ChoJin’s Quarter

Yeah I know… A lot of people and analysts already mentioned this possibility, and I was not really worried about it… until I watched the WWDC 2006 Keynote.

Did you notice how long Steve Jobs talked during this keynote? I didn’t time it, but over the 1h30 keynote I would guess he talked no more than 30min. I was quite shocked, I mean… I watched most of the keynote since 1997, thanks to a website which, unfortunately, has been taken down by Apple, and Steve Jobs was clearly always the Star of the keynote, if not the only speaker. But for this one he asked Phil Schiller (SVP WW Product Marketing), Bertrand Serlet (SVP Software Engineering) and Scott Forstall (VP Platform Experience) to “give him a hand”. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that, and this is not the first time we see Phil Schiller for example, but usually it seemed to me their contributions to the keynote were rather limited, Steve Jobs presenting the major new products or features.

But this time was different… Phil Schiller presented the Mac Pro and Xserve, Bertrand Serlet talked and made a couple of jokes about Microsoft and their upcoming (should I say never-coming?) OS called Vista, while Scott Forstall presented the major (presented) features of Leopard: 64bit support, Time Machine the amazing integrated backup system, core animation and the improvements to spotlight and the Dashboard.
On his side, Steve Jobs did a lot of general talk (the introduction of course, some general talks about Mac OS X and the intel transition, as well as Front row and Bootcamp.) He even talked about the “top secret” features in Leopard that we will not know for now… (in other words he just wanted us to know that the presented features are not the best of the best). The only new features Steve Jobs talked and Demo’ed were Spaces (virtual desktop), and the improvements to Mail, iChat and the text-to-speech.

Sure, Steve Jobs talking about the general stuff was mandatory (you need some charisma to talk about these things, otherwise it’s very quickly and deeply boring). And sure Spaces is a nice add-on, but not really revolutionary. I’ve been using this feature on my Mac since Day 1 (using the free software Desktop Manager, and you now have a fork of it called VirtueDesktop). And the Todo and Notes in Mail, the new text-to-speech engine and the improvements in iChat? Well… Yeah… Why not? (and frankly although iChat has some nice features there is no way I’m going to use it since it only works with other Macs).

Overall this Keynote was a little bit boring, but com’on, why Steve Jobs didn’t present the Mac Pro, Time Machine and some other cool stuff such as the new widget creator for the Dashboard?

Oh by the way, am I the only one who found Scott Forstall quite good during the presentation? I’ve never been a fan of Phil Schiller, I find him too… I don’t know, boring is a little bit too much, but he just doesn’t communicate any excitement. But I found Scott Forstall quite good at it.

But anyway, back to the original subject, am I trying to analyze too much by thinking that Steve Jobs giving so much time to other people in the keynote might be a clue? With all these stock option scandals maybe he is trying to make a smooth transition if he has to resign? I don’t know… like we’ll get use to not having Steve Jobs presenting the keynote, or the majority of it, in case he has to resign? Or maybe he was just tired or sick again? (Did you notice he stalled twice? Surprising, I read he always practice a lot his keynote speeches).

Let’s hope I’m just over analyzing it, because Steve Jobs resigning from Apple would really suck. I often read online that he is supposed to be an a** hole, but there is one thing we have to give him: he is a great CEO, and he always brings us very good and nice designed products… “which just work”.