All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Gil Amelio's greatest hope is for a rerun. Finessing the widespread layoffs he's expected to announce Friday, the Apple CEO's Internet World speech Wednesday touted his confidence that Apple can repeat its stellar performance as the platform of choice in desktop publishing - this time on the Internet.
But Amelio couldn't withhold the signs that Apple is resigned to remaining a minor player in a Wintel-dominated world. His attempt to plug Apple's star in-house software product, QuickTime, ended with applause for the announcement that the 3.0 version will be released simultaneously on the Macintosh and Windows platforms later this year.
"Regardless of which platforms prevail, it is clear the Internet is about content," Amelio said to a packed noontime crowd at the Los Angeles Convention Center. "The one area where Apple can make a difference ... is in shaping the look and feel of the Web." Nothing new there....
For a man on whose shoulders rests the future of Apple, Amelio sure talks a lot about the past. He focused his speech on prior Apple successes in desktop publishing. From start to finish Amelio cited the past, promising to uphold previous victories rather than forge new successes or stride into foreign territories.
The bulk of the keynote verbiage was shoveled toward Web developers and designers rather than the consumer market that will make or break Apple's future. Amelio went as far as to say that the Internet has caused the issue of compatibility to fade, so designers can use Macs regardless of what platform end users prefer. The pep talk flew in the face of last week's big consumer ad campaign.
The closest Amelio came to naming future goals was a pledge to continue delivering the widest possible creative options to design professionals while ensuring ease of use for "new Web authors." He called both "key Apple position(s) we will fight vigorously to defend.”
Amelio did highlight improved relations with developers, voiced his commitment to the developer community and even shared the stage with the once-alienated developer Dave Winer, who is now back in the Apple fold. Winer demo'd his latest Frontier scripting program for building Web pages, while giving his own off-the-cuff sales pitch for Apple. Moments later the next developer demo, CyberStudio, was beset by two system crashes while trying to show its stuff.
The show-stealer was QuickTime 3.0 demo - offering the only fresh Apple news of the hour-long presentation. Its real-time data compression was able to compress the data required to run a movie by about 60 percent without actually losing any of the data. The crowd audibly "oooed" and "ahhhed" as enhanced features allowed for still photos, video, and interactivity to intermingle in a single image.
For now, as Amelio admits, Apple's best hope is to pull back. Conceding a victory won long ago by Microsoft, Amelio said: "We can't be in every market ... we can't support every technology ... we have to narrow our focus." That can hardly be a reassuring rallying cry to Apple's rank and file, 2,000 of whom may be cut from company rosters in a matter of days.
