Steve Jobs on Apple’s Return to NeXT: Rhapsody and the Future

Since 1984, we've had tremendous advances in the Mac OS, QTML advance, of course, Internet and Java, and the most capable OS still will continue to advance, but you know, there are limitations that, frankly, are bound by the original architecture. You know, when the first Mac came out in 1984, it only had 128K OS, and you ran everything on floppies. So you'd have the 128K OS, your applications, your documents, all on a single floppy. So now if you can imagine the Macintosh being analogous to a small airplane, as you built it out and things became more complex, you added more stuff to it.

So you added more passengers and cargo, and then you kept doing that. And then you realized that the engines really weren't strong enough, so you switched from the 68K prop engine to the PowerPC jet engine, and frankly, I think you get the picture. There's no way to design an airplane, at least not how Bert Rutan works. I would like to mention, while we're on this aeronautical theme, that I did visit down there with Bert and got to look at some of these tremendous things. And the kinds of things that apply to the boomerang apply to the Macintosh.

For example, stability, performance, predictability, and inevitably, given the foundation that we've been building on, there are limitations. And so it's now time to look at what changes we need to do. You've got to remember that a lot has changed since 1984. Microprocessors are about 200 times as powerful. Use demands are dramatically different. The rise of the internet, the rise of multimedia, client-server computing, and frankly, the declining cost of memory prices have changed completely the landscape since 1984. Obviously, you can't build everything on top of that old foundation, as I illustrated in the Cessna example.

In fact, it's pretty amazing we've done as much as we do. So what do you need to do? What you need to do is recognize that the mission has changed, and you've got to go to a new aircraft foundation or go get a Boeing 777 or equivalent. And that is what the modern OS architecture is all about. What are the big issues? Stability, performance, predictability. Now, in some ways, the modern OS has some old heritage in it. But frankly, the technology wasn't ready to take full advantage of architectural things we knew about a decade ago until today. And if there was anything that I think characterizes what the impact of great new technology has been, now we can do some of the things we just dreamed about before.

Today's hardware is OK, except you can't necessarily deliver modern benefits to all of the applications. That's an important element. So it doesn't look like a Mac. It looks like starting over, and that's not an option. I said we wanted to preserve your investment, and so the solution for today's Mac in a modern environment on the same OS core, you want to put the macOS System 7 and the modern OS on the same system core, and therefore, get the best of both worlds. System 7, in this kind of environment, we've codenamed Blue Box, and you'll hear that expression and you see it in the picture here.

The yellow box is the modern part of the OS, the modern API, but it's also recognizing the internet. We need Java in here. So let's put in some Java, and let's make sure the machine meets the minimum requirements, preserves your investment, provides stability, performance, and predictability of the modern OS. So this is the model of what we're going to build, and then the question was, and we made this decision about six months ago. I mean, this picture we knew was the right picture going forward six months ago. The question was, what do you put in the yellow box? You know what the Java is? You know what the macOS has got to be? What do we put in the yellow box? What were the options?

Roll your own? License? Acquire? A minimum checklist would be things like preemptive multitasking, protected memory, SMP. But we wanted to go beyond the minimum. We wanted to get some excitement factors into our platform because, frankly, we wanted to make sure that the developers out there are very excited about developing their next generation of application on our platform and maybe allowing them to do things they couldn't do in any other way. So what we did is we came up with 60 criteria, 60 criteria that we felt we wanted to benchmark our options against. And after, I think, a very, very professional evaluation, the next technology came out as a clear winner by 50% or so in terms of all the things that we felt were important.

What are the gains? Well, you're going to get an OS that's ahead of its time, and it's a good fit and complimentary to our technology. It improves administration, gives you great international capability, gives advanced multimedia, a great internet enterprise story, and rapid application development. And of course, along with the application, we also got this guy named Steve Jobs. I would like at this time to invite Steve out. I would like to invite Steve out and have him show you a little bit about what he's been doing for the last decade. Steve? Steve? Steve? Steve?

Thank you. Thank you very much. Let's chat for a few minutes about what we're trying to do here. Okay. Slides. This is our mission. What we want to try to do is to provide relevant, compelling solutions that customers can only get from Apple, right? That's what we want to do, because if we can't figure out how to do that, then I think there's a lot of other options for people to buy their computers from, and we might not sell enough computers.

So this is what we want to do. Now how do we go about doing that? Apple brings a lot to this party, right? As a platform vendor, it brings quite a few things, but it can't do it alone. It needs the developers. It always has, it always will. So Apple can bring a breakthrough platform. Apple can bring the system integration to pull the solution together, and Apple can bring the marketing power to make the solution known. But it's the developers that bring the creative insight most of the time. It's the developers that bring the market knowledge, and it's the developers that bring that entrepreneurial energy.

In a large company, there are not as many cars in the parking lot on Sunday at 3 p.m. as there are at a developer. So how do we go about this? Let me give you some examples, first of all. The first one I was intimately familiar with was PageMaker, right? The Macintosh plus PageMaker plus the LaserWriter created the desktop publishing marketplace. Apple didn't do it alone. And the reason Paul Brainerd chose to develop PageMaker on the Mac wasn't because he wanted to, it's because he had to. There wasn't a choice. There was no other platform that could have supported what he needed to do. Another example here, Director, right?

The Macintosh and Director and QuickTime has what's made the edutainment market. It created this whole new marketplace. Again, it wasn't Apple doing it alone. It couldn't have done it without Director. So we've got to get the spark back with the developers. And you guys have to stop making me blind or I'm going to fall off the stage here like Bob Doerr Thank you So we've got to get the developers back now. What's how are we going to do that? What's our strategy to do that? It started off. I'm not going to go back to the apple today, so we'll just start off with DOS now if you're a developer if you're a developer You can build an app. Let's let's use the metaphor of the floors of a building you can build an app That's three floors tall, but you can't build an app That's ten floors tall because you've all read the mythical man month What happens is that your software team starts getting bigger it kind of collapses under its own weight Like a building built of wood you can't build a building built of wood that high So let's say you can build a three-story app well that means if you start off with DOS You're on the first floor you can deliver a fourth story app Okay Well what we did with the Mac was we had an OS that was about the same as DOS But then what we did was we put this thing called the toolbox on top of it that lifted the developer up to the fifth floor So that they could write an app like page maker Deliver an eighth floor app on Mac because they started at the fifth floor that they could never ever ever deliver on DOS and That's why all these wonderful apps propelled Apple into these exciting markets over the years

But there's a problem now and the problem is a very simple one. It's called Windows The Mac Didn't progress much beyond the fifth floor and over ten years Microsoft copied it and now they can offer a developer You know when you squint your eyes one's a little better than the other in some areas But you squint your eyes, and they're basically both fifth floor That's not good for us It's even a little worse because they've been a little ahead of us in getting a multi-threaded multitasking operating system underneath Windows, and that's arguably even better for the developer So here's what we have to do What we have to do is bring out an operating system. That's even more advanced than NT and This is not easy This is not easy to do because these operating systems are very complex We forget many times that it's taken NT eight years to get where it is today eight years So to do this we can't do this overnight and fortunately we've got one that has been battle-tested and is ready for the challenge But on top of that we're gonna put something called OpenStack And OpenStack lets you start developing your apps on the 20th floor and The kinds of apps you can deliver are phenomenal, but there's another hidden advantage most of the great breakthroughs the page makers the illustrators

Etc the directors come from smaller software companies. It's been said a few times today They don't come from the large software companies They come from the smaller ones and one of the greatest things is that using this new technology? two people or three people in a garage Can build an app and get it from concept to market in six to nine months that is every bit as feature rich every bit is reliable and Every bit as exciting as a giant software company can do with a hundred fifty person team It's phenomenal And so one of the things we are really going to stress is Seeing a hundred new software companies get started around this new technology to build the next generation page makers I'd like to take a moment and descend into some of the details of what this stuff is At the risk of boring you The first thing is it's an operating system. We call it mock OS. It's a version of Unix with the mock kernel in it It's very very advanced and yet. It's very mature. We've been shipping this for over five years into mission critical enterprise applications I get calls at 3 in the morning when this thing breaks and Believe me. There's a lot of scar tissue in terms of building up a reliable mature OS Microsoft would confirm this It's got multitasking and multi-threading symmetrical multi-processing all the nice things very advanced virtual memory very fast driver creation We actually apply the object oriented technology to write drivers so that we can write drivers

Literally an order of magnitude faster than for any other operating system. We're aware of It's tuned for real-time media, and I'll demonstrate some of this a little bit later on obviously very important for the markets that we're in It's cross-platform meaning not only does it run on different platforms, but There are technologies for bundling together the different parts of the binaries for each platform so that you can run one file You can have one version of the app sitting on a server and click on it from any number of different Clients with different processors in them, and it'll figure out the right binary to load and go all automatically So you don't have a file of 68 K apps a file of power PC apps a file of what-have-you And it runs on Intel processors today You can get versions of this software Today to begin developing your apps on and develop apps in parallel with our port of this software to Apple's power PC boxes So we run on Intel today we intend to sell this software as software on Intel processors for people that demand mixed environments and I think it gives us a lot of choices in the future as to what processors we move to because this stuff is processor independent It's also built a network now when we design the software we wanted to I'll tell you a story actually when I went to Xerox PARC in 1979 and saw the original Genesis of the graphical user interface there. I actually they actually showed me three things and I was so blinded by the first that I didn't hang around to find out about the other two and it took me years to

Rediscover them the first was of course the graphical user interface Which Xerox PARC had pioneered and they had a lot of it right and some of it was left to be completed But the other two things that the second one was object-oriented programming They had it all running back in 1979 and the third was networking They had several hundred altos hooked up with network printing network file service email all in 1979 if I just stayed for another 20 minutes and so So Unfortunately, we never designed the Mac to be a networked citizen and it's taken a lot of work to make that happen But right from the start we wanted to design this software to be a network citizen So we looked around and we adopted the network file system Which is an industry standard works really well and we put a user interface on it that's usable by mere mortals We've integrated the DOS and the Mac and the network file systems It's internet ready as a matter of fact Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web as you know, it's CERN in Switzerland He did it all on next step invented the whole World Wide Web a Lot of things like the best email system on the planet as well Then we get to the upper layers open step an incredibly robust dynamic distributed object model So that not only can you connect components in an object oriented way you can build them in an object oriented way and this is one of the core Attributes of the system we're going to have going forward the richest most robust dynamic object model We use display postscript to get to the screen there are some tremendous benefits in that not the least of which is what you see is really what you're going to get on the printer and

Not the least of which is that developers only have to learn one Graphics language and that is postscript Some very powerful application frameworks persistent object frameworks media frameworks and all of this will be rolling out the details of in time But you can get a copy of today if you want one running on Intel boxes The user interface what we found was when we designed this user interface When you design a user interface for multitasking and transparent networking It's different and you have to deal with those issues, and I think you'll be very pleased at what we've done there a Totally unified navigation of a network file system Mac file systems DOS file systems Network Etc full drag and drop system wide things like text and color and printing and faxing all those things just come in every app and they work exactly the same way an extraordinarily Internationalized system we've got the best kanji system in the world, and I think that that's going to come in very handy as well for developers who want to sell internationally on the internet Apple is part of the deal is getting some extremely advanced web server software called web objects Which we're going to continue selling and I think that is going to propel Apple into the forefront of web application server technology and Just to again stress the maturity angle. These are just a few of the customers that are using this stuff today and Our goal is to make that millions of people in the next 12 to 24 months So again what our goal is is to be one of the world's strongest brands

Offering compelling unique solutions in concert with our developers to the consumers education and entertainment enterprises. That's the goal here. What I'd like to do now if we have time is just to show you two things really quickly. The first one is just a little bit of the multimedia readiness of the system. And secondly, I'd just like to show you at a very simple level how you build apps in the system with objects. So, let me go first. Let me just go out over the network here and find somebody's home directory here who happens to live in Maine.

And here's a bunch of movies. And I'm just going to select all these movies here. These are just all QuickTime movies. And we'll just go ahead and run a few of them. By the way, I'll correct one error that I heard earlier today. According to Daily Variety, which is the gospel in the entertainment industry, actually the number one selling home video is Toy Story. I'll just move all these around and see if I can get these puppies started here. There's a way to. Here's five QuickTime movies running. We've had up to about a dozen of them running at once. And here's some mail running as well. I guess they cut the sound off. And we can be doing all sorts of things at the same time. So, we have a very multimedia ready system here. Let me show you one other thing too. Let me just go ahead and grab a clip out of this thing. Let me go ahead and take a mail message just to show you drag and drop here. And I'll just grab this. We'll take a scene out of Space Jam

here. And we'll just grab it and drag it over and mail it to somebody. So, the entire system is fully drag and drop and everything is very fluid in that way. The next thing I'd like to show you is just schematically how you build an application. Now, one of the things, again, we have in this system is an extremely dynamic object model, which means when you make an object, you don't have...the programmer doesn't have to decide what it's going to be hooked up to when they build the application. And that means everything, it turns out. So that at run time, it can be decided how these objects are going to all hook together and those connections can be changed. And so, let me show you a very simple application, which every developer use called Interface Builder. I'm going to build a very trivial little application just to show you how we do this. So, we're going to get a window here and we have pallets of objects up here. We have menus, we have some little UI widgets, and you can add your own widgets. And we'll just take a text field right here and we'll bring up the font panel here. And we'll go ahead and make that a large font so we can all read it. And we'll grab a slider right here. And we will go ahead and set that slider to just have a value from 0 to 100. And we will then make a connection between that slider and the text field by dragging a line. And a panel will pop up and

it'll go interrogate that text object and show me all the messages that text object can understand. And we'll pick one that says, you know, take the floating point value. And now, we don't have to compile anything because we're not generating any code. We'll just say run. And these objects will run themselves. And now when we drag the slider, we'll get values from 0 to 100. And what's happening is, is these objects are just communicating at runtime. No code's been generated, there's no code to maintain. What we found a long time ago was the line of code that a developer can write the fastest, the line of code that a developer can maintain the cheapest, and the line of code that never breaks for the user is the line of code the developer never had to write. So, the goal here is to literally eliminate 80% of the code that every developer has to write for their app because it's in common with every other app. And let them focus on just the 20% of their code that's unique and value add to their app. That's what this is all about. So, let's go do a little more. We'll go do a little more here and we'll say, great, let's move this up here, let's move this here. Let's go grab a text field here. And we will say we want to enable graphics in this text field here. And we can then go back to our application and just run it. And again, you see this still works. And here's some text and we can just type

in this thing. And now we want to make the fonts a little bigger. I forgot to put the font commands in. So, great, we just go back here, grab the menu to that app, and we just say, let's grab a font menu and drop it in. And we'll go run our application again. And now we can type in some text and we can go back and we can bring a font menu up just like in every other app in the system, select different fonts, select different sizes. We can even go grab some pictures and drag and drop them in, et cetera, et cetera. And again, this is how apps are built. They're built incrementally, they're built by connecting objects together, and they're built by removing code for the developers. So, that's pretty much what I wanted to show you today. And the next team certainly looks forward to being integrated into Apple and to working with all the great people at Apple to come up with a next generation system that I think is going to be truly a breakthrough. And the great thing about it is that you can get your hands on it today to start developing applications so that when we start shipping this stuff in less than a year, your applications can be ready to roll on it. Thank you very much.

One of the incredible aspects about the Macintosh community is the brilliant and creative people that are attracted to Macintosh, the real achievers in our society. And of course, that includes everyone here. But we have a few special guests who are visiting us today, and I'm going to call their name out and I'm going to ask them to stand up if they would so that we can recognize them. First, of course, Burt Rutan, who you saw in that video. There's Burt. I think we have Phil Quigley, who's chairman of Pactel. Phil, over here. And Dave Coulter, chairman of D of A. Dave up here. Gregory Hines. And I'm going to call their name out. Sinbad. Thank you. Howard Bingham. There he is. And one more guest, someone who has the incredible talent to touch the hearts of people. And I'm going to call their name out. Someone who I, like you, watched as he successfully touched the hearts of about

three and a half billion people. That is Muhammad Ali. Thanks to all of our special guests for being here with us today. Let me just make a few wrap-up comments here. And of course, we've got one other thing we want to do here at the end. We communicated to you about the next decision about 15 minutes after we made the deal. And as you can see, we've got a lot of things to do. We've got a lot of things You can imagine there are still some loose ends that we need to iron out.

And we're going to take the time between now and the time the transactions close to work out those details. So you'll be hearing a lot more. But remember, the goal that we set out was to build that picture that I showed you. And a key part of that picture was compatibility on the one hand. That was the retrospective, as well as a foundation for the future. That's the new OS and the Java world. And therefore, the answer, of course, is that that yellow box is going to be Next Technology. And that's where we're going. We're going to fuse the best of Mac and Next. And we're going to continue to create new technologies on top of it, as well as some of the old ones, like OpenDoc, QTML, DisplayPostScript, and whatever else comes after that.

And of course, the unique Apple look and feel, which will be a synthesis of what we've got for the Mac and what you've seen just now in the Next environment. The blue box and that picture is all about compatibility. And our goal is simple. That box, when it's fully developed, will be able to run all of our legacy applications. And it will do so equal to or better performance than you get today. That's our problem. There'll be one exception to that. And that is applications that do direct calls to the hardware will have to, of course, be changed because they interact directly with the core OS, which is evolving.

But for those traditionally built applications, they'll run in this environment. This is not an emulation. This is a full-blown host Mac OS capability. And it has the same source code. And as I said, the performance will be outstanding. System 7 enhancements will be delivered directly to this new OS. And what we're going to call this new operating system is Rhapsody. And it's going to evolve through a series of releases. And you see that here in the picture. Right now, we're going to stay with that six-month release cycle that we've been talking about. That's the new pattern that we're falling into in the company here. We want to stick with it. So we will have our first release mid-year for developers.

The blue box will still be under construction at that time. You'll see the first premier release at our next regular introduction, which would be a year from today, in effect. And then by the middle of that following year, we expect to have the full implementation of this technology done. Obviously, we're going to try to do all of that faster. But I think that's a pretty realistic schedule and one I think we feel comfortable committing to. So we want to get some of this technology to developers' hands as quickly as we can. And Steve pointed that out. I would say that this, by the way, the final release in the middle of 98, we're calling a unified release.

And as I mentioned, the other one over there is the premier release. So why buy a Mac today? Because we're going to preserve that investment. And we will bring to you stronger user experience, continuing improvements, as you saw here, on Tempo and Allegro and Sonata, which will be coming after it. And all of those will be mapped into the new Rhapsody Foundation. So you'll get all of that plus all of the neat new stuff in the new applications. For developers, why develop for Mac today? I think there are a few key points to focus on. One is, I think we're learning to listen a lot better to what your story is.

And while we've got some work to do, we're going to continue to do that. We're going to continue to evolve System 7 and make that a better and better and better user experience, because not everyone is going to need the horsepower of some of these high-end systems. We're committed to compatibility in Rhapsody, which I've already mentioned. And we're going to make sure we've got some advanced features, which are supportive of the development environment, tools for smooth transition, and the ability for you to leverage a single effort. That is, with the tools that we will be developing in partnership with folks like Metromedia, you'll be able to develop your code once and then compile it to different applications, the Mac, as well as competing platforms.

And that's going to save a lot of money for all of you developers out there. So recapping, Apple stands for distinctly superior user values, ease of use. You're going to see the Copeland Finder soon. You're going to see better performance. You're going to see a new OS. And of course, the hardware is going to improve, too. Apple will ship this year a PowerPC-compatible processors from Exponential. A start-up microprocessor company. These are blazingly fast. And here's Joe Barta from Exponential to show you one of them running. Well, I didn't know I was going to be following Steve Jobs.

I joined a crowd. What I'm going to be showing you is a side-by-side comparison of the X704 microprocessor-based system versus a Pentium Pro running 200 megahertz. The application I'm going to be showing is just a standard Photoshop. The first filter I'm going to be showing is a Gaussian blur. Start both machines at the same time. As you can see, the X704 has completed the task while the Pentium Pro is still chewing on the data.

And eventually, it will complete as well. Hopefully. There, it's done as well. So I'll clear out the screen. And the next one I'm going to be doing is a unsharpened mask. F6. Both machines start at the same time. The X704 system is complete while the Pentium Pro is still working. Now, this machine is running 450 megahertz as well. So when we start shipping product to you at 533, this thing will even be faster. Oh, the Pentium Pro is just completed. That's all I have. Thanks, Joe. Thank you. Thank you. That's great. I'm a Photoshop user myself, so I can't wait to get my hands on that.

You know, there's one other value that I haven't mentioned yet in all of our discussion. Of course, that is industrial design. And we want to push the limits as we decided to celebrate our 20th anniversary. It just turns out that we have some special people here who probably have earned their 20th anniversary pin. And we wanted to do something extraordinary. So first, I'm going to invite Steve Jobs to come back on stage and join us. But as you know, Steve isn't the only founder of Apple. There's another guy called Steve Wozniak. Steve?

Oh, there he is. You were supposed to be in the back. OK. And we have a special gift for them. And to conduct that, I've asked Sajeeb Chahil, our Senior Vice President of Marketing, to take it over. Sajeeb? Thank you. I, like everybody else in the audience, have had many dreams come true thanks to both the Steves here. And I think beyond my wildest dream was to ever stand in stage of people that I and all of you admire so much.

And Gil had given me the task that we must do something so extraordinary that we can inspire our customer base everywhere else. And a line, I think, two lines we took from Steve Jobs, one about the journey being the reward, and the other one was from both of them about doing insanely great products. So it is my delight and honor here to share with you an insanely great product. Here it is, perhaps.

This is the ultimate in integration of hardware, software, of technology, of industrial design. It is perhaps the world's first flat panel television set, and with a click of a mouse you can get your CNN news. And also, I guess CNN checked out a little while earlier, there it is. I didn't do my sacrifice to the demo gods earlier. But CNN looked very good and they said the floods are over. Also it is one of the greatest audio, FM, stereo, CD audio experiences you could have.

Dr. Bose and his team, who are also great Mac enthusiasts, specially designed the sound system for this. Again with the delicacy of almost designing something for the space program using new audio techniques and sound testing labs. And besides the ultimate audio sound experience, you can also experience interactive music. And here's a piece that was created by Peter Gabriel and Fred Leonard.

And besides the world of entertainment, you can enjoy information. You can fly through the information highway with technologies as you saw earlier, the hot sauce technology. And you can cruise through the World Wide Web and you'll watch it on the screens up there. And you can go find a hot new site. This site is about the 20th anniversary Macintosh. So you have thirst for more information, please check out this website. And also in there, you can put in information about your name and what price you'd like to offer for this product. And I may have some influence with Gil to up your thing if your bid is high enough.

So please check it out at the Mac World booth. And again you'll see everything there in a free CD for you and how you can save the world. And if any of you need to be inspired again about how to save the world, a videotape of ID4 is underneath in each and every one of your seats. So be sure to take that home with you. And with that... Okay. Let me just wrap up here. I know we've... Thank you. We're going to give two of these to the two Steves, and all we have to do is sort out who gets which serial number. And the tradition on that, as you may know from the story, is Steve Wozniak got badge number one.

So we're going to give him serial number one. Steve Jobs took serial number zero. So he's got that. Thank you. This is... It's been an incredible day. I know we've been over our schedule, but we had a lot to cover, and I apologize for that, but I felt there was so much important going on here that I didn't want to cut any of it out in an effort to show you what's coming and where we're going. This is... The future has just begun. We're going to be building on what you've seen today, and as we said earlier, the reward is in the journey. Thank you all very much for being here.