demonstrate this at Seybold. It runs on top of Carbon and we'd like to demonstrate it on top of Mac OS 8.5 and we will be obviously bringing it to Mac OS X. So we're going to give you today a sneak preview of some very cool technology. It's code name is K2 and it's going to be a totally new page layout tool. It's going to run on Mac OS 8.5 and Mac OS X. It's really great at supporting all of the Apple technologies that we've seen here today. So it's my pleasure to introduce you to Ben, the product manager for this product from Adobe who is going to give us a quick demo of this new K2 technology.
Ben: What I'd like to do today is give you a brief overview, a brief glimpse of this new Adobe publishing technology that we've created. This technology is going to be running under the Carbon APIs which ensures compatibility with not only Mac OS 8.5 but Mac OS X, as well. So let me go ahead and start. I should also say, by way of background, that there are over 1,300 features in this highly extensible environment and I'm going to literally skim the surface on those features. You'll notice the first thing inside of our open dialogue, we get a preview thanks to the Carbon APIs which save us a considerable amount of time. So when I open up this document, this magazine spread, what I see here is actually a highly extensible page. Let me go back and create a new layer and I'm going to hide this existing layer which removes the guides and all the objects from that one page as well. Go ahead and draw a box here. You'll notice that in a number of cases we have bent the paradigms for what we can do with graphics as we're manipulating them. I go to the place dialogue and I import a graphic into this shape. Notice that I have access to that graphic, being able to move it around. At the moment I want to go through some sort of transformation of this graphic, I'm not into this abstraction that computer applications put us in in the past, but I can directly manipulate that graphic or do so using one of the nine proxy points down in the transform palette. Let me go ahead and move this down and create a little bit of text here. I'll apply a style sheet to this text. Let's take this text, select it, and then I will create an outline. I should also mention to you that I do not have ATM running on this machine. So let me go over to the swatches panel. I'll modify the color on that. Go ahead and take this existing graphic that I had before, cut that graphic out, and then paste it down into this. You notice I've gone through that action, I still have access to the original graphic back behind it. If I decide form this other graphic that I've drawn I can transform that frame. And, of course, I can take the outline that I've created and I can edit that outline as well. So let me go ahead and move this back up to the upper lefthand corner. And we'll turn that other layer back on briefly just to check our overall layout.
Now let me go ahead and create a new text frame. So we'll start with one of the basic elements for the Marie Curie fans in the audience and grow this radon out. Let me go ahead and open up the color palette over here, pull this out, pull up the gradient palette and we'll create a quick gradient for that text. Now I have the capabilities of creating a separate stroke and fill for that gradient text. I also have the ability to go in and edit that text after I've gone through those actions. Let me go ahead and pull this down here. Let's bring in some text. You notice I don't have to have a text frame created before bringing text in. I can simply create them on the fly. We have a lot of flexibility for extending text frames so if I decide that I want text to roll from here over to here I can easily link that text back up.
So at this stage let's go ahead and select all of this. I'll apply a slight rotation to all of that. If you've seen the wonders of Display PostScript, think of this world as Display PDF because we're certainly leveraging Adobe's PDF technologies. I have the abilities to come in and do very free transformations on that. In addition to that, I also have a shear tool where I can shear that text out. So I can get nice effects of anamorphic scaling. The other capability that we have is multiple views. So if I'm on page one and I want to see how my text is copyfitting on page 20, I can do that. I'm zoomed up at 400% size and I want to see how my text is looking as I'm printing it. I can do that as well. So going here to the familiar Navigator panel which is right out of our beloved friends, Photoshop or Illustrator. I can zoom all the way up 4,000%. The internal precision of this is one millionth of a point. So when holographic publishing finally takes off we'll be there. So I'm going to go ahead and pull this back down. You'll notice that even though I've gone through that action, that text and this view is still editable text and eminently printable through the wonders of PDF. So that's a brief overview. Thank you. Steve.
(Applause)
SJ: Thank you, Ben, and thank you, Adobe. We look forward to seeing this app, hopefully, on the market sometime soon. You saw it here first on the Macintosh. So this is what we had today and I really want to thank you for letting us come and talk. What a difference a year makes. I think we have a lot of momentum going forward. We're here to make the best computers and the best operating systems in the world. So please let us know the problems you're having and we'll really try to address them in our future products. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Maggie Canon: I'm just going to ask you one question. Before you folks leave I'm just going to ask Steve one question. I know you've got to get the show and the conference program. A lot of us are really thrilled with everything he's done this year. He's worked really hard. It's been a long year. I have a personal question for you because I know that we all set personal goals in our lives. When will you, as the head of Apple, feel that you have completely turned Apple around? What's the metric, the yardstick for yourself?
SJ: It's really interesting. Our goal isn't to turn Apple around. That's not what we set out to do. Our goal---we think the reason a lot of us are at Apple is to make the best computers in the world and to make the best software in the world. We know that we've got some stuff that are the best right now. But it can be so much better. So we don't come to work every day thinking well, when are we going to turn Apple around? We come to work every day knowing we know how to make even better products. So that's what is driving us. The turnaround is just one milestone on a long road and it's not for us to declare. Somebody else can decide when that happens. But we're out to make the best products in the world. And we'll sleep well when we do that.
Maggie Canon: That sounds good. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, everybody. Have a great show.
(Applause)