Everything is going to be OK. Apple is doing fabulously. And, I was disappointed with the WWDC keynote.
I was in a good mood for a while, but by the end of the keynote, the stock was down 5 points (I own about $20k in Apple stock) and I was not excited anymore. Maybe it was pre-buyer's remorse, but here are some of the downsides I reacted to.
Worst thing. The way Steve Jobs told developers that there is no software development kit for iPhone because developers can just write web 2.0 and AJAX applications. Yes Web 2.0 is all the rage and I think this may be a good decision on Apple's part. I just felt these loyal developers needed at least a bit of hand-holding on this subject. I'm sure they felt locked out of the iPhone right about then. Steve got off the stage ASAP.
The fact is, this was a marketing event. The keynote is available on the Apple site and anything negative was not going to be included in the keynote. Not when iPhone is the subject of conversation anyway. So, I guess, the geeks shouldn't take it personally.
Blooper. When the Apple guy demonstrating something on the iPhone had trouble typing a word on the iPhone. All he had to do was type one word and he mumbled -- if I can just type correctly... (or something to that effect).
New Desktop? Compare this to the launch of OS X. I'm with the that's it? group. I like the little tray with 3D icons dock. It is different and probably cooler to look at. Too bad I am a hardcore dock-on-the-left person. Guess I can change...
Coverflow in the Finder. That's a big change if it turns out to be useful. I will let you know on that one. It definitely is a cool feature to brag about. Is that why it is here?
Finder iTunes look. Looks good. But not sure I want the Finder to be like iTunes. I am not in love with the iTunes UI. Steve said a 100 million people already know it. I guess that means maybe this will help lower the learning curve for switchers.
Quick Look. I like it. I hope it works as good as it looked in the demo.
I was all gung ho about Tiger before it was released. Now, I am not particularly enamored of Spotlight and hardly ever use widgets. I used to have a lot of widgets but it took forever for them to load when I switched to dashboard. I have only 7 widgets now and I hit the F12 key a while ago and some of the widgets are still loading.
After my less than stellar Tiger experience, I am a little gunshy about Leopard. But it looks a little like Apple's best-of-the-best talent is working elsewhere. Steve said he pulled some quality control people over to the iPhone team. Who else did he pull?
The hottest guys and gals are over working on iPhone. They sure were not working on AppleTV from what I can tell (Steve calls the AppleTV a hobby).
Steve's devil-in-the-details attention drives Apple to achieve great things. Having at least 5 major balls in the air is not easy (Macs, OS X Leopard, iPod/iTunes, iPhone, AppleTV).
Steve has so far proven to be a great juggler and I still think all this will be pulled off remarkably well. There is a reason the stock price is way high and analysts, post-WWDC, are projecting even higher target stock prices. But, the WWDC keynote didn't make my day.