‘This Industry of Handheld Products Will Be Bigger than the PC Market’
John Sculley, Apple Computer
After 10 years of running the show at Apple Computer, chairman John Sculley — who recently relinquished his posts as CEO and chief technical officer of the seminal Silicon Valley computer company — announced at Digital World his plans to pursue his “real love, this new emerging world of digital technologies.”
That said, he kicked off Seybold’s fourth annual Digital World conference with a glimpse at some of Apple’s most recent forays therein, including the first-ever public showing of the Apple EZTV navigational system for interactive television.
THE ‘FEEL’ OF THE FUTURE FROM APPLE’S POINT OF VIEW
Sculley primarily gave examples of “what [the digital world] is going to feel like” through demonstrations of Apple technologies that are moving toward products, such as the Newton personal digital assistant (PDA), and some that are available today, including the company’s new cross-platform multimedia authoring software called Media Toolkit.
But it was Sculley’s demonstration of EZTV, Apple’s “user interface” for the interactive television sets of the future, that really captured the attention of the audience — many of whom had come to see for themselves how much of the buzz around ITV was real vs. how much was hype. “ITV is coming, but we all have a slightly different idea in our head about what it is going to feel like,” Sculley said. He then proceeded to reveal the look and feel of ITV according to Apple.
An EZ remote.>> Sculley said EZTV could be thought of as the user interface that can sit inside a settop box. Key to Apple’s navigational system for interactive television is a handheld remote controller that closely resembles in size and shape today’s standard TV remote controller.
But it will enable viewers to do far more than flip channels. Aside from the normal “TV guide” applications, some of the functions of EZTV include the capability to find out more about a program, mark a program for future viewing and/or to be recorded to a VCR, download news or weather from an online service, see a review or a preview of a film you’re interested in watching, and then perhaps order the movie as a pay-per-view selection.
Sculley browsed all these options using the remote. Later during the conference — at the Great Interactive Television Platform Debate — Gaston Bastiaens, general manager of Apple’s Personal Interactive Electronics division, demonstrated the potential of operating EZTV using Apple’s Casper voice recognition technology (see p. 39).
Let’s get personal.>> EZTV will allow viewers both to personalize their viewing patterns and to provide them with “a lot of flexibility for browsing around,” said Sculley. Twelve different live video windows can be displayed on a single screen so that itinerant channel surfers can jump from channel 47 to channel 3 with one click.
Sculley demonstrated electronic home shopping using a combination of Apple’s virtual camera techniques (first demonstrated in the Apple Virtual Museum CD-ROM), QuickTime and HyperCard software. The combined technologies enable application developers to create synthetic scenes that home shoppers can then walk around. “You feel as if you are there, but you are doing this all electronically,” said Sculley. (We question this assumption. A simulated mall hardly feels like being there.)
For those who believe in retail therapy as a way of life, Sculley demonstrated an application that will allow home shoppers to create customized malls stocked with their favorite shopping haunts. In some instances, such as when considering a software purchase, consumers can try before they buy, “sampling” the application at home, according to Sculley.
CD-ROM ARRIVES, AS A TELEVISION PERIPHERAL
Interestingly enough, Sculley believes the birth of interactive television will, in part, provide the needed push to finally launch the CD-ROM market into critical mass since many of the shopping applications, in particular the electronic catalogs, could be distributed inexpensively on CDs. These discs could then be accessed from CD-ROM drives attached to home television sets with EZTV built into the settop box. (VCRs, online services and laserdisc players could be controlled from EZTV as well.) Apple sold 50,000 CD-ROM drives last year and expects to sell one million more this year, according to Sculley.
While Sculley said EZTV is starting to look very real, he was coy about where Apple stood in terms of building the relationships with communications and content companies necessary to take it from prototype to product — except to say Apple is working on that particular issue. “We did not just start thinking about all this today,” he said. “We have been working on not only the user interface, which I showed today, but also on the architectural issues on what do you do with headers and descriptors and bitstream protocols and things of that sort which are a key part of the navigation architecture.”
Sculley said he expects to make several key alliances by year’s end.
BUILDING THE TOOLS TO BUILD INTERACTIVE PRODUCTS
To simplify the process of creating interactive applications, Sculley debuted Apple’s Media Toolkit, a set of object-oriented authoring tools developed for both non-technical producers and more technically astute programmers. According to Sculley, content producers can create interactive titles by direct manipulation of the objects or media on screen. Programmers will be able to use Media Toolkit differently, since it is compatible with scripting languages, including C+.
The final assembly.>> Media Toolkit works with existing applications such as Macromedia Director and QuickTime for Windows. It will be shipped with templates that can be easily modified. As Sculley was careful to emphasize, content is preserved independent of the application, so developers are able to modify the medium itself without losing the structure of the application — something that is very difficult to accomplish with today’s authoring tools. (This is also a benefit of ScriptX, Kaleida’s scripting language. See stories, pp. 18, 37.) Each project is stored as a template to which digital media can be added for fast production.
The toolkit supports multiple platforms, including Newton, QuickTime for Windows and the Macintosh. Media Toolkit will support Kaleida’s ScriptX when the cross-platform technology becomes a commercial product.
NEWTON IS GETTING ‘CLOSER TO REAL’
Sculley tried to quash the many rumors about delays in the shipment of Apple’s Newton technology. “Newton is coming along just great,” he said, although he provided no concrete information about delivery dates or final technical specs such as battery life. (As we went to press, we learned Newton will likely be launched on Aug. 2 at the Boston Macworld show.)
Michael Tchao, product marketing manager for Newton, once again demonstrated the technology’s handwriting recognition software that can translate both cursive and printed script into computer text. He also demonstrated its substantial built-in communications capabilities that allow a Newton to fax documents from the device and to “beam,” or transfer information, from one Newton to another via infrared technology.
A whole new model.>> Based on an entirely different model from its highly proprietary Macintosh technology, Apple is creating broad alliances with hardware partners to make Newton the kind of standard that the IBM PC became in the 1980s.
“I would predict long term that this new industry of handheld, highly customizable, object-oriented products, which are extremely scalable and inexpensive, will be a market that will be bigger than the PC market,” said Sculley.
Apple continues to support third-party developers who want to create custom Newton applications. Sculley emphasized that the technology is scalable and could someday find itself not only in PDAs and TV settop boxes, but also in display telephones or built into the dashboards of automobiles. (This, of course, will put it into direct competition with Microsoft’s newly announced AtWork technology platform. No surprise there.)
The Newton PDA was expected to go into “golden master,” a record industry term for “ready to be reproduced en masse,” by the end of last month and Sculley said it is very close to real.
TIME TO STEP BACK AND LOOK AT THE BIG PICTURE
As for his new responsibilities inside Apple, Sculley made it clear that it was time for a change for him personally and he endorsed the decision to put Michael Spindler in the chief executive officer’s seat. “If you look at my personal life for the past 15 years — five years as CEO of Pepsi and the last 10 for Apple — that’s a long time to be running things,” he said.
“Quite frankly, the thing I really love is this new emerging world of digital technologies. It is going to be extraordinary. It’s incredibly confusing. Nobody is quite sure where it goes. But we know it is going to take a huge amount of time to sort out what the possible options are. I want to do that.”
Janice Maloney