Steve Jobs on iMac and Market Share: Aggressive Growth

Apple computers certainly had to be one of the big high-tech comeback stories of 1998. What about this year? Our technology correspondent, Renee San Miguel, is here, with a special guest as well to try and give us a clue as to what happens this year. Thank you very much, Bill. The $1,300 iMac was the hottest selling computer in the last half of nineteen ninety eight. This year, get ready for faster, more colorful, and slightly cheaper iMacs along with a new line of professional Power Mac g threes, Apple's first server based product, more Microsoft products for Apple, and software that turns your Mac into a Sony PlayStation. Joining us now live from San Francisco to talk about the ramifications of all this on his company is Apple interim CEO, Steve Jobs. Mister Jobs, thanks for joining us today. Sure. Thanks for having me. I just wanted to ask you, first of all, you you rolled out... I just went through the line of of new products you have coming out for 99, but one thing that I did not see was the consumer portable version of the iMAD.

Can you give us a status on that? Some people were maybe expecting that to be one of the surprises today. Oh god. We had a lot of stuff today. You know, we we started 1999 with a bang by pretty much reinventing our entire desktop computer line all the way from the consumer product to iMac up through the pro product, the Power Mac g three. And so we had a lot of stuff to do today. Now we... We've said previously that we're gonna announce a consumer portable during the first half of this year, and we're on track to do that. Okay. I also wanna talk about the iMac. I mean, this was obviously one of the success stories of '98. And you came out today with five new colors or should I say flavors for the iMac, lime, tangerine, you name it. But, also, you... You're knocking a $100,100 dollars off the price. You're putting a faster processor, a bigger hard drive.

I'm wondering, is that $11.99 price for the new line, and are you gonna be lowering the prices on the older models? Or, you know, just how is that gonna work out? Well, you know, the new the new lower prices for the new models and for those lower... For the older models still left in the channel, we are lowering the price. So you should see some lower prices on those shortly advertised by your local dealers. Do you have any And... I'm sorry. Go right ahead. Well, we just wanna stay very aggressive. We've got the number one selling computer in America. And, you know, it's it's funny. The iMac is the first computer that's been in a color rather than beige or or black and got a tremendous response from the from the consumers. But but the number one question coming back was, you know, could we have this in in different colors? And it was a really tough problem to crack, and we we kinda politely try to discreetly change the subject because we we hadn't cracked it yet.

But we're we're excited about it now. We have five new flavors of IMAX, and this is the number one thing consumers have been asking us for. So we we hope the response will be really positive. And and, also, I was going to ask, and you started talking a little bit about that, about the overall PC market in general. You have to be aggressive because prices are coming down for all kinds of PCs as well. This may necessitate some future price cuts? Well, you know, the future is long. Who knows? Okay. On... With the success of the iMac and with the with the anticipated success you hope of the products you release today, what's your realistic expectations for what kind of market share you can gain at the end of nineteen ninety nine? I believe Ziff Davis market intelligence has you at 5%, IDC now at closer to 8%. What's your goal? You know, someone a long time ago told me if you pay attention to the top line, which is the quality of your strategy and of your people and of your communications and things like that, the bottom line will follow.

And and I really believe that, you know, our goal is to make the best computers and the best software in the world. And if we do that and we market it well, market share will follow. So, you know, we... Sure, we have some internal market share goals that we don't really share. But if we keep focused on the quality of our products and making the best personal computers in the world, then I... You know, we think consumers are smart and that market share will follow. Well, you know, a lot of your your... The people who buy the Apples and have bought them since 1984 when you released the first Macintosh believe you do make the best product, but there's also been concerns about the software that's written for the Mac platform. You said during the keynote, 1,355 new and renewed applications announced since the IMAX launch. My question is Right. Will analysts be happy with the diversity of that software?

Is it mostly graphics and publishing, which has always been your strength, or are there some new areas of software? It's all over the map. I mean, there's design and publishing software. There is educational software, and a ton of consumer software. One of the things we announced today was the top... The hottest dozen games now on PCs are coming to the Mac. Some are shipping today. All of them will be shipping in the next hundred and twenty days. So... And, you know, you mentioned also this new product from Kinectix, which lets your Mac play Sony PlayStation games. Again, you can't even get this on the... On Windows at this point. So, you know, a ton of stuff all over the map, but developers are coming back to the Mac in droves.