Steve and Bill - A Tale of Two Keynotes

Steve Jobs' keynote address at Macworld Expo yesterday in San Francisco was streamed live over the Web to over 50,000 viewers worldwide, simultaneously, using the broadcasting capabilities of QuickTime. You can see it in replay here: http://stream.apple.akadns.net/

In constrast, Bill Gates' keynote the previous day was not viewable on the Web, but you can read a complete transcript here: http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2001/01-06ces.asp

Both take about two hours, depending on how fast a reader you are.

What is strikingly different between these two keynotes is how much time each spent describing actual, available (or imminently shipping) software and hardware vs. future plans, imaginative scenarios, and promises of gadgets and technology to become available some unspecified months or years in the future.

Jobs largely focused on what Apple is offering to users today, available in the here and now. Gates mostly talks about the future.

Jobs presented new versions of the excellent "iLife" Digital Hub tools -- iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD. He demonstrated how these apps are now very tightly integrated, making them even more useful. He announced a consumer "Express" version of the Final Cut Pro video editing suite (at an attractive consumer pricepoint) and introduced two new apps: Keynote and Safari. Jobs showed two new versions of the best-in-class PowerBook latops. And he announced availability of 802.11g Airport Extreme wireless nodes, with nearly five times the bandwidth of other currently available wireless technology.

Very little in Gates' speech focused on what Microsoft offers today. The conclusion, which has been the story all along, though few journalists care to report it this way: Microsoft promises -- Apple delivers.

I prefer to use what's available today, rather than hold out for all the glorious promises to be fulfilled. In less than 60 seconds following Jobs' keynote, I downloaded, installled and launched the brand new Safari web browser -- a browser that even in beta is better than anything else available today on any platform, with features Microsoft hasn't even yet imagined.

With Safari, I selected all the text in Gates' keynote, and used the built-in Speech service to have it read aloud to me (so I could use my eyes for other work). Then, out of curiosity, I used the built-in Summarize service to condense Gates' speech down to about half the original size. (You can see that here.) It makes for more interesting listening. Not satisfied with that, I summarized the summary again, and again, eventually condensing it down to a three paragraph summary. It's a quick, informative read. In this final version, nothing Gates talks about is available today -- it's all in the future.

Last update: 2/22/08; 2:02:02 PM.