Dr. Dobb's Journal April 2002
As I write this, the U.S. General Accounting Office is preparing to sue the Executive Branch of government to gain access to records of task-force meetings on energy policy.
The GAO says it needs those records to decide whether there was any undue influence on government policy by Enron. Since it is a matter of public knowledge that Enron had given a lot of money to the political coffers of those occupying the top chairs in the Executive Branch and had many other known ties to the President and Vice President, and since Enron is a particularly hot potato what with the shredding of documents and executives encouraging employees to put their 401Ks into the company's stock and then selling their own stock just before it went into the toilet and the apparent suicide of an Enron executive, you can see why the GAO might think that it would be good to shine a little light on those meetings.
The Executive Branch, on the other hand, contends that there is a principle at stake: If private citizens can't speak candidly (by which they mean secretly) to their government, the government will lose some ability to make informed decisions. I guess the idea is that people will only say what sounds good if they know it may end up in The Washington Post. There may be something in that.
I mention all this not to sway you to my political viewpoint, but to expose my bias: I'm for openness and against secrecy, almost always (pretty much the opposite of the stated policy of the Bush administration, which routinely resists Freedom of Information requests). You might keep that in mind as you read the following thoughts mulled over at Macworld Expo and in the days following. Because I'm going to be talking about — among other things — secrecy at Apple Computer, and secrecy in business can surely be a useful thing, so my bias may lead me astray here.
In January, MacDirectory senior editor Ron Mwangaguhunga wrote about Steve Jobs' keynote speech at this year's Macworld Expo and in doing so referred back to the previous year's keynote, "Few paid attention to Steve Jobs' vision back when he promised to start 2001 off with a bang." Well, I paid attention.
Neither Ron nor I were alone in getting the gist of Steve's message in his keynote speech at last year's Macworld Expo, when he revealed Apple's grand strategy — to provide the computers to serve as the hub of everyone's digital lifestyle. Steve is an unequaled communicator, and he put that point across solidly. He has continued to harp on it: It was the last point he made at this year's Macworld Expo keynote, too. I'll admit that there are times when it's a challenge to know just what Steve's vision is. I think Jonathan Ive, who designs some of Apple's best products, has been challenged in this way more than once. I look at the new iMac and I see designer Jonathan Ive's final desperate attempt to satisfy a demanding and unpredictable boss. "Well," I imagine Ive telling himself, "he does seem to like the animated goose-neck lamp in that Pixar movie."
But I paid attention last year and again this year. I was intrigued with Steve's articulation of a strategy — any strategy — last year because I had long held that everything Apple had been doing since Steve returned was focused on immediate survival and regaining some sense of legitimacy, which I considered to be the easier of the two problems facing Apple's CEO. The harder problem was long-term survival in an increasingly commoditized industry in which Apple was only a marginal player, especially given that Apple had throughout its history defined itself in terms that virtually guaranteed that it could never be more than a marginal player in that market.
So I paid attention — and I am coming to realize that I understand the strategy less well than I initially thought.
In another context last spring I said: "In contrast to some companies, Apple has actually announced a strategy, stated in something like English. Compared to Microsoft's .NET strategy and its apparent blind panic over Linux, compared with the Intel's soporific briefings on its grand designs, Apple's digital hub strategy is as clear as a Cube case." Well, maybe. Although I think I get it, I admit that I'm still not entirely clear on what precisely a digital lifestyle with an Apple computer at its hub looks like, in terms of mundane details like what computer, where, how connected, and to what. Are Apple's "consumer" machines, the iMac and iBook — some of which are being bought to use on desktops, although Apple insists that they are not cutting into sales of PowerMacs and PowerBooks — the hubs around which we are to be attaching our digital lifestyle? Of course Apple's current answer is yes, but is there more to the strategy, and is there some different piece of the puzzle still to be released?
Wasn't the Cube intended to be that hub? Is there a Cube replacement coming down the pipe? Or is Luxor Jr. the answer? Is a digital hub just a PC running the right software, or is there some architectural or form-factor difference that remains behind the Apple veil?
Some questions come up too, when you try to imagine an Apple Computer with a Steve Jobs at the helm as the company that will define how all these digital devices connect. Steve is notorious for killing off technologies he considers tired; do you trust that your USB1 device will interface with next year's Mac? Junkyards are littered with SCSI and serial and ADB devices that no longer work with Macs.
Charles Haddad of BusinessWeek thinks he knows what the digital hub strategy means. It means making the Mac a "digital warehouse and routing station," he says. He points out that the digital electronics market is many times larger than the (mature, shrinking, moribund: choose your gloomy adjective) PC market, and thinks that Apple could cut out a bigger share of that market when it comes to integrating all these devices, especially given the cachet of Apple's brand.
I think Haddad's right, and I think Steve is probably right. I believe that for Apple this digital hub strategy really is the game, and the only game (dual-G4-processor servers notwithstanding), and that traditional measures of PC marketshare are considerably less relevant, from Apple's point of view, than they would be if Apple were in a direct fight for mainstream across-the-board marketshare.
On the other hand, some of Steve's purported "strategy" is just making a virtue of necessity. Steve likes to liken Apple's position in the market to BMW's and Porche's, but I'm pretty sure BMW's mission statement doesn't actually say "Seize and hold 3 percent marketshare." But if Dell and Compaq and Gateway are not the competition, then who is? Sony? If so, Steve must welcome Sony's recent move to turn the PlayStation 2 into a Linux PC as a silly distraction on Sony's part.
Another thing I don't know is what Apple will do next. Nobody, it seems, knows that except Steve. This is not necessarily a good thing. There has been talk about who can take over the reins at Apple if Steve should leave. It's not clear that anybody can. I don't want to overstate Steve's contribution — he can do that just fine himself — but even though the pieces are all the work of others, it truly is Steve who puts them together, and if he suddenly left, Apple would be rudderless. The irony of Steve being the rock of solidarity for Apple is not lost on you, I'm sure, but it seems to be the present reality for Apple, and it's not a long-term survival strategy for any company to put all its eggs in one basket.
About the veil. Apple used to be easy to get information out of; since Steve's return, though, the leaks have been plugged, and Steve has been able every year to wow the press — usually at these Macworld keynote speeches — with something they didn't know was coming. See-through computers, multicolor computers, goose-neck computers, an MP3 device, and new bundled media applications such as iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, and iPhoto. Secrecy is working for Apple. Or is it?
Because of the secrecy, most third-party software developers and hardware vendors are not clued in when Apple has a new trick up its sleeve, and have to wait like the press and the public for Steve to announce it on stage. This means that they can't begin to come out with products to take advantage of these new Apple technologies ahead of time. I know there were hardware vendors chewing their fingernails last December expecting that a new iMac was going to be announced but wondering what Apple was going to do to the viability of their color-coded add-on products. And sure enough, those blueberry and sage disk drives and scanners are going to look foolish attached to the new white iMac.
Software developers have it even harder, because Apple is now in the application software business, and giving the stuff away. Those bundled applications — iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, and iPhoto — are all serious apps that cut big holes out of the opportunity space for developers. It's arguable that they also create new opportunities for developers, but the point is, you don't know when one of these things is coming until it lands on a corner of the market and leeches all the value out of it. If you had — or were developing — a product that did something like one of these apps when it was released, you may wish that Apple would settle for a little less secrecy.
Presumably the big vendors get clued in, but some of these big vendors — Adobe, Microsoft, Quark — don't seem to make any use of advance information if they have it. Microsoft took forever to release Office for OS X, Adobe still hadn't released Photoshop for OS X by the time its absence was glaringly apparent in Steve's keynote demonstration of iPhoto, and Quark proudly announced the latest release of its flagship product — for OS 9 only — after Steve announced that all new Macs would ship with OS X as the default. Quark also announced that it was "committed to OS X" but had no release date for the OS X version. Are these big vendors dumb, or disdainful of the Mac market, or are they also having trouble getting all the info they need out of Apple?
The digital hub strategy redefines the playing field for Apple's third-party developers. The four cornerstone apps make a Mac into a very appealing platform for making movies and manipulating digital photos and working with music to produce playlists or party CDs. I would like to see Apple lay out the opportunities for third-party software developers afforded by what is arguably a new media platform. There are some hints. The slim editing capability of iPhoto coupled with the ability to use any external app as your photo editor is an opportunity for a software developer. Omni Group has come out with an iPhoto plug-in, hinting at another market. But Apple needs to sell the digital hub strategy to developers, and not just consumers.
For that matter, why isn't Apple trumpeting its developer tools? Java is vastly better on Mac than it was in the past; that's a message worth spreading around. Cocoa is a remarkable development platform, and AppleScript Studio is a great demonstration case for Cocoa: Why did Apple release AppleScript Studio almost invisibly? Rudi Schafer's handy little utility rsMagic is the first outside-Apple product I know of written in AppleScript Studio. It's cool and professional looking, and I'm guessing it didn't take more than a weekend (minus learning curve time) to develop.
Then there's the matter of games. It's going to be hard for Apple to win in the consumer market without getting a lot more competitive in games. There has been progress: The graphics processor, and the hardware in general, and the graphical virtues of OS X should give game developers something to salivate over, but the best you can hope for from that is that there will be a few games that are written for OS X only or at least for OS X first, and that makes people want to buy Macs. It does nothing about the fact that there will be a lot more games that make people want to buy PCs because they are developed first or only for Windows because that's where the money is.
I dunno. I think that Apple's real hope here has to be that PC games become increasingly irrelevant, and that the game machines somehow integrate better into Apple's digital hub strategy than into anyone else's. Given that one of those game machines is made by Microsoft, that's an interesting challenge. (By the way, writer David Coursey recently pointed out that Apple's contract with Microsoft is about to run out, and asked if Microsoft was going to stop developing Mac applications when that happens. I think the answer is clearly no.)
The technology most likely to satisfy disgruntled HyperCard users who have finally accepted that Apple will never port the venerable scripting and authoring tool to MacOS X is something called "Runtime Revolution." I have once or twice before mentioned this product from a young and lean team of developers in Scotland, and I mention it again because it has reached a promising plateau of maturity. Revolution is based on Scott Raney's MetaCard engine, originally developed for UNIX and now available on a wide variety of platforms. Revolution adds a lot to the usability of MetaCard and is also available on a wide variety of platforms, including MacOS X. The last time I put this product through its paces it was rather handsome but a little lame, to pursue the horsey metaphor. The latest release looks to be much improved, and I have no hesitation now in recommending that all the disgruntled HyperCard masses set aside some time to take the free version of this product out for a ride. The development experience is not more difficult than HyperCard's, just different. And Revolution will import HyperCard stacks, although some rescripting is required.
A couple more random observations from the Expo and the days following: Apple doesn't write those nifty apps that it is giving away, and that represents another opportunity for third-party developers: Create a cool media app and sell it to Apple. The fact that Apple didn't develop some of the software it is now depending on can cause the company problems, though. The developers of the operating system for the iPod are reportedly dissatisfied with their treatment by Apple. Given that Apple surely wants this product to evolve, that could be a problem.
Apple's first developer is not resting on his laurels. The former openness of Apple reflected the personality of its other founder, Steve Wozniak, less than that of Steve Jobs. Now Woz is being secretive, but not for long, I suspect. Woz has started a new company, his first since Cloud 9. What has been revealed about Wheels of Zeus, or wOz, so far is — GPS-friendly devices to "help everyday people track everyday things." A little vague, but the company is well funded and Greg Galanos, former Metrowerks head honcho, is on board for the ride. Could be interesting. Wonder where it fits into the digital hub strategy.
DDJ