Jobs's new Apple strategy gives young coders a shot

Apple's interests lie solely with the hardware, the operating system and QuickTime, its audiovisual software. The rest is up for grabs, writes Danny O'Brien

WIRED ON FRIDAY: Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive loves his keynotes. He was speaking this week at the New York Mac Expo. As ever, he was greeted by a rapturous reception.

Apple owners love Steve. They love his style. They love his salesmanship. Mostly they love him because, after a long exile, he returned to the Apple in 1997 and turned it from a Silicon Valley sob-story to modest, stylish success.

Now, in a new marketing campaign, Apple is trying to spread the love. In a series of advertisements, Apple is encouraging Windows users to switch to the Mac. The clips show everyday folk explaining why they moved. Each of them is bathed in white light; the gleaming white light that Jobs and his designers introduced to Apple Stores, the Apple Website, and the Apple range of stylish laptops.

In a visual reference that may or not be deliberate, this is the background generally given behind someone who is supposed to have died and gone to heaven.

Behind the scenes, though, another group is being wooed to switch; one that won't be tempted by stylish adverts or the exhortations of Steve. That group comprises the people who write the programs that the whole world runs - software developers.

The Macintosh world and the Windows universe are, for the most part, sealed from each other. Like freshwater and salt, nothing that runs in one can run in the other. Most coders, given the choice, choose to develop for one or the other. And most developers plump for the Windows world. With a near monopoly of the personal computer market compared to Apple's bare 5 per cent. it's a simple question of economics.

That, and the perception that the water looks pretty inviting. Microsoft has traditionally been very good in encouraging its developer community to fish in its own sea. PCs are flexible beasts and most people buy Windows because the software they need - an inventory management system customised for their market, or a payroll handler, say - has been written by a third-party to run on Windows.

Microsoft looks after its third-party developers. It has a reputation as a predator, but only on software companies that create "killer apps" - software as popular as Windows itself. Killer apps Microsoft likes to keep to itself: the Office suite, the browser, database software, audio and video players. Other than that, well, it's a big old ocean.

Apple has a less grand record. During Steve Jobs's long absence from the company, Apple abandoned its developers. While Microsoft steadily improved Windows, Apple led its third-party coders on a wild-goose chase, first promising, then delaying, and finally abandoning a series of technologies that were supposed to update the aging Mac platform. All the odder, given that Apple's success is even more dependent on third-party developers than Microsoft.

Apple does hardware. It doesn't do killer apps. In every sector where the Macintosh has a foothold, that dominance has been due to software written outside Apple. Adobe Photoshop created the market for Mac's dominance of the digital art world. Quark Xpress, a desktop publishing package, sealed the Mac's mastery in the magazine world. Avid is the premier software for TV and video editing; it too began its life on Mac hardware.

Even Microsoft, as a third party, gets a bite of the apple - a Mac version of its own Office suite preserved the machine's foothold in businesses.

During Apple's leanest years, it was the stability of these third parties that saved the company's bacon. If you wanted to edit video, or create a magazine, or finesse pixel-perfect images, you still bought a Mac. No matter how clunky the hardware, or outdated the underlying operating system, that's where the killer apps were.

But even these third-parties had limits to their patience. By the time Jobs return in 1997, most had Windows versions of their essential apps ready to go. The Macintosh was losing users, but it was losing its development community too.

One of Jobs's first acts was to disown publicly the albatross of the old MacOS operating system, and begin migrating, using his own salesmanship and practically little else, the disillusioned Macintosh community to yet another new OS - MacOS X.

MacOS X is a direct descendant of NeXTStep, the software Jobs created while in exile from Apple. The company he headed, NeXT, was not a great success. Unlike Apple's ageing and patched-together OS, however, NeXT's platform was incredibly well received by developers.

It would not be unfair to say that NeXT's sole customer base was, in the end, programmers with the power to force their employer's choice of computer. Academia, overly complex Fortune 500 companies, and heavyweight financial institutions - all places that live and die on the health of their internal systems - were the last homes of NeXT, thanks to developer love.

It took five years to translate NeXT's operating system to the Macintosh. Last May, Steve Jobs made a keynote speech at the World Wide Developer's Conference. In a typically undramatic keynote, he appeared in mourning, brandished a giant coffin of the old, unSteve MacOS, and declared all its (and his) predecessors dead. Go forth, he almost said, and develop.

And developers are trickling forth through the door. First over are the Linux coders. Like Linux, MacOS X is based upon the expert programmers' preferred design for an operating system, Unix.

But making money in the free Unix markets is tricky - almost everyone there expects to get their software for free. Unlike the freedom-loving Linux users, Apple has a user culture that is happy to pay high prices for working code.

And now Windows developers are sneaking in, too. Part of the peeking is simple curiosity - the Mac development platform is the first convincing way of coding that isn't from Microsoft for a very long time. Part is the NeXT magic, as expertly sold by Steve Jobs.

But perhaps the most important element is what is missing from the Apple world. Microsoft has a presence, with its Office Suite - but no interest in soaking up every killer app on the platform.

Jobs has made it clear that Apple's interests lay solely with the hardware, the operating system, and QuickTime, their audiovisual software. The rest is up for grabs.

As contrary as it sounds, Jobs is promising that someone - and not him - could be the Microsoft of Macintosh software. Steve talks a good heaven and that surely sounds like heaven to the ambitious Silicon Valley coders, looking for their chance to shine.