Steve Jobs was known for his incredible presentations and the skills he had in attracting users. He was the man who could sell anything, but needed the right tool to do it.
That tool was Keynote, which would become part of the suite iWork. But how was keynote created?
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1998 from the Cupertino takeover of NeXT, he was called in to give a speech at Macworld, the 1998 keynote. As he had done countless times before, for this speech, Jobs was inspired by Xerox. He wanted to "produce beautiful slides" using the same procedure that Xerox used in its presentations. The only problem he encountered was that at the moment the only program that existed that allowed making presentations was PowerPoint, and for this, he would have to have Windows installed on a Mac, which would discredit the company.
Ultimately, Jobs decided that the only way to do his 1998 Keynote was by using Quicktime Player. From there, Quicktime became the basis for the custom presentations that Apple's software engineers were writing specifically for Steve's Keynotes.
At the beginning of 2001 Steve already had a beta version of the application that would later become Keynote 1.0 and it would be used to introduce the iPod to the world. Keynote was entirely designed by Apple from the ground up and was designed to meet Steve's exact needs. Keynote wasn't originally designed to be a public software version, but the team created something so magical and so comprehensive that Steve was convinced it had to be known to compete with PowerPoint.
He particularly loved the dramatic motion effect. It's a fascinating story of a much-overlooked app that has played an important role in Apple's big product reveals over the past decade by being full of small-big details.
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Source - Cultofmac