Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference Brings New OS X Updates, new Mac Pro (but not much else)

This past Monday (August 7) at 10AM PT saw the commencement of the 2006 Apple World Wide Developers Conference. This is the place where OS X developers gather to hear about new development tools, additions to OS X that they might want to take advantage of and to generally share ideas and feedback with the Apple Development team. The conference begins with a keynote address from Apple CEO/Founder Steve Jobs. In the past, Jobs has been known to sneak in a new consumer product during the keynote. No such luck this time around. Anyhow, here are some of the highlights of the event.

Mac Pro – The main highlight this year was the announcement of the Mac Pro (the revision of Apple’s high-end desktop computer, the Apple G5). The “Pro” consumer line had been the only remaining product line not to have switched from the IBM G5 processor to an Intel processor. This announcement solved that problem — as now every desktop and laptop are running on Intel processors. Steve Jobs took advantage of the opportunity to highlight the fact that Apple had migrated their entire line of machines in only seven months.

OS X Leopard – Posters all around the conference poked fun at Vista. There were banners that read, “Mac OS X Leopard – Introducing Vista 2.0”. At the keynote, Jobs went through the timeline of OS X releases since 2000. He then invited Senior VP of Engineering Bertrand Serlet onstage to take a few shots as Vista. Bertrand talked about the similarities between Vista and Leopard and got some huge laughs from the partisan crowd. Bertrand’s English was sometimes tough to understand, but I thought his presentation was rather amusing. (To check this out, (with QuickTime installed) go here and forward to the 24:00 minute mark and watch for about 5 minutes.)

Also of note was the fact that Steve Jobs mentioned that the Dev team would only be showing ten new features of Leopard. Saying that he didn’t want to get the “photocopiers in Redmond started too early”, Jobs said that the team was going to keep some additional features “top secret” until a date much closer to the release. (Jobs indicated that the team was aiming for a Spring 2007 release).

WWE’s Teasing a “Hogan Injury”… (so what’s he doing in NYC with Pokemon geeks.)

(This story courtesy of Joystiq.)

Joystiq reports that Hulk Hogan was in Bryant Park at some sort of Pokemon event. Here he’s wearing a Pokemon shirt and holding some sort of proclamation?? (“I, Hulk Hogan, hereby declare this day August 7 as POKEMON DAY!). Basically he looks like a tool. (But if he’s doing it to give kids some joy, that’s cool.) If he’s doing it to help Brooke get some sort of Nintendo tie-in with her album, this is quite shameful.

Regardless of the intent, the problem is that he’s scheduled for a match in two weeks at Summerslam and rumors have been buzzing around the Internet and even on WWE programming that he’s hurt with some sort of angle injury. There are other rumors that he’s faking the ankle industry and even one that I heard where he just flat out doesn’t want to job out to Randy Orton. Well, unless he was limping here, this looks a little suspect. And if he really is hurt, with only two weeks before a scheduled appearance, perhaps he shouldn’t have been here.

Last night it seemed like the WWE might have been teasing a possible Lawler rematch?? (I don’t think he returned to the announce table after his loss to Orton.)

I’d say that this is probably a lock that he’ll be at Summerslam. Either that, or he’s trying to make enemies with Vince McMahon.

Update (8/10/2006 – 2:25am): Hulk Hogan has confirmed that he will be facing Randy Orton at Summerslam.  Thanks to Brent for the update.

What’s in a Technology Name?

iPod. Google. Woot! PlayStation. Tivo. Razr. They were all meaningless formations of vowels and consonants just a few years ago. Now they’ve become technology products and services that most people — even those who aren’t quite so ‘tech-savvy’ — understand and use in their everyday speak. (Okay, maybe not Woot!…. but that’s just because you haven’t found one of their great deals. Woot.com… Check it out!)

But where some marketing execs would have you think that any catchy assembling of letters will elicit a positive response from the public — just as long as the product itself is trendy, I’m not quite certain that this is true. But reflecting over some of the names being given to products lately, I began to wonder whether it really matters what you name a product at all? Would an ‘iPod’ by any other name be the phenomenon that has people finding the extra $300-400 of expendable income in their budget and forking it over to Apple to listen to music? Well, perhaps. But there are situations when the so called “better product” doesn’t win. When the Digital Video Recorder market wasn’t dominated by Tivo, Panasonic’s Replay TV was considered among many in the tech community as “the better product”. But that didn’t stop Tivo from gaining popularity and eventually causing Replay TV to be banished into enthusiast circles. But was that because of the superior Tivo interface? Or did America just like the way that catchy new word, “Tivo” rolled off their tongues more than they did the somewhat boring “Replay TV”? After all, Tivo follows one of my rules of good tech naming (stay tuned) — it can be generalized and turned into a pop culture term. In this case, turned into a verb. “Hey did you see Lost last night? Nah, I Tivo’d it. I’ll watch it later.” That works. Somehow saying, “Nah, I didn’t catch it. But I Replay TV’d it” doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

So does this mean that ‘Google’ and ‘Razr’ and ‘iPod’ were all great sounding names from the start? Well, no. (I actually thought Google was a bit silly sounding when I first heard it.) I believe that some technology products and services are so innovative and so useful that they survive despite being given a bad name. But my general philosophy is that creating a good sounding name does get your product off on the right foot. It creates a buzz. A good and accessible name can set the conditions for success and turn a word from meaningless into a phenomenon overnight. (When my grandmother asks me, “So what kind of iPod do you have”, trust me — the brand development team has succeeded. So what are the “rules” that companies should follow when naming a technology product? So glad you asked.