By Eolake Stobblehouse

People always jump to conclusions. EVERYBODY does that. (And they generalize too much, also:)

At this writing, early 2000, there has been a lot of mutterings... no, let me rephrase that, there has been a lot of bitching recently about Apple's "new direction". The thing that offends me the most is the popular idea that Apple has now completely reinvented itself to be a "consumer" company, only trying to appeal to the unwashed masses, and leaving the professional customer out in the cold.

The reasons for this thinking is the great success of the iMac, the fact that Apple is not marketing to the cubicle market, Apple's new web site, and the new pretty interface coming up with Mac OS X. These are some VERY recent trends, and yet a lot of people think that Apple is changed forever. I say there is a much bigger picture than that.

You forget how Steve Jobs thinks. He is not here to make money or to "be successful". If he was, he could have retired twenty years ago, and the Macintosh would never had been made. He is here, in his own words, to "make a dent in the universe". The Apple II did that. The original Mac did that. The iMac has done that, to some degree. But I don't think he is satisfied with that.

I refer you to an interview with Steve Jobs, where he says:

"I took a walk with my wife the other night and was telling her how, the way I see it, Apple offers me a base that I would be foolish to walk away from. Think about it. By the end of this year we'll have maybe $5 billion in the bank, the Macintosh will be thriving, hopefully our Internet services will be a big hit, and our engineering teams will be operating at the peak of their games. I'm always keeping my eyes open for the next big opportunity, but the way the world is now, it will take enormous resources, both in money and in engineering talent, to make it happen. I don't know what that next big thing might be, but I have a few ideas."

Regarding that only software might be the important thing now, he says:

"We're still heavily into the box. We love the box. We have amazing computers today, and amazing hardware in the pipeline. I still spend a lot of my time working on new computers, and it will always be a primal thing for Apple."

Will everything become small Internet-enabled devices Real Soon Now? Jobs says:

"Well, if you look at the Internet, you can see it is absolutely optimized for PCs. All the pages are laid out to be viewed on a PC. [...] I won't lie, we're working on other digital devices like everybody else. But I'm not convinced that customers won't pay a little bit more for a device that's not going to be obsolete in a year and that's going to give them the full Internet experience, not an "Internet Jr." experience."

So, have Apple achieved everything Jobs wanted by now? Listen to the man:

"My goal has been to get Apple healthy enough so that if we do figure out the next big thing, we can seize the moment. Getting a company healthy doesn't happen overnight. You have to rebuild some organizations, clean up others that don't make sense, and build up new engineering capabilities. [...] We're trying to use the swiftness and creativity in a younger-style company, and yet bring to bear the tremendous resources of a company the size of Apple to do large projects that you could never handle at a startup. A startup could never do the new iMac. Literally 2,000 people worked on it. A startup could never do Mac OS X. It's not easy at a big company either, but Apple now has the management and systems in place to get things like that done. I can't emphasize how rare that is. That's what makes Sony and Disney so special. [...] Now when we see new things or opportunities, we can seize them. In fact, we have already seized a few, like desktop movies, wireless networking, and iTools. A creative period like this lasts only maybe a decade, but it can be a golden decade if we manage it properly."

So. In other words, it is clear that spectacular as Apple's success at present is, Steve Jobs considers it more of a springboard than an accomplishment. (Think about this. Quite a perspective for those of us whose main goal on sunday mornings is getting out of bed early enough so that the baker's rolls are not sold out.)

It is also clear that the computer is the main thing. And it is clear that this is not going to be primarily palm devices or some such plaything.

With all this in mind, I tender this prediction, that we have only seen the tip of the Titanic yet. (You know, most of it is under the water...) I think that Steve loves the consumer market, but I think that he also loves the professional market, I think that he would consider it super-cool to have hardware and software for the professional user that nobody else can match, and that will let the professional accomplish things that have never been possible before. For one thing, why should he be so excited about super-computer power in desktop machines if home users were the only target audience? E-mail and recipes hardly demands that kind of power...

I think that the unseen power (nine-tenths under the water) of OS X, together with multi-processor G4 (possibly even G5) machines, and surely some amazing stuff that I cannot possibly guess, will make the professional computer user be a Mac user in the year 2001, more than ever before.

Hey man!

- Stobblehouse