President's Letter

The Ambrosia staff gathered at a local bar (The Distillery -- a great sports bar if you're ever in Rochester) to see the Jobs keynote at MacWorld, via satellite. I think the free food and beer might have helped encourage them to make the pilgrimage, but whatever brought them there was rather unimportant. I personally did not attend the event -- I wanted to go initially, but when the time came, I was buried in a sprawl of Irix 6.4.1, Perl, and httpd configuration, trying to get our new servers up to snuff.

They returned a few hours later, which gave me pause to wonder what I'd actually accomplished in that time, however I was more eager to find out what they thought about the keynote. Matt Slot, our Bitwise operator, sullenly declared "MacWorld: *yawn*". Jason Whong, our Marketing Droid, handed me a videotape of the event, which they'd thoughtfully decided to record for me -- but after Matt's glowing review, I decided to put the tape aside for a time when I had less to do. If it was nothing exciting, it deserves to get bumped.

A few days passed, and the reports from the expo began to trickle in. One afternoon, I finally gave in and decided to simply watch the keynote video myself. I was quite impressed; in fact I took Matt to task on his "yawn" review of the keynote while we were on our way driving to Buffalo. In short, there were some incredibly positive things announced at that keynote.

• QuickTime. This is one technology (and an important one at that) where Apple is the undisputed industry-leader. The improvements Apple demonstrated in QuickTime 3.0 were welcome, but more important was the direction shown. Single-source code base for MacOS and Windows versions of QuickTime (as well as the feature-parity) is significant. Embracing third-party, superior encoding/compression standards is significant, as is the move to video and audio streaming, which is becoming an increasingly important market.

• CompUSA. Going from 3% of CompUSA's gross sales to 15% in the stores with the Apple "store within a store" is impressive. Hopefully this trend will keep up, as more and more stores are converted over. Given the shoddy retail presence the Mac has had in recent years, I don't think that this effort can be understated in terms of its importance. Mac users need a retail place to go to that isn't a dirty little secret in the corner; these new "stores within a store" are downright proud; I think that attitude is important.

• G3 success. Let's face it, these are some of the hottest machines Apple has produced in years. They are fast, well-designed, and priced reasonably. It's great to hear that Apple is doing well selling them.

• Apple Store. The online Apple store at http://store.Apple.com/ is excellent on a variety of levels. It gives users a great place to price out and purchase their system of choice online, or they can simply use it as a reference to price a product out, and buy it at a retail outlet. It also is an excellent example of what can be done with WebObjects, the industrial-strength web commerce software Apple sells -- an excellent example of something that sells and sells itself.

• The Profit. There isn't much to say on this, except that Apple needed to turn a profit to gain investor confidence back. It's unquestionably a good thing. So much of success has to do with perception and confidence, it's good to see Apple starting to come back in this regard.

Andrew Welch
Thaumaturgist
Ambrosia Software, Inc.