So I'm really impressed that you all made it here after lunch on Friday. That's just total 100% commitment to this. So my name's Brian Croll. I'm the Senior Director in Charge of Product Marketing for our system software, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Xcode, as well as the QuickTime side. So what we're going to be here today, I'll just give you a general premise of what we're going to talk about. So how many people here heard some cool stuff this week?

Well, that's about 100%. That's good. That was the whole point. So I'm happy about that. How many of you want to come back and tell your organization about it? Okay, just about everyone. So now, the big question is, when you go back, How many people are going to face skeptical bosses? OK.

Unfortunately, that was 100%. So what this session is all about is some of the things-- I'm going to share with you some of the things I tell people who are new to the Mac platform and to try to get people to see things maybe through a different light. So that's the idea of this whole presentation.

So I'm going to walk through a number of the things that you may hear when you get back. So. Thank you. When you say "Apple" to a lot of people, this is the tape they're running in their mind. This is, for a lot of people, the last time they ever saw a Mac, looked something like that.

So the whole problem is to take this old image of what Apple stood for and what the Mac was all about and change it to this, and to make it up to date, to really fundamentally move people's image of what Apple's all about. So we're going to walk through that today. So now, if there's one thing that I found to be really effective in getting people to really understand at the core what we're doing at Apple, is to just get this phrase down and to really understand it. The power of Unix, the simplicity of the Mac. Power of Unix, simplicity of Mac. People can get this idea. This is, by the way, our little marketing tagline, but it's also our strategy.

I mean, this is what we're doing. You know, a lot of people ask us, so what are you doing in the future? If you know this rule, you can kind of derive what our next steps are going to be because we're going to take the power of Unix and how that evolves, and we're going to make it really easy. And this is a fundamentally new strategy from Apple that we adopted about five years ago, and now we're really bearing the fruits of. So once again, if there's one thing that if I were going to go out and tell people out there in the enterprise, who don't understand anything about Apple or the Mac, this is the one thing I'd really want them to get.

So you can hear things like this. So the kind of comments, you come back and you're talking to people about Apple and what's going on with the Mac, and you hear a lot of people say, well, Macs are just too expensive. Anybody heard that? Yeah, yeah. OK. Well, you know, the key thing here is that's what people think. But when you really dig under the covers and you look at the solutions, there's some pretty surprising surprising things going on. First of all, a lot of people forget about the eMac, right? We have a really good entry price, you know, $800 for an entry-level Mac. I get people who say, you know, Apple really should go out and do an under $1,000 Mac.

And you sort of say, OK, we'll get right on that. And with us. DAVID J. That's true. But this is something that people don't really even know about, that the EMAC even exists. So this is something that we really want to make sure people know about. The next one that's pretty interesting is Mac OS X. $129 for an upgrade. We come out with OSs very frequently. So for a lot of people, it feels like we're doing upgrades quite a bit and getting $129 a year. We understand that. But if you compare that against everybody else out there in the industry-- so for instance, if you look at XP Pro, Okay, so I got a little laugh there. So, you know, that can be quite a bit more expensive than $129, easily $200, you know, after all sorts of discounts. So the point is, you know, the software is also very, very inexpensive comparatively. Go to the server. Thank you. Okay, for an upgrade, you know, $1,000 for unlimited client license.

Now, the key thing when you're talking to people about our pricing, you've got to really understand this does not include any cows. Right? This is all you can eat. Once you get this, you're done paying. There's no fees for directory entries. There's no fees for accessing a web server. There's no fees for accessing a file server. So again, the price when you add it up is really good. So, it's also interesting is Linux is cheap, right?

OK, so if you were to buy the standard edition from Red Hat, that would be less than this, right? Because it's so cheap? Go to the website, in which you see standard edition server is $1,495 from Red Hat. So we even compare favorably against the leading Linux distribution out there. So that's an interesting fact. So the price here is really aggressive compared to the rest of the industry. So if you want 64-bit-- Red Hat, you got to add another 500 bucks. The price there is $1,992.

Don't exactly understand the 92 part of it, but that's what they went with. So the point is, is when you look at the acquisition costs, we're really, you know, really nice price. And you all know about the XSERV, which is a killer price. For $3,000, you get a really functional, incredibly jam-packed 1U box. It's amazingly competitive in the industry. So again, good price there. XSERV RAID.

I mean, this is ridiculous. There's only one number that you have to tell people about XRV raid when you go back to your company. What that number is, is three. $3 per gigabyte. So when you look down the feature list of the XServe rate, the first feature is that it's $3 per gigabyte. The second is that it's $3 per gigabyte. And the third is $3 per gigabyte. That's the thing that it just blows the industry away here. Now, of course, we make it up in all the accessories, right? Because we charge so much for the fiber channel.

I'm being very facetious here. $99 for a host-pust adapter. And that even includes the cables, which can be $100 from other people. So when you put together the solution here with the XServe RAID plus Mac OS X server, it's pretty incredible. Oh, and one thing I did forget to tell you is, so how much extra is the software with XServe RAID?

free. All you can eat, no extra costs. So the point is, is we have an incredibly compelling price story here. Now, the new kid on the block, XSan, again, $999. The first industrial strength sand solution under $1,000. Okay? You know, $1,000 to hook into a SAN. You know, everyone else out there is around three times that for just the acquisition cost of the software.

So, again, when you put it together, we've done a lot of, you know, price comparisons and put a SAN solution together, a workgroup SAN environment, you know, workflow. I mean, we have four or five different workstations participating in a SAN. We're going to come out at about half of everybody else out there. So, again, we've really put together an incredibly compelling product line up here. Now, you kind of look at it and say, so why in the world are you pricing it at that point?

Because if we're a third of everybody else, obviously you could price it higher. But that's not our strategy. And this is something I think you want to bring back to people. Our strategy is to take these incredibly powerful technologies, bring it down in price, and get it out to a large number of people. And if you look at what we've been doing in the pro market across all of Apple with Final Cut Pro, with all the application suites we have out there, with the SAN, with the Mac OS X server, is to take incredible power, bring down the price, make it accessible by ease of use, and drive it to higher volumes.

We popularize those technologies. And that's what we're all about. Our bet is if we can bring down the price on a SAN solution, there are going to be a lot more people who are going to deploy it. That's what we're all about. So again, when people sit there and say, that it's too high cost. We just don't see it that way at all. I think this is something that you really want to get back and have people look under the covers and get the facts behind it.

Macs are proprietary, right? Well, you know, this has a lot of-- there's a germ of truth here, right? It's in the early '90s. A lot of IT managers were actually going around and search and destroy missions. trying to get the Apple virus off of their network because they're trying to standardize on protocols. So a lot of people out there still have that in their head. They're thinking, oh, man, I don't need a proprietary platform.

Well, as you all know, this is just now factually incorrect. And this is the best kind of objection you can get because you can just go and say, take a look at it. You know, there's no argument. The entire innards of Mac OS X are built on standards, and we're going to continue in the future. You know what's really interesting is what we do is if we see something that's not standard in Mac OS X, we go back and we make sure that we change it over to be a standard implementation. You look at where we've gone from NetInfo to LDAP. We're going to drive everything towards the standards, because that's not where we're going to add value, by owning a proprietary protocol or file format. We're going to add value by making it easy. Go back to the old thing. Power of Unix, along with its standards, simplicity of Mac. So that's just not our strategy. We're going to make things standard.

go one step further. You know, it's really interesting, as I've been going around talking to a lot of people interested in open source, what I find is a really, actually, pretty interesting phenomenon out there. People are looking for an alternative to Microsoft. And the reason why they're looking is they just have this feeling of being locked in to a single vendor. And once you're locked in, you have no flexibility. Right? If you have one vendor and they raise your price, you pay more money. It's just that simple.

What people want is to have one network with multiple flavors of computers. In the past, industry standards, networking standards, were the way people wanted to go down and make this happen. But if you look at how the industry evolved, industry standards really didn't do it. It was too hard to make it integrate and make everything work.

Why people are excited about open source is because open source is a way of doing a practical implementation of a standards-based network. Because if one vendor uses an implementation of TCP/IP, for instance, that's identical to the other vendor, what are the likelihoods that it's going to work together? It's very high. It's the same source code, right? So it's going to work. That's the power of open source, is if everybody is using basically the same source to do network interoperability, it's much easier for the vendors to make it work.

The same thing goes with file compatibility. If we all can see what the source is, that makes it possible for Apple to be compatible with Sun, which can be compatible with IBM, which can be compatible with HP, which is compatible with Linux, which is compatible with Solaris, which is compatible with Mac OS X. So open source is a beautiful way, it's a great mechanism to enforce industry standards.

And this is what's gaining momentum right now. And this is where we play. So if you look at what we have as open source, this fits perfectly into the scenario. All the infrastructure and plumbing of Mac OS X is entirely open source, as you all know, right? The kernel networking, file systems, the commands and libraries, you go up to the rendezvous technology, open directory, KHTML, the CDSA architecture, the printing architecture, all based on open source. That means when it comes to interoperability and compatibility, we're going to play extremely well into the world. And that's generally what I'm hearing everybody wants. You go up to the server, and actually in the server, there's over 100 open source projects in Mac OS X Server. You know, Apache, Samba, JBoss, MySQL, Postfix, you know, Squirrel Mail, Mailman, OpenLDAP, you know, QuickTime Streaming Server.

So again, the summary idea is we can make the world compatible when we go down that open source path. We can make a single network. We can have compatible file formats. The other very momentous decision from Apple in compatibility and going down an open world is to embed Java in every single copy of Mac OS X.

incredibly important. As the world goes to a three-tier architecture, what we're seeing is more and more of the applications have a presentation layer, an application layer, application logic, and a database behind it. As we go down that path, this is a beautiful thing. That means that all those PowerBooks, all those Power Macs, all the OS X systems out there are going to be able to plug into those applications very beautifully. running Java on the front end, you know, or a web page, HTML, you know, hooking into an app server, hooking into a database. It makes the platform extremely good for that kind of three-tiered environment. And again, that's what we're seeing across the board, people going down that path for their application architecture. So again, we take Java, we tune it like crazy, we want to be entirely compatible with all the versions of Java out there so the right ones run anywhere, idea can actually happen on the Mac. We try as hard as we can to make that the case. And, you know, we're going to continue to evolve that. So again, a standard environment, you know, not going down the proprietary route. So then you look at a lot of the hardware standards out there that we use, right? From FireWire, USB, Bluetooth, you know, Ethernet, obviously now DVI is another new one out there, and 802.11. The point is, you know, standards up and down and throughout. The old proprietary idea of Apple, that's dead. That's gone. It's all about standards and making them easy to use. That's the ease of use is where we add the value. Now you know what's really funny? I have a lot of people, and I imagine you're going to run into this, is you go and say, well, you know, So will the PowerBook work on my Wi-Fi network?

Right? And you're saying, well, yeah. And it's funny, because people generally think, well, is it really going to work? And so, you know, say, yeah, right? Wi-Fi is the same as airport, same as 802.11. Of course this is going to work. We have that up. Well, yeah, you can also add, you know, if you can get it to work, you know, your Windows system. But after the weekend trying to figure out the drivers, once you get it to work, it will actually fit into the 802.11 world. We'd love to make that easier, but we don't see that as our business. So the idea is, of course it's gonna work on your 802.11 network. Then you go down and you say, I get this question all the time. Okay, yeah, yeah, that works, but could I put a Linksys router in there?

And you go, yeah, you know, we eat that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No problem, right? So absolutely, positively, yes. So I know you all know this, but I'm amazed how stating the obvious can be a total enlightening experience for a lot of the people out there. You know, especially in the management ranks, right? You know, a lot of people just have bad, bad ideas embedded in their head. So again, I walk through this example, and people are usually pretty stunned, pretty amazing. So the next part-- This sounds really great. Oh, man, the Macs look wonderful. You know, I love this idea of, you know, an easy-to-use Unix. Seems pretty cool.

But, oh, man, this is never going to fit my network, right? Thank you. No way is it going to fit my network. Get this all the time. I hear this everywhere. Well, you know, nah, not quite. It's going to definitely fit in the network. Matter of fact, the beautiful thing is, is you go out there in the world right now, and an awful lot of the corporate networks out there are based on Internet standards, right? On standard, you know, Unix-based file systems. You know, all across the home directories, you go to printing, mail, security, media, all those different architectures are generally, you know, the infrastructure you'll find in a large company. And we're going to fit into that environment. It's our native environment, right? It's not a matter of being compatible, because a compatible sort of implies that you have to do something to hook in. This is our native environment. This is our language. And that's what we're going to speak. Again, you know what I find?

Is a lot of people really have not gotten it in their head that the Mac is probably going to be easier to integrate into a Unix-based environment than any other platform out there. Because again, it's a native architecture. And the thing that people love is the idea from their big honking database down to their laptop that they're going to have one architecture based on one set of standards. That's usually pretty attractive to people. Again, this is something that is a subtlety that a lot of people don't really get. So yeah, fitting into a Unix-based network is going to be a breeze. What about Windows? Well, here an interesting thing happens is because of the wonderful world of open source, with Samba 3, with all the work people have done to integrate Unix environments and Windows environments, we tag along right into that. And we make it really, really simple.

to hook in this environment. And as you've been hearing today and over the week, with Tiger, for instance, we're adding even more window compatibility. We're going to continue to chip away at this. And we're going to make this a very simple environment to plug into, all the way from login authentication, going into Active Directory with our Active Directory plugins, making this much simpler to do, handling the vast majority of architectures out there, home directories, stored on SMB, shared folders, exchange plugins now. We're getting much better at integrating with an exchange environment, obviously down printing, and all the way through the web. So the point is, is we're working like crazy to make sure that we can integrate nicely into the Windows environment. And you know something? It's working.

I go everywhere and I see people pulling this off on a day-to-day basis where they have Windows infrastructure, they have one set of user accounts you can log into from both a Windows environment and from your Mac. A very nice seamless environment. So we're doing this. So again, Mac is designed to fit into any kind of architecture out there, any kind of network from a Unix base. Matter of fact, on the Unix side, is if it's not working in your architecture, that's a bug, right? And we need to go fix it. That's the way we think of that. And also on the Windows side, we're gonna go drive like crazy to make sure it works. So again, this came from our market research. We went out and we took a hard look and found that it turns out there's a lot of people with Windows systems.

Right? So we thought it was a good idea to maybe plug into those environments. We didn't spend a lot of money on that research. Anyway, so the next thing is, and this is one that I love, this one. But if I go with back, what am I going to do about my Office apps?

Just use them, right? Because they're there. They're available. You would not believe how many times I go and talk to people who run an IT shop that are unaware of the fact that you can actually get Microsoft Office from Microsoft and actually run it on the Mac. You know what's really funny? I was talking to a customer recently, really smart. I mean, you know, very good customer, you know, really, really sharp person. And they're asking, so how are you going to handle, PowerPoint, and Excel and so forth.

And they said, so does OpenOffice or Star Office run on your systems? I said, yeah, OpenOffice runs. But are you worried about Windows Office compatibility? Yeah, yeah, that's the problem. I said, well, why don't you buy Office? It was like, oh, it's available? Yeah, that's an option, right? So the point is that you really got to make sure people know that this is there. You're going to find that people just don't know this. You may assume you've been here, you've seen it. A lot of people haven't gotten through their head. And you know what's really interesting? A lot of people believe this is the best version of Office. Matter of fact, I mean, the way I look at it, in a lot of ways, I think Mac OS X is a testbed for what they're going to do with Longhorn. So I actually think you're seeing Office for Longhorn is the way I look at it, right? Because a lot of the transparency, a lot of the interesting new features they're testing out on the Mac, I think are going to wind up in the other Office over time. So as you see this quote, generally people love the collaboration features, the compatibility with Office for Windows, the performance stability everybody loves. What I love about this is, you know, this really gets it down to an interesting thing. The other fascinating thing, there's a subtlety here, is headline: Microsoft ports Office to Unix.

You don't think of it that way, but they actually do have an Office that runs on a Unix. All right, so clearly we have Office. The other one is, well, okay, they got Office, but there are no other applications, right? Thank you. 12,000 applications for Mac OS X. 12,000. We're four years into this, and we've got 12,000 apps. Okay? And now what you're seeing is the turning point is a lot of these are Mac OS X only, focused on Mac OS X, taking full advantage of what Mac OS X has out there. You know, really across the board. You know, you're talking about, you know, from the productivity apps, the publishing, science, you know, enterprise apps, A lot of exciting announcements, IBM. You know, this week, Oracle with, you know, their 10G platform, the leading edge, cutting edge applications showing up on Mac OS X. And a lot of these are new. Because of the Unix underpinning, what we're seeing is this influx of interesting applications. You know, you think about it, Oracle is a big enough application to crush any operating system out there, and it's running beautifully on Mac. So look at this. You know, one of the things when you're looking at the health of a platform, especially in the operating system world, the real indicator, the harbinger of the future, is what are the apps people doing, right? Because nobody buys a new operating system. You buy an operating system to run apps. This is probably the most important slide in a lot of ways that you're going to see, is our developer connection is going wild. Look at that. Developer's gone wild. New video.

So four fold, over four, right? Probably around four and a half in the last four years, new developers, unbelievable. And you know what's great about this? We haven't seen the fruits of this labor yet, right? These are all people who are busily writing things now that are going to be coming out later. So what I think you're going to see is an incredible explosion of apps. Now, what's even cooler is because of the technologies we've put in Mac OS X, the apps that they're going to be creating, I think are going to be the most innovative apps you're going to see in the industry. So not only is it going to be a lot of apps, but you're going to get a bunch of apps where you can only do certain capabilities on Mac OS X, and you can't get it anywhere else. When you look at the whole-- just looking at our announcement through a tiger, think about it. With core graphics-- Can you imagine the kind of interesting things people are going to be able to do with that? With our whole core data that we introduce, that's going to be another amazing thing. So we're creating a platform that I think is going to spur another level of innovation. And you're going to see an incredible set of applications showing up. So not only is it volume, it's also the quality of the apps I think are going to be incredible.

So the other thing to always have at your fingertips if people are worried about the number of apps is the Macintosh Products Guide, right? First of all, it's a great website. I mean, it's really, really handy. And you can go there and find, you know, just about everything. I'm going to leave this up, so if you need to copy it down, you can do that. But go there, check it out. This is where you find all the different solutions available on Mac OS X. You know, 12,000 different solutions there for you to look at. So there's probably something you need there. Okay, so it's guide.apple.com. Okay, the other one, you ever heard this one? Macs are not for serious computing.

Not really, right? What we're seeing, which I think is one of the most interesting and most exciting things right now going on in Mac OS X, is not only is it not for serious computing, it is the... It is the system for serious computing. The absolute leaders in this industry-- this is a picture of James Gosling, the inventor of Java, Sun CTO of the Java division over at Sun. He loves his PowerBook. He loves Mac OS X. Right? And this is one of the leading application developers in the world. The lead-- go to any open source conference, and what you're going to start seeing is over half the people showing up with their PowerBook.

Go to our friends at Slashdot and take a look through the boards. You're going to see tons of talk about Mac OS X, because this is the favorite platform for the leaders in the industry. So when you hear someone say, oh, this is a wimpy platform. You know, it's only for artists. We'll get into that in a second.

Not true. They're really behind the times. This is the place for people who are on the cutting edge. And the reason why, it's really obvious. It's an open source environment. You get all the tools you need. We give the tools away with Mac OS X. Plus, you get to run all your productivity apps. And it just works. So what's really interesting is developers don't want to be sysadmins.

right they want to develop code So it's just easy. They don't have to worry about it, right? And then the other thing that's, I think, killer is when you go to a high, really leading-edge technology platform, It's available on a mobile system. You can take it with you. It's available on your portable. And again, that's something you just can't get anywhere else. So I showed you this, the increase of growth. And I think this is sort of a fascinating thing. So it's growing like crazy. So where's the growth coming from? Take a look at this.

If you look in 2001, the people who identified themselves as being interested in Unix, Linux, or Darwin, it was 19%. So it's 19% of a smaller base than you got in June 2004, where 34% of the people identified them as Unix, Linux, and Darwin developers. That's a really interesting shift in the makeup of our developer community. Again, this is for power users, this is for the hardcore technologists, the lead developers in the planet.

So how about computation? I don't even have to say anything here, do I? Right, with Virginia Tech being number three supercomputer in the world, you know what's really amazing? Think about it, five years ago, if I stood up there and said, you know, in five years, The third fastest supercomputer in the world will be an Apple computer.

I don't think that would have been a credible statement. Okay? But lo and behold, that's what happened. And again, Mac OS X really helped get us there. Now, that was Virginia Tech. Well, you know, we're going to keep it coming, right? So now we have Colsa coming out with some incredible thermodynamic simulations that they're going to be doing, you know, with just unbelievable... I mean, you know, the kind of numbers we're talking about is, you know, teraflops, 25 teraflops is just an ungodly amount of floating point performance. You know, and look at the price down there. That goes back to that original statement. The reason why everyone's going towards, you know, the Mac for these supercomputers is the price tag. You know, a lot of times, you know, the other kind of supercomputers out there are literally over $200 million.

And they're doing it for like $5, $10 million putting together these projects. So the price performance here is just earth shattering. So we are getting the most sophisticated technologists in the planet building the most significant technologies on our platform, on Mac OS X. And all that does is just makes Mac OS X even better, because we're really pushing the envelope. And we'll continue to make it even, even better, because we have customers like this. So again, unbelievable power. And then I mentioned earlier about Oracle 10G. I mean, Oracle on a Mac.

I mean, you know, that's something like, I mean, again, five years ago, that was kind of like Bambi versus Godzilla. where the big foot just comes down, and you kind of have this picture of a flattened pancake of a system. But that's not the way it is today. With Mac OS X running on our G5s, we can eat this database alive right now. No problem. problem.

So again, a really big seed change in what Mac is all about, what Mac OS X is all about, and the ability to handle the most challenging computation out there in the world. So this is another one I love. Well, we would switch to Mac, but boy, we're gonna have to retrain all our users. You ever heard that? Everyone, we're gonna retrain our users. You know, okay.

So the irony here is you know who's getting trained, don't you? It's the teacher. You know, my point here, I'm being a little facetious, but, you know, the idea that a third grader can sit in front of a Mac without any instructions, without a lot of help, and sit down and get it and figure it out kind of indicates that the majority of people's employees could probably handle it as well. Now, of course, there are going to be some phone calls in the beginning of, you know, there's only one mouse button. Which one do I hit? You know, those kinds of questions.

But the point is, it takes a little while to get used to, maybe like two days, three days to get used to. There may be some calls generated. But here's the interesting part. Everybody I know who's implemented the Mac systems in their company has noted that after that initial startup period, what ends up happening is you actually end up getting-- the help desk requests just die down. And there's actually three letters in my mind why that's the case. And those three letters are D-L-L.

Okay? And so I think... You've obviously felt the pain. Okay. And so the point is, is once you get, you know, rid of a lot of that cruft, you know, it does get a lot smoother sailing. And I think this is something that people have to really think about, is, yeah, maybe there's a little training up front, but in the long haul, your help desk is just gonna go down. How about this one? Have to retrain administrators. What I love about this is I have one answer to that.

So you look at that, and the point is, if you know Linux, you know Solaris, you know HPUX, IBM AX, you know, if you know any variant of Unix out there, if you know IRIX, you're gonna sit down in front of Mac OS X and fool around for about a day, and you're gonna kind of get it, right? I mean, it's not that different than everything else. I mean, LS, is LS. It's LS. So all that stuff is there. You know what's really funny, by the way, just to the side. So I'll bring this to people and I'll say, you know, it's a Linux core. And they don't believe it. And you bring up a terminal. And what's great is they still don't believe it. They're looking at it and say, well, this is like some weird, funky emulation mode.

It's like, I don't know how you're supposed to. So it's really interesting. I have people say, okay, well, I'm going to remote log in to some other machine to show you that, you know, and they have to go through their paces. But what I find is really funny is within 10 minutes when I put this in front of somebody who understands Unix or Linux, they go from grumbling and not believing it to then coming back and going, whoa, this is kind of cool, right? And what's really funny is you'd think, you know, a lot of times I find funny when I demo to this crowd is, you know, you go in, you show them, like, all the really amazing graphics that you can do on Mac OS X. You show them exposé. You show them all sorts of cool, all the neat stuff. And they look at it and they go, oh, that's OK. And then you bring up a terminal with green text and they go, ooh, that's cool.

Go figure. Okay. So the point here is, again, the learning curve is pretty, you know, it's a really good learning curve. The other beautiful thing about it is all the kids coming out of school today are all really versed in the whole Unix infrastructure with Linux and so forth. So there's a big labor pool out there. You know what's also cool about this is that what we're finding is, I've heard this phrase bandied about a lot, is we're mainstreaming We're mainstreaming our Apple administration. What this means is a lot of times what happened is there's one group over here that was the mainstream administrators, and they handled the Unix systems and the Windows systems. There's this other group over here, I guess dressed in black or something, and they were like the Mac guys. What's happening is because the skill sets are the same, they're bringing the two together and saying that the is part of the mainstream administrative pool because it's basically just Unix, right? And they can share those skills. So that's been a really major change in the way people are thinking about administering the Mac. Then, of course, there's this, right? So if you aren't a command line junkie, you can also get at it from here. And this typically is better for the people who are raised on Novell or raised on NT, right? The ability to see a graphical user interface like this and handle it, not really as much for the command line, but more for this. And I think we've done an incredibly good job of making it easy to use for someone who really doesn't want to get down to the command line.

And by the way, just as an aside, this is really, you remember that third grade teacher earlier? We actually have really designed a lot of the server admin and all the admin tools to apply to that school teacher setting up a network inside of their classroom. I mean, that is a design center here.

So we really try to make it that easy to do. And I think we've done a pretty good job of that. We have another product, ARD, Apple Remote Desktop, that is another just incredible tool that makes it easy for admins to do all sorts of cool stuff. Here what you see, you know, as we're looking at another session, Joe's PowerBook, right? You can do all sorts of really cool stuff.

You know, software distribution, asset management, remote administration, remote assistance. You know, if you have a couple Macs in your department, you want to make sure that you have remote desktop because that's the best way to administer Mac OS X desktops out there. The reason I bring this up is when you show this kind of a tool to people who are used to the more Windows-oriented world, you know, the light bulbs go off, and they go, this is really cool. Again, you know, that retraining cost of administration goes way down when they see tools like this. The other thing I wanted to mention out, I don't know if you all know about this, but there's a migrating to Mac OS X server from Windows NT, really interesting document. I don't know, has anyone seen this before? Okay, not a lot of people. I would really, really recommend you go check this out. You know, again, migrating from Mac OS X server to Windows NT, because what it does is this is just a page from it. It literally goes through the screens and says, here's what you see in NT, here's what you're going to see in Mac OS X. So it really speaks to the people who know the whole Windows world. So we've gone a really extra step here to make it easy to get past that retraining issue. You know, you can just move right over, we do the translation for people. Okay, now what I wanna talk about is one of the killer things.

When you put it all together, again, we're talking about skeptics. If you have anybody in your organization that's doing any kind of technical work, any kind of Unix environment, this set of slides, I think really kinda nails it for people. is you have-- let's see here. I haven't had time with this clicker. There we go. This is PowerPoint on Mac OS X. Right? This is a Java application, SAP front end, all running on the same machine, PowerPoint, SAP.

And this is an X11 application. So we have Office, Java, X11, all on one machine. Go find me that anywhere. This is a unique offering in the industry. Nobody can do this. I've been actually working in the Unix world for, I hate to admit it, but almost 20 years now in the commercial world.

And this is a screen that literally I've been waiting for like 15 years to see, right? Where you have Office coupled with a Java environment, coupled with powerful technology applications, all running in a really robust Unix environment. For an awful lot of people in the industry, this is unbelievably exciting. And when they see this, it really changes the way they view about it. So it really comes together as the dream machine. And you layer Apple ease of use on top of it, the legendary Mac OS X. You know what's funny? Because it's a computer that's actually fun to use, and you can do your business with it, and you can do your productivity applications. And when you put it all together, and you can take it with you on your portable, what I found is, again, talking to skeptics, I can usually really get their curiosity going here. Especially if you ever hear anyone who's talking about-- or if your company is thinking about going to Linux in any way, shape, or form, right, you've got to look at this. Because in a way, this is like, you know, I think the 22nd century version of Linux in a lot of ways, right? Okay? So we've got it all here.

And again, the spirit of this is, I mean, you all know this, but I'm trying to give you some of the things that I found when I talk to people really get them excited. And a lot of it's stating the obvious, right? I mean, this isn't really particularly profound, but what I found is when I go and tell it to people, it really makes it a lot easier for them to get over the hurdle to the max. So when I look at it, you know, fundamentally, when you go under the covers and you do the work, you actually go through the exercise of pricing things out, which you will find is max R cost effective, okay?

When you put it all together, software and hardware, layer in the CALs, and then if you really wanted to get fancy, then you start estimating the kind of help desk, the kind of administrative costs on top, but I'm just talking even on just straight ahead acquisition costs. We're gonna be very competitive. Macs are open. Ironically, we're just about the most open platform out there. As far as the whole infrastructure, open source, you get your hands on it. You can do what you want with it. All the standards throughout the system, they're there.

We're going to fit in the network. Matter of fact, one of my favorite tests, I have a friend who just convinced his startup to go down the Mac path. It was a bunch of software developers. And they were all privately using their PowerBooks. Their management, their IT guy didn't want them to do that. So what they did is they cut a deal with the guy and they said, if you can't tell, "It's a Mac on the other side of your network, right, "that's plugging into your network. "Will you let us do it?" And he said, "That's a deal."

And what was really interesting is just recently, with the Panthers, you know, active directory integration as well as being able to handle an Exchange server much better, they finally got over that hurdle. And actually, the IT director said, "Fine. "As long as I don't know it's a Mac on the other side, "perfectly fine," and it worked beautifully, right? So it just plugs in, right? Office on the Mac, yep, it's there and it's compatible. And it's a genuine copy from Microsoft. 12,000 apps, tons of apps available.

They're absolutely powerful systems for very serious computing. Now, you know what's also interesting, right? It's only for artists. Well, you know what's wild that's going on? I think a lot of you probably are participating in this right now, is with the whole digital, you know, the move to digital, especially high definition, these are the most challenging applications of today. These applications demand the most from computing, the most from storage. They beat on the storage infrastructure more than any other apps out there. So the interesting part is, is where Apple normally is, is in the very highest end of the performance scale.

This shouldn't be a surprise. They're easy to manage, easy to use. You know, again, that retraining boogeyman out there, I think, is largely something that we can vanquish fairly simple. Again, my third grader can handle it pretty well. We think you guys can handle it. So the point is, you know, we go through this. A lot of really obvious things to say, but it's really worth saying when you go back and you want to talk to people about integrating Macs into your environment. but there's one last thing that I wanted to talk about that I haven't hit on, is the security aspect. Okay?

Turns out right now, there is a huge move of people who are just kind of two views. One view is the amount of money they spend of lost time due to viruses is phenomenal. Just the amount of downtime due to viruses. People have lost, literally, major companies have lost a whole day.

of operations due to handling a virus. You realize that could be the whole profit for a quarter, that one day? That's a risk that's a really brutal risk to take. So a lot of people are saying, do I have to do this? So what's going on here, the other half of the people are sitting there and saying, is it smart to have a monoculture? I'm sure you've all heard this argument, it's saying, look, you know, just like in biology, if you have Like all the wheat is identical. One fungus can come and wipe it all out. There's no redundancies. There's no variety. It's extremely vulnerable. Same thing goes if you have one set, one architecture in your company. One virus can come in and shut it down.

So that's not a good place to be. So a lot of folks right now are looking at the model saying, you know, we're going to take 20% of our desktops and have them be something other than Microsoft. You know, not because they don't like Microsoft fine products, but they just need to have variety.

And so that one virus doesn't come in and just bring them down to their knees. And this is something I think that's gaining a lot of steam right now. So on one hand, lost productivity due to viruses. Other hand, you know, one way to fight that and get ahead of it to diversify the base a little bit. Now, you know, it's interesting. In the past, people used to say, you know, a heterogeneous environment is expensive. It's more expensive. It's harder to manage. And there's this truth to that. So there's a cost to that.

But now what's happening is we finally understand there's a cost to a homogenous environment as well, and that cost comes through decreased security. So you just think of balancing that. So what we're seeing is people really taking a look and saying, you know, we want to go somewhere different. Now, a lot of people would argue, well, you know, Macs aren't really that much more secure You know, it's because the volume's small, right? It's a small part of the market. As a result, if I'm a virus writer, I'm not gonna go after that. I'm gonna go to the big stage, which is the 95% of computers out there that are Windows, right? You hear that a lot. To that I say, hey, we'll run that experiment.

We'll take the 25% market share, and we'll see if we're secure or not. Maybe we'll be, maybe we won't. But we'll run that exercise. The point is, at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter why. We have not yet had, knock on wood, nobody's perfect. We haven't had a major virus yet.

And that's something you can say. Again, we always cross our fingers because it can happen. But for some reason, it hasn't hit yet. So the point is we generally have a much better security record, and that's something that I think we're very proud of. And there are some pretty interesting reasons why we're doing it, right? It's obviously being, we believe, being open and having an open source core makes for a more secure product.

You know why? Because the security vulnerabilities are bugs. Thanks. And the best way to stomp out bugs is to have somebody do peer review and look at your work. Have some other eyes look at it. You guys have all done, you either develop code or done engineering projects. And you see things from one angle. Somebody else comes along and they'll look at it from a very different angle and find an error. Well, that's what open source is all about, is peer review. Having other people look at the code. And that's something we think has really been effective for us. We get ahead of it. Matter of fact, we find that a majority of people warning us about a potential flaw comes from outside of our development organization. It's someone else looking at it and saying, "Oh, look at that. That could be a problem." These are theoretical, but we get to fix them ahead of time. So we have a lot of eyes looking at that.

Contrast with a proprietary approach where you have to trust the vendor and that particular development organization to get every single bug. You've got to trust that they're doing it. And you also know that there's no outside auditing going on of the code. It's only that one organization. And you tend to get a pretty single view of the world from that standpoint. So we think that's been really good. The other interesting thing is we also built Mac OS X from the ground up to be secure. And that's also paid dividends. A lot of ways, we had the advantage, because Mac OS X is a new operating system, of having, we can develop that after we knew about the whole internet, and we knew about a lot of the flaws, potential flaws out there. So we could build it in as we built Mac OS X from the ground up, right? So as a result, when you look at the things we built in as far as secure setup, all our ports are closed right out of the box. Right? The services are off. I have a customer I was talking to, it was really funny, he was at a university.

So what he does, he goes into the server room, installs a computer, gets it up and running, gets it going, walks back to his office, sits down, His server had already been compromised. Okay? I mean, within, like, it was, like, literally said it was a two-minute exercise. It was just bam. So, you know, we get around that. You don't have to go in detail, do a security detail when you buy a Mac, and that's really important. Again, that's because we knew about it when we were building it. There's a lot of other features like that that we build in right from the ground up. You know, it's just simple things, like the root, you know, root is off when you start. You know, it's disabled. So, you know, that's a nice security feature for you to keep people from remotely exploiting this machine. You know, we do, you know, we have a nice way of requiring authentication when you want to load in a new application or run it.

Right? You've got to authenticate it. Our mail is safe, that when you want to run something, run a binary out of mail, you know, we make sure that you know you're running a binary out of mail. Right? So you can't do it behind the scenes. So there's a lot of interesting stuff like that that we've built in to make it a lot harder to exploit a machine. The other aspect is we made it easy to stay secure. Here, this is one of the interesting parts, is a lot of the problems happen on machines that are out of date. You know, there's been a security patch issued, but somebody just didn't install it, right? Well, what we've done within our SU process, the software updates, is just made it really simple for people to keep up to date. And that's a lot of the reason behind it. Oh, and by the way, those are signed packages that come down. so you know they're actually real and they're not being spoofed. So the point is we've really built in a lot of security just to stay secure. And then finally there's the communications and the community aspect of this. This is something we probably should publicize more, how we communicate our security issues. We have a couple of methods here. The first one is when you get your software update, you get a description of what's there. That's generally fairly generic because it's aimed for every single user out there in the world. that isn't going to understand a lot of the technology. So we try to make it as clear as possible, but for a very large audience and a non-technical audience. Typically, from there, you can drill down and get to our website. And on our website, we do go into details as far as exactly what the security issue is and what we're fixing on a patch. So you can see that and just drill a lot deeper. We also work with a lot of the outside groups who are like CVE, which is a MITRE-run organization. And essentially there you can actually track these security issues in really incredible detail online. So there's kind of a layered approach to get the information out there, and we participate very, very heavily in that.

So the point is, in a way, our trump card at the end of the day in talking about it is really about security. And again, we can't make any major promises that we'll never have a virus. We knock on wood that it won't happen. Our track record to date has been extremely good. So we're very happy about that.

So again, to kind of summarize here, When you go back, I try to run through some of the things I've heard, some of the myths I've encountered, try to give you some comebacks to that. But at the end of the day, I think when you kind of sum it up and say, it's all about the power of Unix, the simplicity of the Mac, whenever I get to people to really have that light go on and that's what they're getting, people generally really get excited. I love going sitting down. My favorite person to go talk to is the absolute skeptic. And whenever I go through a demo, I can usually get them turned at about a half hour. And again, it all comes back to, it's all about the power of Unix and the simplicity of the Mac.