Steve Jobs: The king of the Keynote
Apple is famous for its entertaining, world-class product presentations, that attract press coverage (read: free advertising) from the entire world — and there is no debate as to who built this reputation. Steve Jobs’s celebrity and charisma made him “the closest thing to a rock star in the world of business”. During his second tenure at Apple, between 1997 and 2011, he appeared 4 to 7 times a year (when he was healthy, of course) to unveil new products during one of his trademark ‘keynotes’. While he was notoriously a capricious speaker who refused to rehearse in his late twenties, he perfected his art at NeXT, and came back to Apple as the best showman of the industry.
The Apple keynotes were more common in the early 1990s, because broadband Internet and video streaming were far from mainstream yet, making it necessary for Steve Jobs to physically go and preach the Apple gospel in several cities, and for the company to hold conferences to show off their new products. At the time, Jobs spoke at Macworld San Francisco in January, at Macworld Tokyo in February, at WWDC in May or June, at Macworld New York in July, and at the Paris Apple Expo in September. He also spoke at discrete media events and often at the desktop publishing conference Seybold.
As the 2000s progressed, keynotes became rarer. Not only had online video streaming become widespread, but Apple could rely on its chain of retail stores to show off its new products. The company even justified its progressive withdrawal from all Macworld shows by the increasing number of visitors to its stores. Toward the end of Steve’s career, he only made about four keynotes a year, including the developers conference (WWDC) keynote in the summer, and the iPod event in the fall.
Steve Jobs typically started his keynotes by some corporate news, such as the company’s revenues or retail store numbers. Then a series of mini-segments would follow, either introduction of minor products such as software upgrades or product line refreshes, guest speakers (e.g. developers), product demos, or new commercials. Then, at the end, would come the biggest announcement (typically preceded by Steve’s ‘One More Thing…’ joke) where the most important new product was unveiled. At some events, the audience was also treated with a musician’s guest performance to close the show.