WWDC: For Once the Reaction Was Positive

Unlike other WWDC's, Apple share prices rose, albeit only 2%, during this week.

Until this year, the occasion of the Worldwide Developers' Conference had not been good for Apple investors [bold added]:

The data shows that the Monday of WWDC is a horrible day to buy Apple stock. Since 2003, Apple stock has always closed below where it closed on the Friday before WWDC kicks off. Despite the appeal of the WWDC Keynote amongst Apple fan boys, it seems that investors never think that the presentation meets expectations.

Apple watchers have been continually disappointed in the nearly-three years after Steve Jobs' death by the dearth of revolutionary products (although some have been pretty good, like the iPhone 5S with fingerprint recognition). Consequently, expectations for the 2014 conference had been reset downward. As expected, there weren't any hardware announcements, but some observers expressed guarded excitement about what some software changes portended:

Apple did two things that set the stage for a dramatic increase in the software infrastructure that underlies its devices. First, it announced a suite of software and services for developers that will speed how they develop programs for the iPhone that use cloud computing. Apple will let them plug into massive amounts of processing and storage on Apple's servers, so that a whole chunk of infrastructure that a young start-up would have to build itself is now there for free. [snip]

The second big announcement last week was what Apple calls "Handoff."

Handoff is a means for each computer you own to know what you are doing on every other computer at any moment. You can start typing an e-mail on your Mac, and your iPhone realizes you're doing so and offers to let you pick up right where you left off and finish the e-mail on the phone's screen as you hustle out the door. You can answer a call from your iPhone on your Mac. And you can pick up where you left off with a Web page on your iPad when you sit down in front of your Mac.

That kind of seamless interactivity between devices is groundbreaking.

Apple management deserves credit for resisting the temptation to talk about the hardware that it will be releasing in the fall. Instead, it stuck to the plan of rolling out the software tools that will help developers write apps for the new devices.

Patience, making a plan, sticking to it until you're ready to talk about it, now that's revolutionary.