In Apple‘s keynote at Macworld, CEO Steve Jobs was played by Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing. It was an evolutionary keynote with just a few points of note for enterprise IT managers.
Don’t get me wrong. I was personally filled with the urge to buy a Mac (an iMac to be precise) for my home so that I could use the enhanced iLife ’09 suite made up of iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand and other Web and media creation features. But for eWEEK’s core enterprise IT audience, the only announcements that warrant attention are iWork.com and the 17-inch MacBook Pro.
iWork.com, released as a public beta today, is a new service from Apple for sharing iWork ’09 documents online. Mash up Google Apps with Microsoft Works and (eventually) add subscription pricing and you have the basic picture of iWork.com. (Perhaps this makes it something like MobileMe’s first cousin?) iWork.com is perhaps a little richer in its delivery in that it enables sharing of Keynote (think PowerPoint), Pages (think Word) and Numbers (think Access) with extensive revision notes. After uploading an item, the user can invite others to view and comment on the work product.
The 17-inch MacBook Pro completes the Mac notebook family that is already composed of 13- and 15-inch offerings. Apple claims the thinnest and lightest mantle. Officials also announced that the battery, which is not designed to be consumer-replaceable, lasts up to 8 hours on a single charge and can be recharged up to 1,000 times for an effective five-year service life.
The real highpoint of the keynote session was the musical performance by Tony Bennett that wrapped up the session. It’s hard to make “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” sound fresh, but I got goose shivers as I listened. And I’ll hand it to Apple and Macworld; this is the first time in 11 years of attending trade shows that a musical act added to the presentation and instead of just making me feel squeamish.