Apple Has Stopped Preaching To The Choir

Royce Buñag, director at the California-based computer giant tells Shishir Prasad .

After spending 11 years with the marketing group at Apple, Royce Buñag felt he could do more. As he saw it, if Apple was to be successful in its turnaround, then it would have to shore up its relationship with developers and hone their ability to provide solutions to customers. For years, Apple refused to share its operating system architecture with software developers. The result: much fewer applications were written for Apple machines, and a limited installed base.

Todays Buñag task as head of the developer group is to instil developer confidence "� which he himself admits isnt easy. He reports to Apples Central Marketing Organisation and describes his job as an interesting synthesis of marketing and technology.

 

Buñag spoke to The Strategist about the challenges facing his company.

Q.Your business card describes you as director, evangelism and international developer relations. Could you tell us a bit about your role within Apple?

A. The evangelism part of my job consists of spreading the word of Macintosh. There are actually two types of evangelism at Apple. One is technology evangelism. For example, if I am a QuickTime technology evangelist, then I know, to a deep level, what QuickTime is capable of and I work with developers to incorporate that technology. The developers that I work with are essentially any developers that can work with QuickTime to deliver a finished product.

The other kind of evangelists are relationship evangelists. What they do is focus on top-tier developers that Apple has. That top includes Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia and Quark. It essentially works down from there. And they are priority at Apple. Apple has grown into a large and complex organisation. If you are an external developer, you dont know who to call at Apple for marketing, engineering, access to the sales force and what have you. You might have to make 12-14 telephone calls. So what a relationship manager does is be a sort of account manager for that developer. So these developers call their evangelists and their evangelist is the one who advocates for them. If I, as a developer, want to bundle my product with some Apple configuration, then the evangelist takes care of that.

Q: But doesnt being labelled as an evangelist still indicate the prevalence of a cult mentality, which got in the way of

Apple becoming a mass market player?

A: The evangelists at Apple do not preach to the choir now. Particularly, with Rhapsody, our modern operating system, that is very much founded on a multi-platform strategy. That means a good percentage of the developers here and at other places are not Macintosh developers. So a evangelist essentially has to a job of convincing them about Apples business proposition. It is no longer preaching to the choir.

Q: You spent about 11 years with the consumer marketing end of Apple. What were the consumer concerns?

A: In the first 11 years with the company, I interacted with Apples customers. Most of these were the K-12 educational segment, universities, large corporate accounts and government accounts. I had minimal interaction with consumers if that is the term you want to refer to.

If you largely group those customers into largely three areas: educational, large and small businesses, and the creative area which includes multimedia, content people, artists and publishers. In the educational market users have largely been satisfied with Apple. Historically from the days when we sold a lot of Apple IIs to laboratories and in the K-12 market recently, over the last three to four years we are starting to get to a point where the Apple IIs are being replaced with Macintoshes. And then when you get to the higher academia you realise that Apple was always very well-suited there and we had a very strong foundation in the schools. In the US, we had an Apple university consortium. There were 24 schools in that consortium and Apple made it very easy to buy Macintoshes for them. The graphical user interface as opposed to the text-based interface were always very well received. So the educational market then the user really have not been asking for much.

If you see the

K-12 people, they really do not see the need for a modern operating system. They are actually just trying to make that transition to the Macintosh.

If you look at the business market, one thing that Apple has consistently been requested for by customers, is the ability to play better in the corporate enterprise market. This is the market that is largely owned by the big companies such as Oracle, Lotus and the systems kind of people. Till Rhapsody we have not had a good answer to that with the present generation MacOS.

With Rhapsody if you look at where NeXT software comes from and what its strengths are, you will realise they are very strong in the enterprise market. So whether it is enterprise-wide computing, intranets within large corporation, the good news is that it is quite scaleable. If you combine Rhapsody at the high-end and combine it with the MacOS at the lower end you can use Apples products within small workgroup settings as well. And it can go all the way to small business with one proprietor or owner running an accounting firm. And the whole thing comes with the ease of use that Apple is known for.

Another Apple area was the creative, publishing and the multi-media market. Again Apple has enjoyed a leadership position in that market. This was because the important thing for that market was the ability to translate what one saw on the screen in resplendent colours to the printed page. Now the importance of that is still there. Particularly with the convergence of electronic media, Apple is very well-positioned to make that transition. So in that area the customer needs are largely technical in nature in that they should be able to manipulate ever increasing file sizes. They want enhanced speed over the networks. So again I think where we are headed with Rhapsody will appease that market.

The second part of your question was regarding developers. Prior to the NeXT software acquisition "� latter part of 1996 "� if you were in Apple developer relations, you had a pretty difficult job. This was because for the popular press here was a company with ever decreasing market share. So what is that I (as a developer relationship manager) can say to a Macintosh developer developing on that platform or even get out the required pitch to entice someone else to develop on the Macintosh.

We frankly had a very tough job.

Now with Rhapsody the main thing is that the developer proposition is very much enhanced. This whole idea of writing my code once and with the windfall of being able to play it across multiple platforms. This has resulted in increased commitment from the developers. The developers seem to think that Rhapsody is something that will keep them in business. And you will notice that much of the technology and products that Apple is working on is on the basis of the multiple platform. We came to the full realisation that Macintosh could not survive on itself. It would have to open up and accommodate other industry norms as well.

Q: You have spoken at length about the consumer concerns. What developer issues do they translate into?

A: The first thing is that Apple at that time had a market share approaching a single digit. The rest of the industry was 85 per cent Windows, five per cent Unix and the remaining was Macintosh. The developer question was: how am I going to make money with this kind of an installed base?

A related issue to that is the situation in the consumer retail market in the United States. Now the way it works is this that the developer who manufactures shrink-wrapped commercial software needs a distribution channel to get that out. But if you go to any computer superstore and what have you, and look around, you see many aisles stacked with Windows software and then you might see one aisle of Macintosh software.

When a customer "� not a very knowledgeable one "� walks in that store and wants to buy a computer, after seeing the software in aisles, why would he buy a Macintosh? That was probably because Apple had an ongoing communication problem.

We continue to have very good advantages in user interface and ease of use and for many people who have never used a computer before, we need to get that message out. We need to reach out to the consumer. This is where our competitors have done a better job at marketing.

Q: But isnt this whole idea of having Rhapsody running alongside MacOS a

bit like Microsoft releasing Windows and running DOS as a Windows task?

A: I guess there are similarities. But right from the very beginning, what Apple has done is try not to forget some of the users that have been with us right from the beginning. So that is what the 'Blue Box portion of the Rhapsody is supposed to do. To be able to say to someone who purchased a Macintosh in the late eighties or early nineties that their applications would not only run, it will run faster within that Blue Box is, I get the message. That is one similarity with the DOS compatibility portion.

But I do not know whether our friends in Redmond (Microsoft HQ) can say that those DOS applications actually run faster. That is actually one thing that Apple has been able to provide. The way we did it was that when we introduced the PowerPC, we said that over the years "� and people did not believe us then "� with the future revisions of the MacOS as more and more of the MacOS code was turned into native PowerPC code, these applications would actually run faster and faster. That does not happen on the DOS and the Windows platform.

When we first introduced the PowerPC there was a small percentage of the MacOS that was written in native PowerPC code. Over a period of time, that percentage has grown. At this point the present MacOS is probably 95-96 per cent native power PC. So that means that if I had a word processing application which kept updating, the user would see its performance enhanced.

It seems to me that Windows 95 is just the starting point but Windows NT is where Microsoft wants to take everything "� which is a good strategy. But if you look at our strategy for Rhapsody though, the end-user does not have to care. Because developers are a kind of early warning system for the user. If the developers do their work ahead of time it will make things that much easier for the users because the users then can be platform agnostic.

Then the onus is on Apple to differentiate.

Q: With Rhapsody Apple is trying to gain a foothold in two segments: the industrial strength server segment (for the Internet) and also the consumer application segment. How do you aim to achieve this?

A: I think that question has a lot to do with where Apple intends to do its marketing for Rhapsody. We are not telling consumers that Rhapsody is for this market. What I think is going to happen by natural selection is that our customers are going to tell us which markets adopt Rhapsody. What we are saying is that just because of hardware configuration for Rhapsody, it is going to be difficult for a home user or K-12 institution to configure a 32-MB hardware platform for Rhapsody. So that you will see much of the marketing and positioning "� at least initially "� for Rhapsody is going to be towards the higher-end: the enterprise, publishing or the multi-media market.

But that does not mean Apple is saying that Rhapsody is not for the small business, K-12 or the consumer market. We actually have quite a bit of interest in small business developers and K-12, particularly administrative developers. Apple has finite resources: we have to focus on marketing and engineering talent for certain things. We realise that one and a half years ago we were probably trying to be all things to all people. Now we are trying to focus on our key market areas where we have succeeded. This is because in the past we have been spread too thin and it was not helping us one bit.

Q: Enterprise computing market is a very tough market. How is Apple planning to attack this market?

A: One is with the acquisition of NeXT we have not only inherited their technology but also their sales force which have had an expertise in addressing this market. While the NeXT sales force was not large, but they were very experienced in servicing, porting and dealing with large client like the US Postal service "� US Postal Service was using WebObjects. One of our hardware competitors website is based on WebObjects. So basically this a testimony to where this technology can be used. So the former Next salesforce is a part of the Apple salesforce.

The other thing, from a developers perspective, we are partnering with those key industry systems people. In fact Computer Associates has committed to doing software for MacOS and Rhapsody. Among others we will continue work for Peoplesoft. But we are realistic about the fact that Apple is not going to rise up suddenly and say,Guess what! We are in the enterprise market? We are going to be working very closely with some of the main vendors in that market.