Steve Jobs' Keynote Dilemma

How can he change the buying cycle of Mac customers while still maintaining his MacWorld showmanship?

by David Lang (Posted: 1/8/04)

[Please Note: As with all Bully Pulpit articles, the views expressed in this opinion piece are completely my own, and are not necessarily representative of CMUG.]

What's a guy like Steve Jobs to do? A consummate showman, Jobs has always been at his best — and his “reality-distortion field” at its strongest — when he is making surprise hardware announcements and pulling unexpected iApp rabbits out of his hat during the MacWorld keynote. On the other hand, this need to put on a good show has led many Mac-users to wait for Jobs' MacWorld announcements before making any new hardware purchases, a buying pattern which has often hurt Apple's Spring and holiday sales. In recent years, Apple has been making a concerted effort to wean its customers of this dependence on MacWorld Expo by making its hardware announcements at unexpected times throughout the year. Overall, the strategy appears to be working, but unfortunately, it seems to have cut much of the heart out of Jobs' keynote addresses.

Witness the reaction of much of the Macintosh press to this year's keynote. Many have called it “disappointing,” “dull,” even a “snoozefest.” One article I read referred to it as the most boring keynote since Gil Amelio's three-hour ramble-fest back in 1997. That's certainly got to rankle Steve the showman!

Are these criticisms of Jobs' keynote unfair? Maybe a little. Jobs did announce several exciting new products, such as the G5 XServe, much-needed improvements to its iLife suite (a version of iPhoto that's not prohibitively slow—yea!), the hip new GarageBand iApp, and the cool, if somewhat overpriced, new iPod minis. But Job's demo of GarageBand did drag on for forty minutes, and as I watched it, I found myself wondering if Jobs was just trying to fill the two-hour time slot. After all, did we really need to hear that many different loops and instruments to get a sense of what GarageBand can do?

Jobs was clearly out of his element this time around, a magician with too few rabbits to be able to put on a good show. For those of us who have learned to look forward to seeing Apple's five-percent-market-share-reality distorted at least twice a year, Jobs' keynote was indeed disappointing, but I'm afraid this somewhat lackluster keynote has given us a glimpse of the future. Apple is clearly committed to changing the buying cycle of its customers, and that means Steve's keynote announcements are bound to seem more evolutionary than revolutionary, more pedestrian than Olympian. My hope is that this paradigm shift won't lead Jobs to stop doing the keynote — after all, who wants to hear Phil Schiller saying, “Just one more thing”? Steve may need to scale back the length of the keynote to fit the number of new announcements to be made, and he may have to get used to people being disappointed that he's no longer delivering manna from heaven. But with a few adjustments, Steve can still put on a good show with new software innovations and minor hardware announcements. And who knows, maybe someday we Mac diehards will begin to develop more realistic expectations of the yearly Stevenote.