Steve Jobs reveals OS X Strategy WWDC 1998
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
But the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change, that is.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Good morning.
Thank you very much for coming to our developer conference.
We've got some great stuff for you today.
I'd like to start off giving you an update on our company and an update on what we announced last Wednesday, our new products and our whole product strategy. Now, how many of you were there last Wednesday, just so I can get a feeling? Some of you. Okay, great. Well, we want to clue the rest of you in in case you missed something. So let's get started and then we'll get to the real heart of the matter, which is our software strategy.
So, Apple Computer.
I arrived back at Apple ten months ago,
and a lot of things were broken.
And we've managed to fix a lot of things in ten months.
And I'm really pleased to report to you that the company's back on track.
The company's doing great.
And a lot of that, of course, is due to the hard work of the Apple,
hard work of the people at Apple. They're really, really great and they're working like crazy to make Apple shine again.
And so let me review a few of those things. When you look at any company, the most important thing is people.
And Apple is really blessed with some great people. We have a very wise board of directors.
We've got a really strong senior management team now. As I said on Wednesday, I'd hold them up against anyone in the industry,
any other senior management team in the industry.
Most of all, though, got some incredibly talented employees.
And when you've got great people, the most important thing to do is to keep them.
And last summer, Apple was losing people at the annualized attrition rate of 33% a year.
You don't last very long if you're losing your great people at 33% a year.
And I'm really pleased to report that the attrition rate is now down to 15% a year,
which is below the Silicon Valley average, which is amazing in Internet boom time.
Next, distribution.
We've made a lot of changes and tune-ups in our distribution system at Apple.
And one of the bigger ones was to focus on one national distributor,
which happens to be the biggest, CompUSA.
Now, when we started this relationship with CompUSA,
we were nowheresville, and they agreed to put an Apple store within a store
in each one of their roughly 170 locations throughout the U.S.
And because of this and because of the focus that each of the two companies has brought to bear,
when we started this program in last October,
if you looked at CompUSA's total CPU revenues,
Apple represented 3%.
I'm very pleased to report that we are now 15% of the revenues in CompUSA for CPUs.
And we expect that number to climb.
Next is Apple.com.
You know, the Internet is a great gauge of overall interest in the company.
We've got customers, existing customers, we've got prospective customers,
we've got competitors, we've got software developers,
we've got QuickTime downloaders.
You name it, they all go to Apple.com.
And we've invested a lot in our website to really make it worth going to,
going to and of course we have the award-winning Apple Store one of the gold
standards of e-commerce and again ten months ago the Apple websites were
getting 1 million hits a day that's one to 200,000 visitors per day I'm pleased
to report that ten months later that is now
million hits a day or 1 to 2 million visitors per day. Growth. Growth is
important for us and as you know our market share as measured by IVC was
about 3.4 percent in the quarter ending in December. The new figures have just
been released and even in this very competitive marketplace in the last
Last quarter, Apple grew 15% in market share.
Now, we're not happy about having 4% market share.
And thank God in the markets we focus on, such as design and publishing,
where our market share is 50 to 90%, depending on what segment you look at,
or education, where our market share is over 50% of the installed units
and about 37% of the new sell-ins, we do much better.
But still, we would like to raise this, and we believe that some of the new products
introduced last week are going to help us. And lastly, finance. We have a lot of very
ambitious plans. We need to be healthy financially to finance them. And again, as you know, Apple
has turned a profit each of the last two quarters. In the first half of this year, we've made
over $100 million of profits. In addition, we have grown our cash. For the quarter ending
December we had 1.6 billion dollars worth of cash that was a hundred million over
the prior quarter and this last quarter ending the end of March we added 200
million dollars more to bring it to 1.8 billion dollars worth of cash this is
very very important to ensure our customers potential customers that Apple
is going to be here ten years from now and lastly in market value actually this
slides a little old it's gone up since then but the market value of Apple has
gone from 1.8 billion ten months ago to actually about four billion dollars
today and who knows where it's going tomorrow so I think the company that we
all really care about is getting back on track and it feels feels very good now I
was very privileged to represent all the folks at Apple to introduce some great
products last Wednesday and I'd like to take you through them right now now if
you go back and you look at the products last summer what I found when I got here
was a zillion and one products this was these were 15 of the platforms on top of
this of course were all the servers and the monitors and the scanners and the
printers and it was amazing and I started to ask people well now why would
I recommend a 3,400 over a 4,400 or when should somebody jump up to a 6,500 but
not a 7300.
And after three weeks,
I couldn't figure this out.
And I figured,
if I can't figure it out,
working inside Apple
with all these experts
telling me in three weeks,
how are customers
ever going to figure this out?
So we decided to say,
what are the right products
for our customers?
And some of these products
were very good products.
But as of now,
we're making none of them anymore.
And what we decided
to put in its place
was to go back to,
you know,
business school 101
and say, okay,
what do our customers want?
And we have customers that want consumer products.
We have customers that want pro products.
Now, education, which is a huge market for us,
primarily wants the consumer products,
although they buy some pro products too.