Steve Jobs introduces Power Mac G4 at Seybold (1999)

Transcript

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   Welcome to Seabold Seminars 1999 for a very exciting week here in San Francisco.

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   I'd like to extend a special greeting to those of you joining us from around the world via satellite feed and simultaneous webcast.

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   My name is Gene Gable. I'm the general manager here at Seabold.

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   And on behalf of the entire Seabold team, I'd like to thank you for coming,

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   pledge our commitment to providing you with a very exciting, educational, and entertaining week.

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   There's many reasons to come to Seabold.

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   One of the primary ones is to find new and innovative ways of combining words and graphics

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   into important, entertaining, and beautiful documents.

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   It doesn't matter if the final results are a printed page, a web page, an e-book, or

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    the screen of a Palm Pilot.

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    Increasingly, it's all of them at once.

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    But the reason we're here this morning, and a very exciting reason, is to hear from one

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    of the companies that embodies the Siebold spirit of combining innovation, creativity,

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    and technical excellence.

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    I'm sure you won't have any problem in joining me in a very warm welcome for our special

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    guest this morning, Mr. Steve Jobs.

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    Thanks, Steve.

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    Come on.

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    Good morning.

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    Thank you.

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    Thank you.

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    We have some really fun stuff to share with you today.

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    And so let me go ahead and get started.

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    First, I'd like to give you just a brief update on Apple, the corporation.

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    Just a few slides, and then we'll get into the fun stuff in a row.

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    We recently announced our profits for our last fiscal quarter.

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    ending in June, and it was our seventh profitable quarter in a row.

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    So Apple's doing pretty well there.

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    In addition to that, Apple now has over $3 billion in cash with very little debt.

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    So the company's very healthy.

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    Now, one of the things that we think is really important

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    is to bring operational excellence back to Apple,

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    because in our industry only the efficient survive.

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    And one of the best ways to measure that

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    is how many days of inventory you have leaving each quarter.

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    And as you can see, we've been working that tighter and tighter and tighter every quarter.

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    And last quarter, we ended with less than one day of inventory,

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    about 15 hours to be precise.

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    And that's pretty remarkable,

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    especially when you take a look at that relative to our competition.

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    Compaq ended with 28 days.

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    Gateway and Dell, the two direct players, with 9 and 6.

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    As a matter of fact, we've beat Dell now for the last 4 or 5 quarters.

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    And Apple ended with 15 hours.

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    And of course, inventory is something in our industry that gets stale pretty fast.

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    And lastly, we added a new board member to our board of directors.

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    Mickey Drexler, the CEO of Gap, Inc.,

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    a brilliant, brilliant executive in markets here, has joined our board.

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    And I think he's going to help us a lot going forward.

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    So those are just a few things to give you an update on sort of the overall corporate stuff.

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    Now let's delve into the really fun stuff.

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    First thing I'd like to do is give you a little overview of where we are with QuickTime.

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    I know a lot of you are very familiar with this.

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    QuickTime is an incredibly important strategic technology and set of initiatives for Apple.

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    We're really serious about digital media.

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    Apple invented this stuff a long time ago.

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    And we're really seeing some incredible success

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    with the new versions of QuickTime.

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    Now, we thought we were finished with it, but it keeps going.

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    The largest internet event in history

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    has been the downloading of the Star Wars 1 episode trailer.

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    And as of last weekend,

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    there have been over 25 million downloads of this trailer.

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    Now, we've offered this in several sizes.

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    Most everybody goes for the big one

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    because they want the quality.

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    and that means that we have downloaded over 450 terabytes of data from our websites to viewers

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    around the world on this. The largest internet event in history. We also just recently introduced

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    QuickTime 4. Now QuickTime 4 is the latest incarnation of QuickTime. It features a ton of

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    new codecs and other great technology but the biggest thing it features is of course live

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    internet streaming so that you can download stuff but you can also stream stuff live.

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    and it's been huge.

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    Since we put this on the web,

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    there have been 13 million downloads of QuickTime 4 to date,

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    skyrocketing past all of our estimates,

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    and we're incredibly pleased with this.

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    We've also introduced QuickTime TV.

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    Now, if you...

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    look at video on the internet, it's not so good in general. It's the quality is

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    very poor and the delivery consistency is very poor. We aim to change that with

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    QuickTime TV. And so what is that all about? How do we go about that? Well we

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    should look at regular television and see what are the key

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    components to making this work. The first is a great television receiver. Then you

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    need television stations and you need a broadcast network because television

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    stations are usually local. They can't broadcast around the continent or around the world. And,

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    of course, you need content. So let's look at where we stand on QuickTime TV in each of these

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    four areas. Television receiver, well, that one's easy. We've got the best one in the world,

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    QuickTime 4, the highest quality video on the internet. What do we do about a television station?

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    To broadcast content right now, all of our competitors require that you go to them and

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    pay them a lot of money for fancy server software to run on your server. We call it a server tax.

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    Now, yeah, they give away a few baby copies, but if you want to do anything serious, you got to go

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    write them a big check. And all the content providers out there know that. What is a television

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    station for QuickTime TV? It is any server running the new open protocols for streaming on the

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    internet, RTP and RTSP, the new industry standards, and anyone who implements those and runs a server

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    using them can be a television station on QuickTime TV. We are not interested in making any money

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    taxing server software. So anyone can do this. And as a matter of fact, we've written one that

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    conforms to the standard called the QuickTime streaming server. We give it away free with Mac OS

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    10, and we also give the source code away, and it's now running on Linux, and it's running

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    on NT, and there's more to follow very shortly.

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     So in this Darwin open source streaming server program that we have to give away the source

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     code, there have been over 37,000 downloads of this Darwin open source streaming server.

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     So there's a tremendous amount of activity, because people are tired of paying server

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     taxes to broadcast on the internet.

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     So that's a television station.

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     What about the broadcast network?

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     Well, that's obviously the Internet.

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     But it's not so obvious, actually,

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     because it turns out if you're in New York and the server's here,

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     there's a lot of traffic between New York and here on the Internet.

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     And the Internet does not guarantee latency,

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     does not guarantee delivery in any period of time.

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     And so it's very likely that your video is going to be of very poor quality.

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     Now, what can we do about that?

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     Well, to get around that problem,

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     we have partnered with a company called Akamai.

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     We've made a substantial investment in them as well.

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     And what Akamai does is they put servers

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     all around the internet, all around the world.

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     And they have almost 1,000 of them now around the world.

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     And these servers actually intercept you