MacRumors has shut down most of their site in favor of a light-weight design for special coverage of today’s opening of the June 2004 WWDC Expo. If they didn’t do this, the site would be shut down anyway by the hordes of people who will be constantly loading and reloading the site all day to see what the news from Apple is.

Apple Computer just has a way with excitement. They guard their secrets closely, and release them in a relatively big fanfare at these occasional events. This one is the annual World Wide Developer’s Conference, for programmers and other people who work with Apple-related software and hardware. Nobody knows exactly what they’re going to announce, but because they guard their secrets, rumors are very popular. It’s rumored that they’re going to update their display product line, and announce the next version of their Mac OS X, and talk about some of its features. They could also surprise everyone with something really interesting, because admittedly, those announcements would be pretty mundane. But keeping everything secret makes even the mundance stuff exciting to the people who follow them.

Mostly, as a recent purchaser of an iBook, after years of using Windows and trying out Linux, I’m just happy Apple keeps working on their software and trying to integrate new innovations. That’s what a successful business does. Microsoft is in a different business model entirely, but I think in the long one it will prove to be a failure. When your only product is software, and software becomes a commodity, you can’t be billionaires anymore unless you come up with a new product. They’re having a lot of trouble there, in my opinion because they’ve rested on their haunches so long, relying on their monopoly power to keep the money rolling in. Still, maybe the XBox game console will end up being a success for them in the long run. Who knows? I’m sticking with Apple for now, until such time as they stop being the best solution for my needs.