PDC 1996 Keynote with Bob Muglia and Steve Jobs
Transcript
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at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference.
But the times there are changing, and I think that one of the great aspects of today's,
all of today's sessions and this conference as a whole,
is that the Internet platform brings about all sorts of opportunities,
opportunities for developers to support these new standards
and create new applications that broaden the market greatly.
That's what this is about, and that's what this special keynote is about.
So without any further ado, let me introduce Steve Jobs, president of Next Corporation,
to talk to you about some opportunities that his company is bringing to the Internet.
Thank you.
Good evening. Thanks for coming tonight.
I wanted to spend about 30 to 45 minutes talking about web objects and going into a little more detail.
Of course, there will be even more at the technical session tomorrow.
and then try to answer any questions which might come up.
I've got a few slides.
I'll repeat a little of what we did this morning,
but maybe in a little more detail,
and then take it quite a bit further, if that's okay with you.
It's 7 o'clock at night,
so please feel free to give me lots of feedback
if you don't like something or occasionally if you like something.
So WebObjects, we all heard about that this morning.
WebObjects is server-side software on the web.
And we view the web as sort of filling out Act 1 and entering Act 2.
And Act 1 was clearly the web browser and static publishing.
And you can look at a plethora of wonderful websites.
This is Next up here.
Here's Microsoft's, as I'm sure no one loves.
Here's Intel's, and as I highlighted this morning, one of my favorites, Toy Story.
And we've come an incredible distance with static publishing.
It's amazing what we can do with such a simple, pervasive metaphor.
Now most of the activity that you hear about on the web today, even including most of the
announcements today, are focused on the browser.
And what they're focused on is enhancing the user interface of the browser.
And what I mean by that is if you take the user interface capabilities of, let's say,
Microsoft Windows and say it has the capability equal to that surface area of that square,
then the web's user interface has that capability, substantially less today.
And what most of the effort is going into so far on the web is to expand the surface
area of the web's user interface with both plugins and now the ActiveX stuff, to stretch
it and push it and pull it, to try to make it have as much capability as a PC user interface.
And this is going to be successful.
But this is mostly what we hear about today, and it's very important.
So that's what's happening on the browser, is enhancing the user interface, our portal
into this web.
We believe that we are now entering Act 2 of the web, and Act 2 is going to center on
the server.
And it's going to center on moving from static publishing to what one might call dynamic
services or active services, pick a name.
So again, it's going to focus on the server.
And if enhancing the user interface
was the focus of the browser, what
is the core focus of the server?
Well, let's look at static publishing.
Static publishing is, in a way, a metaphor of taking a book
or a brochure and tearing it apart into its constituent
pages.
Or maybe you scan these, maybe you build them, of course,
with your favorite HTML editor.
And you put these pages on an HTTP server, and anyone can
access them with the browser.
We all know and love that.
The problem exists, though, the problem arises if the page
the user wants to see doesn't exist.
What do you do then?
Well, six, nine months ago, people would have said, well,
that never happens, of course.
Well, it does happen.
And let me use the example I used this morning, which is
of course, the Federal Express example.
When I type my package tracking number in,
it looks in four mainframe databases
to find out where my package is.
And then automatically, by computer,
builds that web page on the fly and sends it back to me,
telling me the history of my package being picked up
and going through Memphis and arriving
at the local destination and maybe being on a truck
and maybe somebody signed for it.
Now, clearly that page did not exist.
before my package was sent, maybe before I asked for it.
That page did not exist, and they had to make it on the fly.
And this is trivial compared to what we want to do,
and it took them four months to write this.
Now, they have about 10,000 people a day accessing this,
and they claim it saves them $8 every time somebody uses the website
instead of calling their 800 toll-free number to find out where their package is.
So they think they're saving $80,000 a day.
I don't know.
Here's another example of a dynamic web page.
All of the indexed search services, when you go searching for something on the web, clearly
they don't have every permutation of every search made up as a web page to respond to
you.
They make them on the fly.
So this is what WebObjects is designed to address at its core.
WebObjects builds web pages on the fly, is one of the things that it does.
And it builds pages not out of pages at stores, but out of components at stores.
And it can combine those components in any number of permutations, with any number of
calculations, to build web pages on the fly to answer your requests.
And it uses a scripting language to glue all this stuff together.
There's some very powerful objects that come with web objects that save state throughout
sessions that do all sorts of wonderful things.
you can just glue together with the scripting language
and have it build these web pages on the fly
out of these components.
And so let me go back to that demo I showed this morning,
and let's go through it in a little more detail.
Okay.
We're switching screens here.
All right.
Now, I used the Internet Explorer browser this morning.
I'm going to use Netscape tonight just to show you that we work on all the browsers.
But we like the Internet Explorer very much.
So this was an app that we built literally in a few days.
And we built it for one of our customers, Chrysler, right?
And so this lists all their cars here.
I hope you can see this.
And so I'm going to select all their cars.
and I'm going to select the whole price range from $8,000 to $90,000
and all their different models.
And as we went through this morning, we could say,