Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
How Big Can Apple Get?
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Diatribe said:
Have you Ever heard of a little program called VectorWorks? The new version 11 is flawless, It is widely available on both mac and pc, most professionals I know use the mac version though. This CAD program leaves AutoCAD in the dust. VectorWorks is not just great for Architechture, and Mechanical Engineering, it also is the recognized standard in lighting design with Spotight...not to mention the capabilities of Landmark, and The new Renderworks.....hmmm so nice to have one piece of software that can do ALL of these things...
virividox said:
Can't help laughing at that... anyone who has ever met Steve knows that he would never settle for unrealistic expectations
Porchland said:
No, written from scratch on the spot. Others may, probably, have the same idea though. Hey, great minds and all that!
jaromski said:
Definitely. I use Illustrator on the Mac right now for CAD type work but would love a good real 2D/3D CAD program. At one point, long ago in a far away land, it looked like Virtus was going to be such a tool. Never made it. Blender is interesting but awkward.
sw1tcher said:
In that interview with the Adobe CEO (linked a ways up; it's from April 2004), he says Mac software sales account for 22-25% of Adobe's income. That means Windows sales are ~ 75% of their sales.
If you figure that Mac's market share is 3-5%, that is really pretty darn impressive.
sw1tcher said:
It's been done, in the opposite direction. Flight Simulator used to be a Mac program. Microsoft-cough-cough, bought it and dropped all Mac support. It was a decent program in it's time. A-10 was a great flight sim on the Mac but the developer never followed up on his Mac success and went over to the PC. ("No, Luke, come back from the dark side!") X-Plane is great, on Mac, Linux and Windows now. Hopefully Austin will never abandon the Mac. Fortunately he's a fan of SJ.
DrEwe said:
Apple could definitely benefit from something that would take any output and make it into web pages. Perhaps this needs to be built into the OS as part of the print (Print to laser, inkjet, fax, pdf, web, jpg, tiff, etc). There is potential with such an approach. It would make web pages so much easier for users who don't want to get into hand coding HTML, etc.
Personally, I don't like the code produced by FrontPage, DreamWeaver, etc. Their output tends to be messy where HTML has the potential to be so right. I use a combination of BBEdit and HyperEdit - just wish the two were one.
-Walter
in Vermont
Blue Velvet said:
Photoshop 6
Illustrator 9
Blue Velvet said:
That's the issue.
What I have does all I need. Nothing feature-wise that I've seen Adobe add to Illustrator and Photoshop in recent upgrades has been even remotely tempting. The only thing I want is running native in OSX but that isn't worth the upgrade fees ($300) so I just run them under Classic. It works. No hassle learning new commands. I get the job done.What I see Adobe doing is milking the upgrade fees without really offering a whole lot of new functionality.
-Walter
in Vermont
cgc said:
Yeah! Definitely. I forgot that one. My Handspring Visor (PalmOS) is my third hand. I really wish it synced completely with my Pismo. Frankly, Apple needs to bring out a handheld, a PDA. Yes, the PDA market hasn't been growing like it used to, but part of that is the features have been built into so many other devices. What I would see in an iPalm is full integration with the Mac such that my Home directory could be transfered to the iPalm and I would have access to my data in the field on a smaller screen and slower processor. Other than the scaling down it should offer the same basic experience. Until then full syncing with PalmOS devices would be really nice. PalmDesktop offers some of that but I don't like their desktop applications as much as Apple's (iCal, etc).
pubwvj said:
There has been a good deal of new functionality but it may not be useful to you... one example, the file browser, has made a tremendous difference to my working day, because we store a substantial photo library on a server...
Small things are the hugely improved filter preview windows in CS and the liquify 'filter'...
The next version of Pshop promises to bring effects/filters/other transformations across multiple layers simultaneously.
I find most of these things assist my productivity but it depends on the user and their needs. So it's horses for courses, I guess...
bleachthru said:
Not wanting to start anything here but I've had two CAD classes. One in which we used Vectorworks and one in which we used AutoCAD. And I have to say that AutoCAD blows vectorworks out of the water. Vectorworks will draw things and stuff all good but AutoCAD was so much easier to use. If they ported AutoCAD so many people would then be enabled to switch.
Blue Velvet said:
Excellent choice of examples. I greatly prefer the file browser in GraphicConverter which I use in conjunction with Photoshop.
Adobe has a lot ot learn.I'll keep watching Adobe's upgrades. Maybe one of these days they'll convince me it is worth paying the upgrade fee again. Until then Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 9 are mine.
pubwvj said:I'll keep watching Adobe's upgrades. Maybe one of these days they'll convince me it is worth paying the upgrade fee again. Until then Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 9 are mine.
Well, at least you can download and use fully-functional demos for 30 days from Adobe so it never hurts to try them out...
p.s. Notice I didn't make any great claims for Illustrator CS
macktheknife said:
Rumors of this always seem appealing. Especially to broke-ass pc users.
What everyone seems to forget is that there would be no applications available for an x86 version of osx. No Office, no Photoshop, no major apps at all. Safari, Mail, and maybe iLife. Thats about it. If Microsoft won't do a cocoa version of Office, what makes anyone think they'll recomplile for an os on their home hardware turf? Besides, I'm sure MS would be more than happy to provide good oem pricing to the companies that try to sell osx on x86. crazedbytheheat said:http://www.apple.com.cn - Apple's Chinese site.
Here's the link to the Asian Apple Store with all the places you can buy Apple products in Asia: http://www.asia.apple.com/buy/
Unemployed Chinese don't buy very many computers, you know. Everyone complains about using chinese labor without considering whether or not the Chinese like making a living. Maybe we should instead worry about their economy growing to the point where the average guy can afford to buy a computer.
The problem is that Apple doesn't offer anything that is tailored to the Chinese. In other words Apple is way too expensive. Something like mini is what they need to offer, but for the Chinese market, it needs to be under $300. What they should do is create a special Chinese market mini, with something like a 867 G4. Whatever the minimum is to actually run Panther and Tiger. Performance doesn't matter. Its a question of what the Chinese can actually afford. Apple needs to have a presense there now, no mattter what. The recent Universal/iTunes announcement to sell Chinese music is a good first step. They would be incredibly stupid to ignore the potential market.
On a side note, who cares if 90% of China can't afford a computer? If 10% can, that's 100 million people. Which is why Apple should be killing themselves to get into that market. Ultimately, it can bigger than the US and European markets combined. Unless of course, America starts having lots and lots of babies. Europe is almost a lost cause. They've been in decline for the past 100 years.
Fortune Article - part 1
How Big Can Apple Get?
Back from near oblivion, Apple is setting the pace in a new digital universe where computing and entertainment merge. We asked Steve Jobs how he did it (hint: It's the software, stupid) and what's next.
FORTUNE
Monday, February 7, 2005
By Brent Schlender
"My God, there really has been a genie locked in that bottle! Apple's innovation and creativity have been unleashed in a way that they haven't been in 20 years. Look at the results. This isn't a company about 5% market share; this is a company that is capable of competing with world-class competitors and achieving market shares of 65%, 70%, and even 90%."
Steve Jobs, the silver-tongued king of Apple Computer, is explaining how the world's opinion of his company has risen with the triumph of the iPod. We're in our third phone conversation, following up on a 2 1/2-hour interview in the Apple boardroom a few days before. Jobs is obviously feeling good, and with good reason. Overnight, it seems, Apple has broken out of its box as a boutique computer maker and emerged as a force to be reckoned with in consumer electronics, music, and who knows what else. "The great thing is that Apple's DNA hasn't changed," he says. "The place where Apple has been standing for the last two decades is exactly where computer technology and the consumer electronics markets are converging. So it's not like we're having to cross the river to go somewhere else; the other side of the river is coming to us."
Apple's recent achievements, in fact, make it look as if it is walking on water. Its stock price, which languished during and after the dot-com crash, suddenly more than tripled last year. (It recently hit an all-time high of nearly $80 a share.) In January, Jobs crowed that Apple had posted the highest revenues and profits in its 28-year history for its fiscal first quarter ending Christmas Day. Propelled by sales of 4.6 million iPod portable digital music players, revenues zoomed by 74%, to $3.5 billion for the quarter, putting the company on track, by analysts' estimates, for a $13 billion 2005. Meanwhile profits more than tripled.
The DNA may not have changed, but the external transformation is dramatic. No longer is Apple's business limited to computersthough it did sell more than a million Macs last quarter for the first time in four years. Today the company's ever-expanding products encompass multimedia applications for creative professionals and consumers, the thriving .Mac (pronounced dot-mac) Internet subscription service, and a popular line of easy-to-use wireless networking gizmos to link computers and stereos and other devices in the home and office. And, of course, the iPod. The company has even become a player in retail with its 100 Apple Stores: chic glass and anodized aluminum temples that fuse fashion, technology, and reverence for personal creativity into something Jobs likes to call the "Apple user experience."
In his first extended interview since undergoing surgery for pancreatic cancer last summer, Jobs eagerly explains how Apple has pulled all this off and drops hints about where the company is going and how big he expects it to get. (For excerpts from the interview, see 'Our DNA Hasn't Changed'.) But as the conversation unfolds, Steve doesn't talk about the next gotta-have-it gizmo or ultracool ad campaign or trendsetting industrial design. None of those, he says, is Apple's core strength or primary competitive advantage. Instead he's going to talk about softwarethe central strand that runs through all of Apple's success.
Steve being Steve, he's doing this partly because he's selling something. This spring, Apple will unveil Tiger, an update of its OS X operating system that, at $129 a pop, will generate hundreds of millions of dollars of high-profit sales. (More about Tiger later.) Even so, for Steve to credit software for Apple's success sounds so hopelessly dweeby, so Bill Gates, that it seems hardly worth muting your iPod foruntil you consider the new business model it has helped Apple spawn. Indeed, the whole iPod phenomenon is, underneath it all, one big interwoven software creation. The iTunes jukebox that coordinates the mind-meld between your iPod and your Mac or PC is just the most obvious chunk of code. The iTunes Music Store, which accounts for 62% of all music download sales on the web, is likewise a software machine, purring away in both Apple's corporate IT systems and your computer. And the iPod itself, like the Macintosh, is a marvel of software engineering.
It's that prowess in software that is Apple's greatest hope for sustained growth as it dives into markets dominated by leviathans like Sony and Microsoft, and that could propel it into other realms of consumer electronics. As we'll see, software wizardry is how Steve brought Apple back from oblivion and even breathed new life into the Mac, which turned 20 years old the day we sat down to talk. Software, in a word, is the genie in Apple's multibillion-dollar hardware business.
Steve Helps Himself
Your typical corporate CIO must be wondering, "Why aren't there some nice new exciting applications for me?" Nothing has really changed in his world, while on the consumer side there's all this cool new stuff like iTunes and the iPod and iPhoto and iMovie. That's where the real innovation is now, and Apple is driving it.
Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist at Sun Microsystems
Think back about just how irrelevant Apple seemed even two years ago. Its share of the personal-computing market had shrunk inexorably throughout the 1990s to a tiny 2%. It had slogged through nearly a decade of dwindling influence and financial pain. The consumer-oriented Mac couldn't run many of the programs that PC usersespecially those in business settingsneeded. Corporations, which buy the bulk of computers, were at best keeping a few Macs around to handle creative tasks like photo editing and document design.
By the late 1990s, Apple was making even its most loyal users doubt the point of sticking with the company. Its operating system was an unstable patchwork, and programmers were growing ever more reluctant to write for Macs or adapt their PC programs to run on the machines. Apple knew it needed help. It turned to a man who had started it all: Steve Jobs. Since being pushed out in 1986 of the company he had co-founded, Jobs had gone on to start another computer company, Next, and to take over what would become the animation powerhouse Pixar. Apple bought Next in 1997, and in came Jobs with a plan to remake the company with software.
But software takes a long time to build, and at first he had to scramble just to keep the place afloat. He pruned the product line in his first full year as CEO, causing revenues to sink some 15%, to $5.9 billionlittle more than half of Apple's peak sales in 1995. One of his first moves surprised Apple partisanshe turned for help to his longtime rival Bill Gates. The two struck a deal under which Microsoft bought $150 million of Apple stock and promised to keep supplying Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer for the Mac, programs that made Apple's computers at least somewhat compatible with the PC world. (Microsoft's stake in Apple is now worth well over $1 billion.) At the same time, Jobs used hardware to create buzz. In 1998, Apple launched the iMac, a fun, jellybean-colored machine thatwhile little different internally from its predecessorsquickly became a fashion statement.
But in truth, he was using the Microsoft deal and the iMac to buy time. Jobs' big bet was on Mac OS X, a new operating system based on his work at Next. Unlike the old Mac OS, this one would be based on Unix, an operating system that had been poked, prodded, tested, and improved over decades by some of the largest companies and universities. He told Avie Tevanian, who led software development, and Bertrand Serlet, the head of the OS X team, to treat it as a moon shot. In 2001, after three years of labor by nearly 1,000 geeks, Apple delivered the software equivalent of a cross between a Porsche and an Abrams tank: an operating system with sleek, animated graphics and an abundance of useful and novel features built on top of industrial-strength code. OS X made it easier to write applications, made programs run better, and allowed for much easier plug-and-play of camcorders and other consumer products.
OS X gave Apple the foundation it needed to build new generations of machines. But to get most of its 25 million or so Mac customers to upgrade, Jobs needed sexy applications. As part of his deal with Gates, Microsoft had agreed to adapt Office and Explorer for OS X. Jobs had assumed that this vote of confidence would inspire third-party developers to come up with software for, say, editing home videos on a computer or managing photos or digital music. But a 1998 meeting in which Jobs asked Adobe Systems executives to develop a Mac version of their consumer video-editing program changed his mind. "They said flat-out no," Jobs recalls. "We were shocked, because they had been a big supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, 'Okay, if nobody wants to help us, we're just going to have to do this ourselves.' "
How Big Can Apple Get?
Back from near oblivion, Apple is setting the pace in a new digital universe where computing and entertainment merge. We asked Steve Jobs how he did it (hint: It's the software, stupid) and what's next.
FORTUNE
Monday, February 7, 2005
By Brent Schlender
"My God, there really has been a genie locked in that bottle! Apple's innovation and creativity have been unleashed in a way that they haven't been in 20 years. Look at the results. This isn't a company about 5% market share; this is a company that is capable of competing with world-class competitors and achieving market shares of 65%, 70%, and even 90%."
Steve Jobs, the silver-tongued king of Apple Computer, is explaining how the world's opinion of his company has risen with the triumph of the iPod. We're in our third phone conversation, following up on a 2 1/2-hour interview in the Apple boardroom a few days before. Jobs is obviously feeling good, and with good reason. Overnight, it seems, Apple has broken out of its box as a boutique computer maker and emerged as a force to be reckoned with in consumer electronics, music, and who knows what else. "The great thing is that Apple's DNA hasn't changed," he says. "The place where Apple has been standing for the last two decades is exactly where computer technology and the consumer electronics markets are converging. So it's not like we're having to cross the river to go somewhere else; the other side of the river is coming to us."
Apple's recent achievements, in fact, make it look as if it is walking on water. Its stock price, which languished during and after the dot-com crash, suddenly more than tripled last year. (It recently hit an all-time high of nearly $80 a share.) In January, Jobs crowed that Apple had posted the highest revenues and profits in its 28-year history for its fiscal first quarter ending Christmas Day. Propelled by sales of 4.6 million iPod portable digital music players, revenues zoomed by 74%, to $3.5 billion for the quarter, putting the company on track, by analysts' estimates, for a $13 billion 2005. Meanwhile profits more than tripled.
The DNA may not have changed, but the external transformation is dramatic. No longer is Apple's business limited to computersthough it did sell more than a million Macs last quarter for the first time in four years. Today the company's ever-expanding products encompass multimedia applications for creative professionals and consumers, the thriving .Mac (pronounced dot-mac) Internet subscription service, and a popular line of easy-to-use wireless networking gizmos to link computers and stereos and other devices in the home and office. And, of course, the iPod. The company has even become a player in retail with its 100 Apple Stores: chic glass and anodized aluminum temples that fuse fashion, technology, and reverence for personal creativity into something Jobs likes to call the "Apple user experience."
In his first extended interview since undergoing surgery for pancreatic cancer last summer, Jobs eagerly explains how Apple has pulled all this off and drops hints about where the company is going and how big he expects it to get. (For excerpts from the interview, see 'Our DNA Hasn't Changed'.) But as the conversation unfolds, Steve doesn't talk about the next gotta-have-it gizmo or ultracool ad campaign or trendsetting industrial design. None of those, he says, is Apple's core strength or primary competitive advantage. Instead he's going to talk about softwarethe central strand that runs through all of Apple's success.
Steve being Steve, he's doing this partly because he's selling something. This spring, Apple will unveil Tiger, an update of its OS X operating system that, at $129 a pop, will generate hundreds of millions of dollars of high-profit sales. (More about Tiger later.) Even so, for Steve to credit software for Apple's success sounds so hopelessly dweeby, so Bill Gates, that it seems hardly worth muting your iPod foruntil you consider the new business model it has helped Apple spawn. Indeed, the whole iPod phenomenon is, underneath it all, one big interwoven software creation. The iTunes jukebox that coordinates the mind-meld between your iPod and your Mac or PC is just the most obvious chunk of code. The iTunes Music Store, which accounts for 62% of all music download sales on the web, is likewise a software machine, purring away in both Apple's corporate IT systems and your computer. And the iPod itself, like the Macintosh, is a marvel of software engineering.
It's that prowess in software that is Apple's greatest hope for sustained growth as it dives into markets dominated by leviathans like Sony and Microsoft, and that could propel it into other realms of consumer electronics. As we'll see, software wizardry is how Steve brought Apple back from oblivion and even breathed new life into the Mac, which turned 20 years old the day we sat down to talk. Software, in a word, is the genie in Apple's multibillion-dollar hardware business.
Steve Helps Himself
Your typical corporate CIO must be wondering, "Why aren't there some nice new exciting applications for me?" Nothing has really changed in his world, while on the consumer side there's all this cool new stuff like iTunes and the iPod and iPhoto and iMovie. That's where the real innovation is now, and Apple is driving it.
Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist at Sun Microsystems
Think back about just how irrelevant Apple seemed even two years ago. Its share of the personal-computing market had shrunk inexorably throughout the 1990s to a tiny 2%. It had slogged through nearly a decade of dwindling influence and financial pain. The consumer-oriented Mac couldn't run many of the programs that PC usersespecially those in business settingsneeded. Corporations, which buy the bulk of computers, were at best keeping a few Macs around to handle creative tasks like photo editing and document design.
By the late 1990s, Apple was making even its most loyal users doubt the point of sticking with the company. Its operating system was an unstable patchwork, and programmers were growing ever more reluctant to write for Macs or adapt their PC programs to run on the machines. Apple knew it needed help. It turned to a man who had started it all: Steve Jobs. Since being pushed out in 1986 of the company he had co-founded, Jobs had gone on to start another computer company, Next, and to take over what would become the animation powerhouse Pixar. Apple bought Next in 1997, and in came Jobs with a plan to remake the company with software.
But software takes a long time to build, and at first he had to scramble just to keep the place afloat. He pruned the product line in his first full year as CEO, causing revenues to sink some 15%, to $5.9 billionlittle more than half of Apple's peak sales in 1995. One of his first moves surprised Apple partisanshe turned for help to his longtime rival Bill Gates. The two struck a deal under which Microsoft bought $150 million of Apple stock and promised to keep supplying Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer for the Mac, programs that made Apple's computers at least somewhat compatible with the PC world. (Microsoft's stake in Apple is now worth well over $1 billion.) At the same time, Jobs used hardware to create buzz. In 1998, Apple launched the iMac, a fun, jellybean-colored machine thatwhile little different internally from its predecessorsquickly became a fashion statement.
But in truth, he was using the Microsoft deal and the iMac to buy time. Jobs' big bet was on Mac OS X, a new operating system based on his work at Next. Unlike the old Mac OS, this one would be based on Unix, an operating system that had been poked, prodded, tested, and improved over decades by some of the largest companies and universities. He told Avie Tevanian, who led software development, and Bertrand Serlet, the head of the OS X team, to treat it as a moon shot. In 2001, after three years of labor by nearly 1,000 geeks, Apple delivered the software equivalent of a cross between a Porsche and an Abrams tank: an operating system with sleek, animated graphics and an abundance of useful and novel features built on top of industrial-strength code. OS X made it easier to write applications, made programs run better, and allowed for much easier plug-and-play of camcorders and other consumer products.
OS X gave Apple the foundation it needed to build new generations of machines. But to get most of its 25 million or so Mac customers to upgrade, Jobs needed sexy applications. As part of his deal with Gates, Microsoft had agreed to adapt Office and Explorer for OS X. Jobs had assumed that this vote of confidence would inspire third-party developers to come up with software for, say, editing home videos on a computer or managing photos or digital music. But a 1998 meeting in which Jobs asked Adobe Systems executives to develop a Mac version of their consumer video-editing program changed his mind. "They said flat-out no," Jobs recalls. "We were shocked, because they had been a big supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, 'Okay, if nobody wants to help us, we're just going to have to do this ourselves.' "
Fortune Article - part 2
So Apple plunged into the OS X applications business. It bought a languishing project from web software company Macromedia, and in less than a year turned out two programs that capitalized on the iMac's ability to connect to digital camcorders: a video-editing program for professionals called Final Cut Pro and a simplified version for consumers called iMovie. Apple's Applications Software Division, which sprang from the project to become what is now a 1,000-engineer-strong group, has been on a roll ever since.
Consider iLife, a bundle of programs that comes free on every new Mac or can be purchased separately for $79. Its five applications turn the computer into a home studio: iMovie, iDVD (for recording movies, digital photo slide shows, and music onto TV-playable DVDs), iPhoto (for managing and touching up digital pictures and making slide shows), GarageBand (for making and mixing your own music), and the iTunes digital-music jukebox. iWork, aimed at people who like to make presentations and put out newsletters, is equally slick: It consists of a PowerPoint-like program called Keynote and a flashy word-processor/page-layout program called Pages.
The steady stream of software not only kept the buzz alive but also helped Apple create a tidy new line of business. Gradually users began to notice that the company was delivering truly innovative programs and continuously improving them. Today Apple gets people hooked with free online updates and then, every year or so, offers to sell them a full overhaul loaded with new featuresand more and more users are willing to pay. OS X has already gone through four versions, named Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, and Panther. It's a tactic that Microsoft and other software makers have tried with much less successWindows users in particular have grown leery of the chronic computer crashes and conflicts between programs that its upgrades cause. Apple engineered ways to minimize such problems.
The upgrades also fuel Apple's computer hardware business, which still accounts for 60% of annual sales. Jobs sees applications like iLife as the centerpiece of his marketing strategy, which is to differentiate the Macintosh from Windows PCs by positioning it as a complete multimedia machine. Right out of the box, the Mac with iLife gives users (especially the creative types) everything they need for creating, editing, managing, and playing digital content. While comparable applications are available for Windows machines, matching what Apple initially throws in free costs hundreds of dollars, and the various Windows programs don't interact easily with one another. "Everyone in every corner of the software business could learn a lot from iLife," says Bill Joy, the legendary computer scientist, now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Triumph of the iPod
I remember sitting with Steve and some other people night after night from nine until one, working out the user interface for the first iPod. It evolved by trial and error into something a little simpler every day. We knew we had reached the end when we looked at each other and said, "Well, of course. Why would we want to do it any other way?"
Jeff Robbin, lead software designer for iTunes and the iPod
The best example of how clever software plays the pivotal role in unlocking huge hardware opportunities for Apple is the saga of iTunes and its progenythe iPod and the iTunes Music Store. Their lightning evolution demonstrates how, when the coders really get rolling and follow their noses, one technological breakthrough leads to another in a virtuous cycle that Jobs, the marketing whiz, can exploit to create "user experiences." It's how the iPod coalesced into the hottest product the media and electronics world has seen in years. And the delicious irony is that Apple's enormous success in digital music came out of nearly missing the boat.
"I felt like a dope," says Jobs, thinking back to summer 2000, when his fixation on perfecting video editing on the Mac distracted him from noticing that millions of kids were using computers and CD burners to make audio CDs and to download digital songs called MP3s from illegal online services like Napster. Yes, even Jobs, the technological visionary of his generation, occasionally gets caught looking in the wrong direction. "I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up."
He moved fast, ordering Mac hardware designers to incorporate CD-ROM burners as standard equipment in all Macs. But what about the "jukebox" software necessary to manage what could conceivably be thousands of songs on the computer? Windows PC users already had several jukebox programs to choose from, but only a handful of Mac developers were tinkering with them. One was a company called SoundStep, founded by a then 28-year-old software engineer with an MBA named Jeff Robbin, who had left Apple literally the month Jobs returned. His program, SoundJam, wasn't ready for market, but Jobs bought the company anyway, primarily because Robbin had impressed people while at Apple before.
The alacrity and breadth of what transpired over the next 13 months are hard to believe in hindsight. Robbin and a couple of other programmers started over from scratch and pounded out the first version of iTunes in less than four months. That was just in time for Steve to show it off at the annual Macworld trade show. The application simplified the importing and compression of songs, but more important, iTunes was a powerful and ingenious database that could quickly sort tens of thousands of songs in a multitude of ways, and find particular tracks in a trice.
Even before iTunes was out the door, Jobs, a music nut himself (he favors Dylan and the Beatles), recognized that although storing and playing music on a computer was pretty cool, wouldn't it be even cooler if there was a portable, Walkman-like player that could hold all your digital music so that you could listen to it anywhere? He asked Robbin to pitch in on the portable-player project, a much more complex undertaking that required not only modifying iTunes but also building a tiny new operating system for what was basically a miniature computer, and designing a user interface that could sort and navigate music files on it with the same sophistication as iTunes on the Mac. It was another crash project that yielded the iPod just nine months later, in November 2001.
Only after playing with iPod prototypes did Jobs and his geeks realize that the whole iPod "platform" was still missing something, namely an online store for buying downloadable songs. They knew there had to be an easier way to get music for your iPod and your computer than by laboriously "ripping" audio CDs into your computer. But talk about a software challenge: An online store would require building an e-business infrastructure that could automatically both serve up the songs and take care of billing and accounting for conceivably millions of purchases. Plus, they'd have to construct a "storefront," either as a website or preferably by modifying iTunes yet again so that the store was incorporated right in its screen. And then they'd have to persuade big record companiesfirms like Sony and Universal Music were paranoid about downloadsto buy in to make the concept work.
Still, less than 18 months after the rollout of the iPod, Apple's iTunes Music Store opened for business in April 2003. "We had hoped to sell a million songs in the first six months, but we did that in the first six days," says Eddy Cue, the corporate IT specialist who led the project and is now a vice president for applications. In the meantime, Robbin's crew developed a version of iTunes for Windows PCs, expanding the potential market for iPods and the iTunes Music Store to, well, the entire worldas well as delivering a huge, huge ego boost. The company that had once begged to get PC software adapted to the Mac now found itself supplying some of the hottest software in the PC world. By the time Apple announced its financial results in January 2005, it noted that to date it had sold more than ten million iPods and 250 million songs.
Apple Casts a Shadow
Software is the user experience. As the iPod and iTunes prove, it has become the driving technology not just of computers but of consumer electronics.
Steve Jobs
The crudest way to measure the impact of Jobs' software factory is by the numbers. He estimates that this year Apple will generate $1 billion in revenue from selling applications and updates, plus other software-related revenue generated by the iTunes Music Store and its .Mac online subscription service, which has 600,000 members. That's almost double last year's take and doesn't count the boost software provides by helping sell iPods and Macs.
So Apple plunged into the OS X applications business. It bought a languishing project from web software company Macromedia, and in less than a year turned out two programs that capitalized on the iMac's ability to connect to digital camcorders: a video-editing program for professionals called Final Cut Pro and a simplified version for consumers called iMovie. Apple's Applications Software Division, which sprang from the project to become what is now a 1,000-engineer-strong group, has been on a roll ever since.
Consider iLife, a bundle of programs that comes free on every new Mac or can be purchased separately for $79. Its five applications turn the computer into a home studio: iMovie, iDVD (for recording movies, digital photo slide shows, and music onto TV-playable DVDs), iPhoto (for managing and touching up digital pictures and making slide shows), GarageBand (for making and mixing your own music), and the iTunes digital-music jukebox. iWork, aimed at people who like to make presentations and put out newsletters, is equally slick: It consists of a PowerPoint-like program called Keynote and a flashy word-processor/page-layout program called Pages.
The steady stream of software not only kept the buzz alive but also helped Apple create a tidy new line of business. Gradually users began to notice that the company was delivering truly innovative programs and continuously improving them. Today Apple gets people hooked with free online updates and then, every year or so, offers to sell them a full overhaul loaded with new featuresand more and more users are willing to pay. OS X has already gone through four versions, named Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, and Panther. It's a tactic that Microsoft and other software makers have tried with much less successWindows users in particular have grown leery of the chronic computer crashes and conflicts between programs that its upgrades cause. Apple engineered ways to minimize such problems.
The upgrades also fuel Apple's computer hardware business, which still accounts for 60% of annual sales. Jobs sees applications like iLife as the centerpiece of his marketing strategy, which is to differentiate the Macintosh from Windows PCs by positioning it as a complete multimedia machine. Right out of the box, the Mac with iLife gives users (especially the creative types) everything they need for creating, editing, managing, and playing digital content. While comparable applications are available for Windows machines, matching what Apple initially throws in free costs hundreds of dollars, and the various Windows programs don't interact easily with one another. "Everyone in every corner of the software business could learn a lot from iLife," says Bill Joy, the legendary computer scientist, now a Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Triumph of the iPod
I remember sitting with Steve and some other people night after night from nine until one, working out the user interface for the first iPod. It evolved by trial and error into something a little simpler every day. We knew we had reached the end when we looked at each other and said, "Well, of course. Why would we want to do it any other way?"
Jeff Robbin, lead software designer for iTunes and the iPod
The best example of how clever software plays the pivotal role in unlocking huge hardware opportunities for Apple is the saga of iTunes and its progenythe iPod and the iTunes Music Store. Their lightning evolution demonstrates how, when the coders really get rolling and follow their noses, one technological breakthrough leads to another in a virtuous cycle that Jobs, the marketing whiz, can exploit to create "user experiences." It's how the iPod coalesced into the hottest product the media and electronics world has seen in years. And the delicious irony is that Apple's enormous success in digital music came out of nearly missing the boat.
"I felt like a dope," says Jobs, thinking back to summer 2000, when his fixation on perfecting video editing on the Mac distracted him from noticing that millions of kids were using computers and CD burners to make audio CDs and to download digital songs called MP3s from illegal online services like Napster. Yes, even Jobs, the technological visionary of his generation, occasionally gets caught looking in the wrong direction. "I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up."
He moved fast, ordering Mac hardware designers to incorporate CD-ROM burners as standard equipment in all Macs. But what about the "jukebox" software necessary to manage what could conceivably be thousands of songs on the computer? Windows PC users already had several jukebox programs to choose from, but only a handful of Mac developers were tinkering with them. One was a company called SoundStep, founded by a then 28-year-old software engineer with an MBA named Jeff Robbin, who had left Apple literally the month Jobs returned. His program, SoundJam, wasn't ready for market, but Jobs bought the company anyway, primarily because Robbin had impressed people while at Apple before.
The alacrity and breadth of what transpired over the next 13 months are hard to believe in hindsight. Robbin and a couple of other programmers started over from scratch and pounded out the first version of iTunes in less than four months. That was just in time for Steve to show it off at the annual Macworld trade show. The application simplified the importing and compression of songs, but more important, iTunes was a powerful and ingenious database that could quickly sort tens of thousands of songs in a multitude of ways, and find particular tracks in a trice.
Even before iTunes was out the door, Jobs, a music nut himself (he favors Dylan and the Beatles), recognized that although storing and playing music on a computer was pretty cool, wouldn't it be even cooler if there was a portable, Walkman-like player that could hold all your digital music so that you could listen to it anywhere? He asked Robbin to pitch in on the portable-player project, a much more complex undertaking that required not only modifying iTunes but also building a tiny new operating system for what was basically a miniature computer, and designing a user interface that could sort and navigate music files on it with the same sophistication as iTunes on the Mac. It was another crash project that yielded the iPod just nine months later, in November 2001.
Only after playing with iPod prototypes did Jobs and his geeks realize that the whole iPod "platform" was still missing something, namely an online store for buying downloadable songs. They knew there had to be an easier way to get music for your iPod and your computer than by laboriously "ripping" audio CDs into your computer. But talk about a software challenge: An online store would require building an e-business infrastructure that could automatically both serve up the songs and take care of billing and accounting for conceivably millions of purchases. Plus, they'd have to construct a "storefront," either as a website or preferably by modifying iTunes yet again so that the store was incorporated right in its screen. And then they'd have to persuade big record companiesfirms like Sony and Universal Music were paranoid about downloadsto buy in to make the concept work.
Still, less than 18 months after the rollout of the iPod, Apple's iTunes Music Store opened for business in April 2003. "We had hoped to sell a million songs in the first six months, but we did that in the first six days," says Eddy Cue, the corporate IT specialist who led the project and is now a vice president for applications. In the meantime, Robbin's crew developed a version of iTunes for Windows PCs, expanding the potential market for iPods and the iTunes Music Store to, well, the entire worldas well as delivering a huge, huge ego boost. The company that had once begged to get PC software adapted to the Mac now found itself supplying some of the hottest software in the PC world. By the time Apple announced its financial results in January 2005, it noted that to date it had sold more than ten million iPods and 250 million songs.
Apple Casts a Shadow
Software is the user experience. As the iPod and iTunes prove, it has become the driving technology not just of computers but of consumer electronics.
Steve Jobs
The crudest way to measure the impact of Jobs' software factory is by the numbers. He estimates that this year Apple will generate $1 billion in revenue from selling applications and updates, plus other software-related revenue generated by the iTunes Music Store and its .Mac online subscription service, which has 600,000 members. That's almost double last year's take and doesn't count the boost software provides by helping sell iPods and Macs.