That plan is built upon continuing to announce exciting and innovative hardware products that will utilize an improved Mac OS today, while building an exciting and advanced new operating system for the future. It strengthens our leadership in multimedia and ease of use, which studies show are important purchase considerations for the home, business and education markets. Apple's new operating system strategy aims to build upon and increase this leadership over time and provide seamless compatibility between the Macintosh and competing platforms. We are also moving quickly to develop the next-generation operating system, which we call Rhapsody . We expect the industry will see the first fruits of our development effort beginning this year, not in 18 months.
Recent history demonstrates our ability to smoothly transition to new generations of technology.
In 1994, we introduced the first Macintosh based on the PowerPC microprocessor and today's PowerPC computers are flawlessly running many applications designed to run on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor family. Apple innovation moved them from one generation of technology to the next. We'll do it again. Mr. Mossberg worries that Rhapsody will not run on older Macintoshes. Backward compatibility has always been an industry issue.