Apple on the move

APPLE’S SENIOR VICE President of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Avie Tevanian, and Director of Mac OS Product Marketing Ken Bereskin met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, News Editor Mark Jones, Editor at Large Ephraim Schwartz, Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell, and Technical Director Tom Yager to discuss Web services, digital rights management, Bluetooth, and Apple’s plans for the enterprise.

InfoWorld: Desktop software is going to become much more interesting as a consequence of the Web services movement. There are things for desktop applications to connect to that suddenly make them come alive — Sherlock is an interesting step in that direction. To what extent has Apple put together a road map for developers that connects these parts?

InfoWorld: What do you mean “make real” for everybody?

Schiller: It varies by the technology, but let’s use 802.11 as the best [example]. About three years ago, the whole market was saying, “The next big thing is home networking.” And everyone agreed that [with] the average number of computers being 1.8 per home and growing, people need a way to network things together. Most Internet networks were dial-up, so you had to share a connection to get out of the house [and] only one person could get out at a time. At the time Compaq was starting to promote power line networking [and] Intel was investing a lot in phone line networking. We looked at it and thought, “These are really stupid ideas.” First of all, power line networking: It’s illegal in many countries to inject a data signal over a power line. In schools you can’t run power to every kid’s desk, so it won’t work in education. And what happens when your networking doesn’t work in your house — do you call the electrician? What’s he going to know? Phone line networking [has the] same problems: Who are you going to call if you don’t have a network connection in a room somewhere in your house — your phone company? And what are you going to do in a classroom? There are not going to be phone lines at every desk. So we said, “These guys are just missing it.” If you step back, what do people want? It was obvious to us but not to the market at the time. We had a bunch of people on standards bodies and they told us that there was this thing called 802.11 that no one has noticed yet and that we should bet our money on it because this is great. [The 802 standards] came out of the same committee that did Ethernet, and it can be the next great thing and everybody can play in it. So we decided, really fast track, to make consumer hardware, base stations cards, to write the software, to change the physical design of all of our products to include antennas and card slots and to make a complete holistic solution to make 802.11 come out [and] we call it Airport. And [we] invent wireless networking for consumers and schools and business. It’s based on an open standard, yet we were able to innovate and do our own thing and bring a very unique solution to market.

Bereskin: The [technology] we’re in the midst of right now is Bluetooth. We believe Bluetooth was sort of like wireless USB, [allowing] you to have now a mini network of devices with your computer at the center. At the moment, most of it doesn’t work. Most of the chip sets don’t work quite as you would think. Most of the software stacks don’t work together properly, and we’re debugging it and making it all work and making it all easy to do. That’s what we’re rolling out with. Both the Bluetooth hardware we’ve been working on as well as the Bluetooth support in Mac OS X, as well as the iSync software that’s going to connect Bluetooth devices to all your applications.

InfoWorld: When is Bluetooth going to be built into Macs?

Bereskin: We’ll talk about the future when it comes.

InfoWorld: Are there plans for any kind of collaborative environments that would leverage these wireless technologies?

Bereskin: You know we hate to talk about futures. What I will say is that especially with Rendezvous, which is the underpinnings for a lot of kinds of technologies we’ve talked about, the light bulb has gone off with our engineers and all the third parties that support our platform. They’re coming up with incredible ideas.

Schiller: We’ve already demonstrated that in two very real ways. When we introduced Rendezvous, we did the demo of iTunes. Steve [Jobs] is on stage, he’s got a desktop, he’s looking at iTunes, he’s got his music library, then I walked up on stage, opened up my notebook, and I have a music library as well. All of a sudden Steve’s library dynamically grew and now had the music from his library with my music in it as well — in a completely legal fashion, because we’re not copying anything. You can just see it as if it’s one library. This is the real answer to what you need, for example, in the home. A lot of companies have played around with the idea of a server in the home. That’s really dumb. I have yet to meet a consumer who said, “What I really need is a server to manage.” You have these computers [with] more power than any server you could afford to buy for under $1,000. You don’t need more power, you just need a way to make this completely seamless and invisible.

Every client is a server and every server is a client. I want your music and my music to be seamless wherever it is. I want your photos and my photos to be seamless wherever they are. We’ve actually showed a demonstration of that working. Not shipping yet, but working. iChat is a similar thing, dynamically creating a network to chat together and interact and share files with each other without anyone having to do any work. It works over Airport in a peer-to-peer fashion in a completely dynamically configured network. Those are two applications solutions that do exactly what you’re talking about. We’ve had announcements from diverse [vendors], from World Book to Sybase, [which] shows that we’re going to have a pretty broad range of developers who get this.

Tevanian: This was rolled out at the Worldwide Developer Conference last May. And in all the hallway conversations, Rendezvous was the topic that every developer was jazzed about.

InfoWorld: How committed is Motorola to Apple? And how portable is the operating system to other chips?

Schiller: There [are] two parts. The first part is we’re very committed to Power PC. That’s obviously what we’ve been doing for many, many years, it’s what we continue to do. We just rolled out our fastest Mac ever, the dual 1.25GHz Power Mac, so we’re continuing on that path. The OS is, by its very design and nature, quite portable and we’ve always said that we’ve got the capabilities in there to do whatever we want whenever we want to. But the plan remains Power PC today.

InfoWorld: Are you guiding this from an enterprise perspective or are you still letting it germinate and gel in an ad hoc fashion?

Bereskin: For Rendezvous? It’s both. We put the technology out there, we educate people on a mass scale at our conferences, like our Worldwide Developer Conference and whatnot. That causes lots of people to go figure things out. But at the same time we work hand in hand with lots of developers [and] consumer electronic companies, telling them in very detailed ways what we’ve got, proposing things that we can do together. For example, you saw our partnership with Philips to do things in the consumer electronics space. That’s not just something where they suddenly called up. It’s where we had meetings together, we talked, and we decided what to do.

Schiller: We’ve got a very small, tight executive staff that’s very product-driven. For example, people [say] IBM [is] customer-driven, and you can talk about what that means. But [at Apple] we’re very product-driven. The executive team here is very hands-on in every technology decision, every technology strategy. For example, the idea of what we should do with Rendezvous [and] how it should work across all our products involved the entire executive staff and all of our teams to think about how we’re going to implement it, how we’re going to promote it, how it works across all our products. Internally we have a very creative process, a very collaborative process, and we just all decide to do something and it moves very quickly, which is why we’re able to do something like an Airport in eight months [and] why we’re able to make all these technologies just happen. We’re very careful to pick only the ones we think are most important and then we rally the whole company.

InfoWorld: Your open architecture strategy is pretty much 180 degrees from where you started. Is there a coherent view of the enterprise as a product focus?

Tevanian: When it relates to the enterprise, we like to remain humble because we know we have challenges to playing in that space with our products, largely due to the past and the perception that people have of us. That having been said, the thing that you have noticed that we have turned around 180 degrees is the open-standards approach. I think that is one of the key things that’s important to the enterprise. Because the enterprise knows that they want to have a choice, whether it be for certain applications they want to run or services they want to run or vendors they use. They know that the open standards approach works for them. As Phil said, our philosophy is [to] use an open standard and find a way to add value to that. And if it really is the case that the enterprise adds values, then in time we have a good solution for the enterprise. We think for many things today we do have a good solution. It’s just a matter of how do we convince people that we have that today?

InfoWorld: Is it important to you to capture a significant share of this market?

Bereskin: Everything is relative. Today the most important things to us are serving really well the markets where we’re strong — the consumer, education, [and] the creative professionals — and keep making sure that we’re serving them well.

Schiller: We don’t want to say, “Here’s the percent market share we want of the enterprise.” We’re not being that head on [in] attacking that market. But we are going after a number of key elements tangentially. The No. 1 thing is we can never, ever again lose sight of our core customers and making them really happy. We’ve got this brand and this loyal, passionate following, and one of our strongest weapons as a company is that passionate customer base. You have to keep them happy or you’ve ruined your own foundation. We’ve got 25 million active Mac users in the world and they’re our first target. We think there are so many changes happening in the consumer market that are really advantageous to Apple: The creation of new digital media types and the integration of digital devices like cameras and cell phones into our lives give an advantage to Apple, because one of the key elements in succeeding there is great software. The move from the analog Sony Walkman stuff to what people want to do with, for example, an iPod, is as much about software as it is about hardware, so we have an advantage there. That’s the consumer market. The education market is the soul of Apple; we’ve got so much steeped history in education. We’re in education not because it’s a nice size market; we’re in it because we actually care a lot about how kids learn in this country and we don’t think [education] should be treated just from a purchasing agent standpoint of “What’s the cheapest machine I can throw on a desktop?”

InfoWorld: What about when these kids grow up?

Schiller: That’s a really sad methodology that people use — that’s not how we approach it at all. First of all, I don’t believe it’s true. When you graduate from college and go to your first job, you’re the last person to tell your company what they have to use for computers. It’s your first job — you’re coming in and you’ll use whatever they damn well tell you to use! There is an element [of influence] on the creative side, when a company says, “You better listen to [new graduates] because [they know] the cutting edge of new programming, new artists, new whatever.” But in mainstream business? No.

So, education is really important to us for the purpose of helping kids learn. The creative market, we have great depth [in and] it drives a lot of profits for this company. Publishing and video [are] expanding and growing [markets] for us. Those are our three core markets. There are a number of [other] markets we’re expanding in. We’re starting to get stronger again in small businesses. We’re seeing a rise for us in markets like legal [and] medical again. For example, in Japan the majority of all doctors use Mac, and in Europe it’s a general small business [focus]. So it varies by geography, but small business is becoming important again to us. Then we have a number of vertical markets that are becoming strong again. [In] the Sci-tech [Science & Technology] market or biotech there are a number of things that are growing really strong for us. And the Unix underpinning of Mac OS X is what’s helping us get back in there, as well as Xserve for compute power. We’re starting to see government agencies picking up the Mac again [for] a couple of [reasons]. The two most common ones are the same as in Sci-tech: Using a Unix-based desktop for research, as well as using that Xserve compute server for small, cheap redundant racks of compute power. And then the second reason is they’ve had a multiyear experiment with NT, and they’ve had a lot of problems. For example, a guy from the Army called me and said that they’re not allowed to use NT-based operating systems in fields of operation. It turned out to be too unstable. They are moving back to Unix-based for anything that’s in a field of operation. That’s really interesting. So we’re finding them coming to us. And that’s exactly what’s happening with some of the enterprise customers who have come to us. It’s more [a case of] them coming to us and us responding to what they tell us they need, than us proactively having a big marketing campaign.

InfoWorld: Microsoft is coming out with Windows Media Player and DRM [digital rights management] and they seem to have plans to incorporate the Palladium infrastructure as part of that solution to lock down the computing environment from beginning to end. What’s Apple’s take on this?

Tevanian: What’s most important to us is what do consumers want and what are consumers entitled to? We’re very intimately aware of the issue of illegal use of these things vs. legal use and who’s paying and who’s not. We’re as big a stakeholder as anyone from that perspective. But we also believe the most important thing is not really how do you make sure people are always doing what’s legal by forcing them to only do things that are legal? The bigger question is, How do you provide them something that they really want? For example, I think most people would agree that the reason many people “steal” things over the Net is because it’s so easy to do and it’s the easiest way to get the things [they want]. Well, imagine if it were easier to pay a fair fee and get the thing. Our view is, Let’s look at how we provide things that are the easiest for consumers, because by and large people want to be honest. And by and large, people will pay for what they’re getting.

Schiller: Our attitude has always been you’ve got to protect the content owner’s rights and the consumer’s rights. We think you can try to do both. We did that with the iPod — we went down the middle safely. A second part of this is we fundamentally think that an attempt to create an unbreakable system is foolish. Microsoft has more than almost anybody [who’s been] trying to build encryption schemes into DRMs. And as we saw with the last version of Windows Media, it was broken before it shipped. So we think the No. 1 task is not to make an unbreakable system that tries to keep ahead of criminals, because criminals are going to find a way to break through anyway. What’s important is to find the products and services that help honest people stay honest. And people haven’t focused on that.

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