14 DAY TRIAL // At the Worldwide Developers Conference 2007 in San Francisco, the company's Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs revealed in the opening keynote that he would quit and that Apple would be shutting down because of the overwhelming success of Windows Vista and Zune. In the video at the bottom, you will be able to see the PC Guy from the Get a Mac ads, impersonating Steve Jobs and announcing the end of the Cupertino-based company. The YouTube video fragment, courtesy of Long Zheng, features the same flavor of acid irony that we've come to expect from Apple.
"Well, I've got some big news this year, and I want the whole world to hear it... I quit! Yes that's right, I'm resigning effective immediately, and once more, I'm shutting down all of Apple. Now, I know that this comes as a surprise to all of you, but if you think about it I really didn't have a choice. I mean, Windows Vista has been performing so well, they've sold tens of dozens of copies. So it just appears to me that Leopard was going to get lost in all that Wow," PC Guy/Steve Jobs stated.
Just watch the video at the bottom for the complete performance from PC Guy, or go here to access Steve Jobs' keynote address at WWDC 2007. Obviously, Apple has not been shut down, Leopard is right on track for October, so is the iPhone, and Safari has even made it all the way to Windows Vista. But this video is an illustration of how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates understand to deal with marketing.
During his address at Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) 2007 in Los Angeles, Bill Gates stated: "We've really been amazed at the customer response. I mean, we knew that [Windows] Vista would become the standard version of Windows. We knew that the industry was stepping up to take advantage of those capabilities, but what's happened in the last 100 days has been beyond our expectations. As of last week, we've had nearly 40 million copies sold, and so that's twice as fast as the adoption of Windows XP, the last major release that we've had."
Gates' approach was statistical, he did take a swing at Apple, but just a subtle one, mixing Mac OS X along with all the Windows Vista rival products. Apple is less shy of performing an all out operating system measuring contest, with the associate dose of humor. For the sake of comparison, Bill Gates' remarks are available here, just right click and select Save Target As.