Following Apple’s announcement last month of an unsurprising $708m loss for its second quarter, CEO Gil Amelio reassured customers and developers that with a meaner and leaner structure and a host of exciting and highly-praised new products, his oft- predicted turnaround was on its way. Apple is still concentrating on core publishing and new media markets and, despite its financial woes,still garnering real interest among customers in those areas. Apple is still putting tremendous effort into holding onto its core support among traditional and multimedia publishers, as was seen at the Seybold Conference last month in New York. Traditionally a bastion of Mac supporters, the conference was eagerly awaited this time as a test of faith, since Microsoft and Intel had made a powerful attempt to woo this important constituency at the previous Seybold event in San Francisco last autumn. At the time, Apple was deemed to have taken its eye of the ball, letting its internal (dis)organization problems distract it from holding onto the most important market it has. The Wintel gang repeated their propaganda blitz at the New York gathering – but this time Apple seems to have woken up. Apple chief technical officer Ellen Hancock’s reiterated that it still has over 80% of the color printing, advertising, and publishing market and 64% of Web publishers, who make up the majority of attendees at this show, natch. An important part of her talk was dedicated to the Rhapsody operating system and the impact its arrival will have for the new media markets. Besides increased speed and stability, which all high-end Mac users have been crying out for, Rhapsody is claimed to be about to bring improvements in areas publishers deem crucial, like font usage and color rendering. Hancock took the opportunity to warn possible waverers from the Apple cause, pointing out that there isn’t a single media arena that Microsoft itself isn’t moving into. Invest in Microsoft, and they may use that money to compete against you, she said. Invest in Apple, and we’ll make our technology better. She highlighted areas where the Mac retains an edge – color management and font handling, and cited research which seems to indicate professionals who produce digital media on the Mac are twice as profitable as those who work with Windows. Apple product managers also took the platform to explain what the upcoming releases of Mac OS 8 in July and the first customer release of Rhapsody in early 1998 would entail. We are now a dual-OS company and that will continue for several years, said Apple vp of Platform Technologies Jim Gable. Gable said many of the applications that run on the Mac today will run on Rhapsody, but not in emulation mode, since the Mac operating system will be rehosted on the new microkernel. Users are not going to get some second-rate Mac OS with Rhapsody, he said.
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