Steve and Steve speak

SAN FRANCISCO -- The new president of Microsoft and the interim chief executive of Apple share a variety of things, including their first names.

Steve Ballmer is a longtime Microsoft Corp. sales and marketing guru who recently was named president of the software giant based in Redmond, Wash. Steve Jobs has been, for 18 months, the "interim" chief executive of Apple Computer Corp. of Cupertino, Calif. They were two of the four keynote speakers at Seybold San Francisco '98, held here Aug. 30 to Sept. 4.

Ballmer -- dressed atypically in a suit because he was speaking to schoolchildren later in the day -- assured the publishing crowd that Microsoft wanted to be their No. 1 supplier.

"We're excited to see that over 41 percent of the publishers today are using Windows NT Server, and have a high interest in installing NT servers tomorrow," Ballmer said. He didn't define the word "publishers."

The Microsoft president admitted that Windows NT 5.0 was still in development. He noted, however, that it was in its second beta release and that it would be available "in the not too distant future."

Microsoft will go on developing software for the MacOS. "We are 100 percent committed, as we were at the time that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates first started talking about this over a year ago," Ballmer said.

The other Steve -- the Apple founder -- delivered a variety of marketing messages, including discourses on a new version of the PowerBook, the next upgrade of the MacOS and pledges of support from Macromedia Inc. of San Francisco (makers of FreeHand) and Quark Inc. of Denver (makers of XPress).

MacOS 8.5, due to be released "this fall," will include a new search utility, Sherlock. With it, users will not only be able to search every word of every file on their Mac hard drives, but also turn to a user interface to allow searching of the Internet by combining the efforts of a variety of established search engine sites, such as InfoSeek and AltaVista.

Interestingly, after Quark founder Tim Gill's heartfelt comments about Apple and Macintosh, Jobs turned over the stage to Quark competitor Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose.

Adobe gave a quick, two-minute demonstration of its new page layout product, code-named K2 (see Few applauded as Quark, Adobe danced). Observers said Gill had not been warned that Jobs' keynote would feature the public unveiling of K2.

-- dmc

See also Digital Revolution has ended, if Seybold is any indication.

From THE COLE PAPERS, October 1998, Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved.