It was while walking around this year's Macworld Expo San Francisco, the West Coast's annual celebration of everything Apple, that I first started to notice the real power of Steve.
The event itself was pretty uneventful. There were no new hardware products announced and Apple's new OS isn't set to ship until the summer. No, all Mac users really got for their $45 minimum entrance fee were the announcements of some strategic business partnerships, and some mildly intriguing add-ons to Apple's Web site.
Not that anyone in attendance was really complaining. New products or no — Steve was there.
For Mac users, Steve is our Prometheus. Many credit him alone with rescuing Apple from certain destruction, returning the company to profitability and giving us hope that the platform might regain its share of the OS marketplace. We credit him his bravery and his ingenuity, for prevailing in spite of the underhanded dealings of Bill and his foul-playing software titan, Microsoft.
That's pretty lucky for Steve. Because it means that when the ideas aren't quite so ingenious, we don't care anyway. It's enough that they come from him.
Case in point, the new OS releases from both Microsoft and Apple. As Bill prepares to roll out Windows 2000, the next generation of the operating system formerly known as Windows NT, most NT administrators only know three things about it:
- It's huge, comprising millions of lines of code.
- Most of that code is brand new, rather than relying on tried-and-true technologies from NT 4.0.
- You don't want anything to do with it — at least not until the first few rounds of bug fixes come out.
Now, along comes Apple with its next generation operating system, called Mac OS X. Steve is claiming the new release will be just one step forward from Apple's current consumer product, Mac OS 9. (By comparison, Bill is not recommending Windows 98 users migrate to Windows 2000 just yet.)
Like Windows 2000, Mac OS X represents a complete rewrite of the core Mac OS that users and developers have come to know and...well, they know it. In its place will be a kernel having more in common with Linux, or UNIX variants like Solaris, than with any other desktop OS that has come before it.
Steve tells us the new OS runs OS 9 applications "really well" — but when has it ever been the case that a new Mac OS version didn't break some software? Most Mac users have never dealt with any kind of UNIX at all.
Yet many are reassured when they hear Mac OS X is based on a UNIX-derived operating system called OpenStep, from a company called Next. That's Steve's old company — it'll work out fine. Meanwhile, many analysts predict the eventual launch of Windows 2000 to be a troubled one.
Folks seem to hate Bill's ideas, but they sure love Steve's. Which is funny, because the ideas sound an awful lot alike. For example, when Bill tried to integrate Windows with the Internet, it landed Microsoft in court. And yet, the more Apple integrates its OS with the Internet, the public seems to be saying, the better it gets.
Giving away applications for free as OS components, we were told, is anti-competitive. It stifles innovation. That's why Microsoft's foes, among them Netscape Communications, wanted Bill to remove Internet Explorer as a component of Windows. Why, then, did no one raise an eyebrow when Steve introduced a new Apple email client to be bundled with Mac OS X?
"The most-used application for the Internet isn't a browser," Steve said in his Macworld keynote. "It's email." So if we don't want Bill dominating the browser market, isn't it worse for Steve to dominate the market for email software?
Apple has been working to integrate its OS with the Internet since long before Mac OS X, as well. Rather than handing its customers over to Real Networks, Apple ships a streaming media player with its OS, as part of QuickTime 4. And with Mac OS 8.5, the Sherlock utility gave Apple the ignoble distinction of being the first company to integrate not only Web search capabilities, but also online advertising at the OS level.
At MacWorld Expo, Steve announced Earthlink to be the new "official ISP of the Mac." Earthlink will henceforth be the only ISP users can sign up for using Apple's Internet Setup Assistant, which ships with all new Macs.
The MacWorld audience applauded — and I sat, confused. Back when Bill put the Microsoft Network on every Windows user's desktop, didn't we say he was trying to limit customer choice? What makes it different now, just because it's Steve that's doing it?
Every time Mac users discover a new Web site that only works properly under Microsoft Windows, they're up in arms. Now Steve has announced a whole suite of Internet applications hosted on Apple's Web site, and many of the features are only accessible to Mac users. Make that OS 9 users — because unlike Microsoft, Apple requires all its established users pay for an upgrade to take advantage of the latest online gizmos. And Mac users are eating it up.
It's all in the presentation. When Bill says it, we boo. When Steve says it, we cheer. So am I disappointed with Apple's latest direction? Does it bother me to hear Bill's words coming out of Steve's mouth? Well — no.
The Mac OS has taken great steps forward lately. I'd take the ads out of Sherlock, maybe. But it's high time consumers had an OS built on modern technologies.
Also, since it's hard to imagine a desktop PC today without Internet access, it follows that the operating system should be more tightly integrated with the Internet. But then, I never faulted Bill for these things, either, despite Microsoft's other bad business practices. In fact, I'd say Apple's new direction vindicates Bill's foresight of what it takes to compete in today's industry.
What worries me more is America Online. I first warned you when the online giant swallowed Netscape. Now AOL seems poised to merge with "old media" giant Time-Warner.
The new company would be in a unique position to control every facet of Internet experience: from the software to browse Web pages, the software to publish them, access to the Net itself, to the content you will find there. Ultimately, this could mean they control how and where you shop online, and who has access to personal information profiles gathered about you.
The two cards left in this game that Apple still holds are the computer hardware itself, and the OS to make it work. That's one more card than Microsoft, which doesn't manufacture its own computer systems — and Steve's betting that gives him an edge.
Combined with the Earthlink partnership, Steve's hoping his cards are strong enough that he can leverage them to put Apple into a top spot in the new Internet-enabled consumer market.
I wish Steve the best of luck. Anyone who's going to try and compete against a behemoth like AOL Time-Warner is going to need a whole lot of believers on his side.
But one thing Macintosh users want is to believe. Given the same strategy from both Microsoft and Apple, that's really where Bill falls short.
And that's the real power of Steve.
