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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J R KARY who wrote (13416)	5/11/1998 6:36:00 PM
From: Michael Feldstein	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213177

Jobs is waging a classic political campaign. Think of the WWDC as the primary and MacWorld NYC as the general election. Today Jobs is playing to his base, as candidates often do in the primary. He is shoring up his core constituency by speaking to their fears. What they fear most is that Apple is going to develop a whole new operating system based on new technology, that all of the developers are going to have to completely rewrite their code, and that Apple is going to yank the rug out from under them. The message Jobs sent today is this: "The blood, sweat, and tears you poured into your code base is still worth something. Your software will run on our OS several generations out. In fact, it will run better, because we're asking you to make only very minor changes so that we can add some very major features. And we're making it easy for you to make those changes. Don't worry, we won't abandon you this time." There was nothing in the speech that indicated that the OpenStep APIs with their cross-platform capabilities are being abandoned. They are just being played down in the keynote. Expect a lot of education about them to be going on in the various tracks this week. (Folks out there at the conference, we're counting on you to fill us in!) MacWorld (I'm guessing) will be more like the general election. With the base support firmed up, there should be more emphasis on the cross-platform stuff that will woo the Wintel world. (Holy alliteration, Batman!) Jobs has a strong history of knowing his audience and staying "on message", as the spin doctors would say. At Seybold he only talked about stuff that would be interesting to the publishing world. At the broadcaster's conference (forget the name) he talked about Quicktime. At the media event he talked about flashy hardware that the media would actually understand ("Blessed are fools..."). At WWDC, today, he spoke to the crowd of veteran (read: beaten up) Mac developers. We'll see who he speaks to at MacWorld.