Spirit of Steve Was Quite in Evidence at iPhone Hoo-haw

Since The Station covers enterprise software/hardware/services for eWEEK most of the time, we don’t often get over to Cupertino to visit Apple. Yes, Apple has the Xserve, and yes, it has many loyal customers in smaller and midsize businesses, especially in the creative arts and home user verticals.

Apple is a huge player in the crossover consumer-business sector with the iPhone and iTouch, but it’s certainly not an enterprise play on the level of HP, IBM, Dell, EMC or a number of other systems makers.

So it’s rare that we get over there to cover a news story of any kind. The Station was on the scene March 17, however, when the iPhone OS 3.0 was launched and its assets described ad infinitum by the Apple marketingmouths.

Founder/CEO Steve Jobs may be on a health hiatus at his Palo Alto home, but his spirit is definitely still in evidence. He would have approved of the way Scott Forstall (SVP for iPhone software), Greg Joswiak (VP of iPod and iPhone marketing) and Phil Schiller (SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing) pounded the message into the audience for 2 full hours.

Jobs also would have liked the slide show and the dramatic statistics (13.7 million iPhones shipped since June 2007! iPhones now in 80 countries! 25,000 apps in the App Store!) that constantly bopped us over the heads.

To make sure it looked like an important event on camera, a good number of Apple employees — probably earning extra-credit points, by the way — squeezed into the auditorium along with journos and analysts. It felt like one of those basic-requirement college lecture hall classes everybody has to endure.

All the hoo-hawing aside, we’ll find out over the next eight to 12 months whether this is a good product or not.