和而不同

Every now and then someone will say that the keynote from Apple’s WWDC is boring. There is no doubt that expectations are high towards any keynote speech of Apple—Steve Jobs is an excellent speaker and his reality distortion field transforms even the most simplest feature to become state-of-the-art innovations. Too high the expectations can lead to disappointment, especially for consumers viewing the WWDC keynotes. The target audience for WWDC keynotes is clearly the developers, and lay-persons might not feel interested in, if not bored by, the content.

Consumers generally like to hear key points with a high WOW factor—iPhone with 3G+GPS capabilities or thin MacBook Air with MultiTouch trackpad—which are also the points which the consumers can understand and talk about. They are happy to hear this and they expect to hear these things in any Apple’s keynote. On the other hand the consumers won’t understand a bit of “Oh! Apple’s announced the Push Notifications Service!” Even if the keynote is all about these innovative technical details, consumers won’t feel interested in any way. The consumer is ignorant (which is a bliss) of the technical innovations that will benefit them in the long run. This is why the WWDC keynote is often “boring”, but in fact, they just lack the WOW factors.

Of course, Apple wants more hype and rumours before the keynotes to generate higher expectations and attention to their keynotes. In fact, they are believed to intentionally leak (fake) product features. The rumour mills are, well, okay at expecting what will be announced next. But they aren’t necessarily correct. There are numerous times do they predict that the (then) Apple phone would be announced but these rumours turned out to be false. And Apple sometimes release something entirely new without the rumour mills saying a word about it before the announcement.

To me, watching the WWDC keynote is like watching a football match (some friends may point out that I never watch football matches, but anyway I’m just making an analogy here). I watch it because I want to know how Apple announces their new products, not what they will announce. If I only want to know the results I could simply skip the keynote and read the news afterwards.

People are always anticipating new gadgets. But how about the software? I believe that good software is a large contributing factor to Apple’s success, though the general public seem to direct their attention to somewhere else. This is why I like to ask people why they buy an Apple product—it seems pretty shallow to me if “being cool” is the only reason. I like Apple because I like their way of working with computers, and this is software related.

Source: Apple WWDC Keynote 2008 video.

Since yesterday Apple started pushing a new update to QuickTime which bumps the version number to 7.5. Though there seems to be issues with this release that makes MP3 music to be played incorrectly. iTunes won’t even play some MP3 music (iTunes uses QuickTime to play media files, it seems). So I advise people to skip this release and wait for another update.