What Would Jobs Do? Not Much!
by Kara Swisher
Posted on June 12, 2007 at 3:04 AM PT
I only had to drive by both the Apple store in downtown San Francisco and then the Moscone Center nearby yesterday to feel the relentless gravity of the Mac faithful gathered inside at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, waiting for some juicy tidbit from the Oracle.
Or, as I like to call him, Steve Jobs.
As I wrote in this post earlier yesterday, the CEO of Apple launched his speech at 10 a.m. PDT yesterday with a massive force of live bloggers at the ready to take down his every utterance. A shame then that, despite what looked like a very entertaining show as usual, not much news was actually committed.
Most especially, and perhaps one of the reasons the stock was down a few dollars in after-hype profit-taking, there was no Google CEO Eric Schmidt onstage with Jobs announcing a deal to gird Apple’s .Mac business with its fresh-baked Googley know-how. (Amusingly, Gizmodo attributed the stock dip to the fewer number of times Jobs uttered “Boom!” in his speech.)
To be fair, though not much, there was some iPhone software news with Apple letting programmers make some for it (here’s yet another picture of it, since it is so dang pretty), some more details about previously announced features for its upcoming Leopard operating system and a cool widget demo.
Jobs’s most interesting move, one that has worked well for Apple related to iTunes, was showing off a new version of its Safari browser that works on the Microsoft Windows operating system. It’s not a bad idea, given how iTunes has thrived on the platform. In fact, last month at D5, he noted in an interview onstage that the success of iTunes software on Windows machines was because it was “like giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell.”
Presumably, the new Safari on Windows means more quenching of parched souls.
But why listen to me, when the master of stage and screen-juggling can tell you, courtesy of our friends at The Wall Street Journal Online’s video unit? Even when he is not saying much, it is fun to watch Jobs in action:
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
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Comments
I’m a longtime Mac user but I’m not terribly fond of Safari. On my Macs, I’ve switched to Firefox which brings my browsing environment in line with what I use on PCs. I like the features and add-on’s and I find Firefox to be a more comfortable (and less persnickety) interface than Safari. (I know this is sacrilege…)
Given that there are other alternative browsers (Firefox, Opera) that are big improvements over IE, what would make a Windows user who hasn’t already gone out and gotten another browser seek out Safari?
Walt recently commented that iTunes for Windows was a cleverly insidious subversive sneak attack by Apple that (in Jobs’ words) gives a glass of ice water–a taste of the Macintosh UI–to people trapped in hell. I don’t get that same feeling about Safari. Are people who haven’t already jumped to another browser really going to care about Safari for Windows?
Posted by Rich Rosen at June 12th, 2007 at 8:10 am