“When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 he was assigned the title of iCEO (interim CEO). The ‘i”’ later took on a much more deeper context as the product naming conventions changed at Apple. Steve had planned rather early how new Apple products and major Apple changes will be announced, a one man show that insiders came to call the ‘one more thing’ show,” Quora reports.
“Steve knew something that all great CEOs, All great founders should instinctively know, they are salespeople and they know that people want to be ‘sold.’ Steve had a rather high degree of respect for the sales process and good salespeople in general,” Quora reports. “He felt all the much better when a founder is the chief salesperson. He once stated ‘if I can’t sell it, no one should.'”
“To present ideas to the world, a salesperson can use tools that are at hand. In the case of Steve, he was visual and wanted to punctuate his ideas with a huge backdrop of points,” Quora reports. “He also knew that a true Kinesthetic environment was needed to present lasting ideas and concepts. Steve would serve as the Kinesthetic student and presenter in these Keynotes.”
“Steve would respect PowerPoint only to the level that in the correct hands it could be a crude yet broken tool. It however did not serve in any real way the Kinesthetic experience of movement and it ran on a lesser operating system,” Quora reports. “Steve was left with only one product in 1998 for the Macworld Keynote, Concurrence, from Lighthouse Design. This ran on a NeXTSTEP computer connected to a VGA Projector from Sony. He operated the slide show with a custom built RF remote control with four buttons.”
“Concurrence served a basic purpose for Steve but he wanted more from the system. He wanted it to produce beautiful slides like the great photographic sales presentation slides the Xerox salespeople would use,” Quora reports. “This prompted Steve to ask his software designers to build something he can uses at his Keynote speeches and gave them a long list of features. In the mean time Steve used the Quicktime Player for most of the presentations. The Qucktime Player formed the basis of Keynote and the custom software the team was creating for Steve. Thus Keynote’s early grandpappy seems to be the Quicktime Player.”
Much more in the full article here.