There’s a very thought-provoking article on the O’Reilly Network’s MacDevCenter, reading between the lines of Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote:
After welcoming the audience of developers, Jobs let the audience know that others would help him on stage. This, in and of itself, was unusual. There are often supporting roles in the WWDC and MacWorld keynotes but only one featured artist. Not only did Jobs share the stage with Bertrand Serlet, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall, but he allowed them to make many of the morning’s announcements. In a way, they represented the three faces of Steve.
In his email newsletter, MacDevCenter editor Derrick Story expanded on this point: “As these Apple heavy hitters made the various announcements that Steve often handles, I couldn’t help thinking that Apple once again is planning ahead. Steve Jobs won’t be CEO forever. Others are going to have to share the heavy lifting.” Thought-provoking.
The article also had a couple of other tidbits that struck me:
- Continuing with my thoughts about application dialtone, the new Time Machine feature could be described as dialtone for backups: “This new Mac OS X application is designed to help users backup and restore their data. Forstall said that in their estimation only 26 percent of users back up their data. Most of these, however, do so in a manual and ad hoc way. Every once in a while they burn some files to a CD. Only 4 percent have a regular automated backup strategy. Time Machine is automatic backup for the Mac…. The Time Machine UI is stunning. It allows people to look at a directory and zoom back in time until they find the file that is missing or has been changed.”
- As further evidence of the trend we’ve been watching about the importance of power rather than pure performance as one of the key competitive factors in the coming market, “The Mac Pro is built around a pair of Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5100 processors available at 2GHz, 2.66GHz, or 3GHz…. Schiller stressed the improvements in performance per watt saying that this new chip is three times more efficient than the G5.” While Apple’s is a consumer offering, power per watt becomes even more important in data-center heavy Web 2.0 applications.