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June 13, 2007

Thoughts On WWDC '07

I've been peppered with e-mail (and involved in an inordinate number of Mac-oriented conversations) over the last 48 hours, mostly relating to Monday's hotly-anticipated WWDC keynote. Generally, the question has been, "What did ya think?"

Now that I've had a day or so to noodle on it, here's where I come down.

• Generally, the keynote underwhelmed. Last August, Steve Jobs stood up at WWDC and made a big deal about how they were going to show Leopard, but were holding a few things back, ostensibly to delay being ripped off by Microsoft:
  

  So let me start off with some of the stuff that we can't show you. There's some top secret features to Leopard that we're going to keep a little close to the vest and we're not going to show you today. I just want you to know they're there. [Laughs] We don't want our friends to start their photocopiers sooner than they have to, and so we're going to keep a few things a little secret.

  So of course, the Mac community was all atwitter on Sunday to see what these goodies - now a year in the making - could possibly be.
  
  And when the answer came down, we wound up with a new Finder, a translucent toolbar, and Quick Look.
  
  Uh ...
  Hm.
  Really?
  
  Clearly, there's "top secret" and then there's "Top Secret!"
• The only conclusion I can draw from Apple's profound lack of a "wow" new announcement? They're maxed out. Like, they're firing on all cylinders, yes, but ultimately there are only so many great engineers, so many smart designers, so much time in the day. The iPhone absolutely, positively MUST be perfect - a good $7Bn of new revenue rides on that sucker - and so Steve and Bertrand Serlet made the hard call to cut some planned, kick-ass features from Leopard and shift those engineers over to iPhone. The much-ballyhooed Leopard Delay of April is just part of the story - the other part is that Leopard is likely not what it was originally intended to be.
  
  If true, I give points to Steve for being the one to put on the suit of armor, step on stage, and demo all the same stuff they showed last year. He didn't make some minion do it, and he didn't soft-pedal. In the software business, you ship what you've got ("Here's your Time Machine demo, and you'll like it ... Boom!")
• (Of course, depending on just how done some of these now-unreleased features are, this may mean that 10.6 will be sooner to market than expected.)
• There's a lot to like in Leopard, but most of the goodies are buried underneath the headlines. I'm personally most excited about Time Machine (automated backup bliss), Spaces (a non-retarded virtual desktop implementation), and Core Animation (fantastic-looking, cinematic applications).
• We have a new Finder, at long last (somewhere, John Siracusa is weeping with joy). While I've not had a chance to play with the Finder, I am optimistic that it won't, uh, suck as much as the current one. And I also find its resemblance to iTunes - playlists on the left, search on top, and frickin' Cover Flow, for Pete's sake - uncanny. The Finder, in effect, is the newest tool for getting Switchers to the Mac. I can almost see the demo in the Apple store, circa November: "If you have an iPod and use iTunes, you'll find navigating the Mac to be a similar, intuitive experience..."
• The new Desktop looks an awful lot like Vista, what with the translucent menu bar and reflective Dock. As someone who's' not too enthusiastic about Vista's look, this seems to be a step backward.
• StacksPiles look amazing. As a project-manager kind of guy, I can't wait to try 'em out.
• The new Mail got short shrift in the keynote, but I love the new (old?) Data Detectors functionality. It will be wonderful to have Mail be able to smartly talk to iCal or AddressBook when it gets formatted data in messages.
• Another under-the-hood investment - making OS X better on multi-core processors - is potentially very exciting. Mac apps should get pretty damn fast on Intel's increasingly-parallel architectures.
• While the eye candy (iCandy?) in iChat is all nice n' stuff, the ability to integrate presentations, movies, and other media into collaborative sessions is very exciting.
• Finally, the Safari thing -- at first, it was a bit of a headscratcher for me. I mean, why would Apple put money in to developing a free product that doesn't add value to their own platform? Doing iTunes makes perfect sense - it's free music software that sells iPod hardware - but what's the revenue model for Safari on Windows? Why do it?
  
  Gruber has some thoughts on this (it's all about Google ad revenue), but I actually think that Safari on Windows is about the iPhone.
  
  As Apple builds an increasing number of post-PC devices (e.g., iPhone and its descendants), a good Web browsing experience becomes increasingly critical to these success of these devices. Shipping a browser in the iPhone that's incompatible with some percentage of Internet sites (as Safari is today) is a glaring hole in the vaunted Apple Customer Experience. Apple customers need to have a first-class Internet experience, so Safari on Windows is about giving Safari a seat at the Web standards table - since it's no longer "just a Mac thing," we can expect that Web sites will be tested against it. Plus, by making the Windows Web browser market more than a two-horse race (no disrespect intended, Opera), Apple can potentially make Web standards more important to site developers.
  
  I'll be curious to see who the customers are for Safari on Windows. Will they be IE customers? Certainly there could be a set of people in the world that use (but aren't crazy about) IE, don't much like Firefox, and therefore are sticking with IE for the forseeable future. Will Safari grab 'em? Or, will Safari customers be Firefox users who dislike IE, but aren't crazy about Firefox, either - they just dislike Firefox less than they dislike IE?
  
  Or - perhaps more scarily for Apple - will anyone care that their browser is on Windows?
  
  One group of people who might care a lot are Mac users like Yours Truly who have Macs at home and PCs at work. If Apple did something smart with dot-Mac integration across platforms, they could conceivably offer me a set of remote services on Windows that let me get to my Mac data - bookmarks, sure, but perhaps files and other things, too - from anyplace with a Safari browser installed. And since Safari is going to come with iTunes (genius move, guys), that might actually be a huge number of machines in a very short period of time.
  
  (Oh, and is it worth pointing out that Google Docs & Spreadsheets now works in Safari?)

So. Leopard looks like a strong release, and I'll be right in line with my $129 for the "Ultimate" edition when it ships this fall.

But I can't help but wonder -- what on Earth did they cut from the product?

Posted by Gavin Shearer at June 13, 2007 10:20 AM. Posted to Apple.

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