Apple on the cusp

Apple made a big splash at the recent Macworld Conference & Expo with the introduction of its new PowerBook G4 notebooks. Avie Tevanian, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, and Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering, met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor, Executive News Editor Mark Jones, and Editor at Large Ephraim Schwartz to discuss the company's use of unapproved wireless technology in PowerBook, as well as the convergence of the enterprise and consumer spaces in its new Keynote and iLife products.

InfoWorld: Isn't Apple taking a big risk using the unapproved 802.11g technology for Wi-Fi access in its new notebooks?

Tevanian: We think g is outstanding, so we adopted g before it was standard. These [wireless technologies] will converge very quickly and it will become clear that g is the right solution and the world will adopt g. 

InfoWorld: What are the downsides of 802.11g?

Rubinstein: The downside of g is that the standard could change. [But] I don't see that as likely. 

InfoWorld: Is it backward compatible?

Rubinstein: Yes, completely backward compatible. History has always shown that things that are compatible with the past win. G is compatible, [802.11]a is not. So they can keep plowing ahead with a, but they're going to keep plowing their head against the wall because they're incompatible.

InfoWorld: Your Keynote presentation package looks like a very strategic enterprise play. Doesn't this put your laptop strategy front-and-center as a corporate information management tool?

Tevanian: It's not [an enterprise product].

InfoWorld: Your average consumer is not spending a lot of time doing Keynote.

Tevanian: But your average educator [is]. In fact, your average seventh grader is.

InfoWorld: Clearly iLife is targeted at consumers, but isn't it also aimed at business-information transfer?

Tevanian: We didn't [introduce Keynote and iLife] because we wanted to push into the enterprise and push out both lines. We did it initially because Steve [Jobs] wanted a good presentation package that he could use to get the quality [he wanted] for the keynotes that he does. Then also we've got a lot of requests [from] educators. The other thing is we wanted to be able to expose all the underlying functionality we've got in Mac OS X now, which you can't do in a PowerPoint presentation but you can do with Keynote.

Rubinstein: In the old days hobbies were very separate from work. If you were a stamp collector it didn't have much to do with work, it was a totally different technology. But now there's a synergy. iLife is using advanced technology you may not even have in the office. And so the hobbies, or lifestyle, and the office work seem to be somehow sharing this same platform.