President's Letter
by Andrew Welch



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.

There were no bombshells dropped -- frankly, I think the last thing Apple needs is a bombshell that results in yet another change of focus. However there were quite an array of positive announcements -- enough to make me begin to feel a bit more positive about Apple's future. Here's to an interesting 1998!



Andrew Welch
Thaumaturgist
Ambrosia Software, Inc.




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