06.11.07

jobs drops the ball. drops the apple? whatever.

Posted in technology at 11:18 pm by Rob Fahey

In my last post, I suggested that perhaps Steve Jobs’ showing at D: All Things Digital was rubbish because Apple was keeping its powder dry for its own WWDC event.In the wake of today’s keynote at WWDC, I wish to apologise for any confusion caused by my own confusion. For “keeping its powder dry”, I should have said, “wondering why it has no damn powder in the powder-box, and where it can get some more.”

To recap; where we had hoped for hardware and cool new software, what we got from Jobs was:

•  A demonstration of OSX Leopard, which still looks like a wonderful upgrade, but hasn’t really changed much since he originally demoed it at WWDC last year.
• The announcement that Safari 3 will be available on Windows. This is good news for web developers, who can now test in all browsers on one system, and utterly meaningless to everyone else in the world.
• The announcement that if you want to develop apps for the iPhone, you’ll have to build them as websites. In itself, this might not be a bad thing if the promise of fully implemented iPhone interface elements for AJAX (the web scripting technology that makes websites properly interactive) comes through - but it does mean that unless you have a flatrate data tariff for your phone, the iPhone could well be prohibitively expensive.

For the consumer, in other words, there was sweet fuck all in this announcement - it was utterly meaningless to anyone who isn’t an Apple developer. Now, from Apple’s perspective, perhaps that feels fair enough; WWDC is, after all, a developer conference.

However, this to my mind represents a complete misunderstanding of both consumers and the media - which is surprising, coming from the typically media-savvy Apple.The issue, to my mind, is that WWDC is seen as Apple’s quarterly product update - perhaps not by the company itself, but certainly by the rest of the world.

It’s that latter perception which matters. Tens of thousands of people view the news from the keynote in real-time, and they expect there to be exciting product news in there to justify their attention. When WWDC fails to deliver this, it reflects incredibly badly on Apple - and with the iPhone launch coming up in a few weeks’ time, Apple cannot afford to seed bad feeling in this manner.

Interestingly, I had… Well, not an argument, but certainly a difference of opinion, with Sony’s Phil Harrison on a similar matter a few months ago. Some of you may recall Ken Kutaragi’s keynote at the Tokyo Games Show last September, only a few weeks before the launch of PlayStation 3. Rather than showing off new games, or revealing the online service, or generally exciting the world about his new console, Kutaragi chose to deliver an interesting, but disjointed and somewhat irrelevant, lecture about his vision of how technology will look in ten years time, how important Web 2.0 is, and how data services will evolve. It was the wrong thing to do.

The hall was packed with the cameras of the world’s media - from specialist press like ourselves, through to the big news agencies from all over the planet.  They wanted to be wowed by the PlayStation 3, and no matter how visionary Kutaragi’s speech may have been, they walked away from the keynote feeling let down and underwhelmed. Across the globe, game fans tuned in to live broadcasts in text, audio and video, and felt similarly let down by Ken’s speech.

Now, you could argue that this is a case of gamers failing to understand the event in question, or of the media hyping it up to be something it was never intended to be - and that’s certainly what Harrison believes. He told me that Kutaragi had been invited to give a talk at TGS about the future of the industry, not about Sony or its specific plans, and that it was felt that it would have been rude to TGS’ organisers to break with that arrangement.

I disagree - or rather, I feel that such rudeness is merely practical, and necessary. Sony, like Apple, is in business to make money by selling products to consumers. When your consumers are available to you, when the media has hyped them up and they are hoping for something good, you give them something good. Previous Steve Jobs keynotes have delivered fantastic new products - the Intel macs, the new iMac designs, the Mac Mini, the iPhone, the AppleTV. Previous Ken Kutaragi keynotes had included new games, new hardware, new technology. When you set a standard for yourself, and it’s obvious to any fool that the world is expecting you to continue hitting that standard, then you must be prepared to pull out the stops to make that happen - even if that means reorganising a product schedule a little to ensure that you have worthwhile products to show, when people want to see them.

In that respect, WWDC is egg on Apple’s face. The company needs to look carefully at how it approaches WWDC in future; if there’s no big reveal, then perhaps it’s best not to put Steve on stage. At least that way, the world won’t be waiting for a One More Thing that can’t deliver.

Technorati Tags: Apple, PlayStation 3, iPhone, Sony, Steve Jobs

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