Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

Given Jobs’ purported secret meeting with Bill Gates in CES Vegas last week, I was on maximum alert today for Redmond DNA at the MacWorld keynote and aftermath. It helped that a Microsoft PR official denied the existence of the meeting, which only served to make it all the likelier that it occurred. Why call attention to it if there was no substance to it? Or put another way, if it did occur, and it was secret enough to escape the camera phone grid in Vegas, wouldn’t Microsoft PR have to deny it. Or maybe PR was out of the loop too a la Ron Ziegler.

Other than a pushback from an HP guy to the effect that Craig Mundie said Silverlight integration with the iPhone would never happen, there were no obvious clues in the lobby after the SteveNote. Of course, in keeping with the PR denial, the fact that I made up the Silverlight scenario out of whole cloth made it more than a little interesting that an HP official had actually discussed such a thread with Mundie before I had even made it up. Given the wave of exits from Microsoft Classic in recent weeks (Jeff Raikes, Charles Fitzgerald, Gates’ glidepath) my bet is whatever Mundie says may be irrelevant in the reasonably near future. But then you have to examine the breadcrumbs Jobs sprinkled around Moscone West.

For starters, the transitional upgrades to both the iPhone and Apple TV auger well for Jobs’ continued accupuncture approach to finding pressure points on the body politic of the carrier and cartel communities. Get static from NBC and competition from Amazon and the record companies… switch over to the movie rental business and resuscitate Apple TV in one nifty move. Decouple Apple TV from the Mac and Windows, and Steve sends a loud message to the record companies too: watch the iPhone go tetherless next and regain the lion’s market share. And Time Capsule combined with a free upgrade and a lowered price point suddenly turns Apple TV into a child management system in HD without having to wait for BlueRay to drop into the adoption zone.

The iPhone upgrade offers another clue in the Google containment scenario. The Maps location functionality is augmented by an additional GPS workaround with WiFi to supplement the cell tower triangulation now commoditized across every other mobile platform. Broadcast SMS keeps us connected across both the iPhone network and the downlevel rest of the market, including smart and even dumb phones as receivers. Webclips deliver application status to the iPhone home screen two months ahead of SDK apps and suggests that the value add of native apps will be integration of offline storage and rich services. Hmmm — how will that be delivered?

Flash? Nope. Java FX? Never. Google Gears? Maybe but only as a caching mechanism for text. Let’s see, what multimedia service fabric will work equally well across Windows and OS/X and Linux other than those two which Apple has frozen out of the loop? Could it be Silverlight? Does Apple want to let Google control the RIA turf with the possibility of an Android-seeded nullification of the Apple leverage over the carriers and cartels? Build it anew and have less clients than Dennis Kucinich has voters? Or partner with Microsoft and continue to exploit the advantage of control of the entire device to maintain market dominance to wield against the content and bandwidth suppliers?

More breadcrumbs: Office ‘08 ships on the MacBook Air DVD-less, over the air. Apple TV sucks down rentals (aka software) over the air computer- and DVD-less. If Entourage and the rest of Office were to move to a Silverlight platform, the iPhone, Air, iMac devices would be the Rolls Royces of computing devices in the enterprise. The Intel Trojan horse that Jobs has so strategically exploited will complete the takeover of the PC from within, particularly if iPhone 2.0 includes Intel chips. It’s hardware plus services, something the new guard at Microsoft can live and prosper with.

Like the Presidential campaign, it’s not who is most experienced or most viral or any of that. Rather, it’s who’s left after the least are gone. All the religious arguments — closed versus open in particular — are left in the dust by our desire to live as much in the future as we can. How else to explain the power of the iPhone to upend the usage patterns of 1.0 mobile devices and create a small but highly influential class of users who live as much or more on the mobile Net as they do on the corporate and home networks. With 2% device share, the iPhone has beaten and now runs a close Obama second to devices with a 43% share. One device works on the Net; the other sort of does. Game over.

Now Apple TV is refreshed with a sidestep of the HD conundrum. Switch to cable for HD because satellite has less capacity? Or wait until BlueRay drops below a hundred bucks? No need, particularly if you already have one gathering dust. Upgrade your backup and Airport to Time Capsule and watch as HD podcasts come to life around the free transport and advertiser subsidy built into the Apple TV model. Who’s threatened here? Netflix, Blockbuster, and the TV networks who better settle their ass soon with the writers before the public catches on to the fact that the presidential campaign seems to have continued right through the strike without a hiccup and with far more drama, humor, and cliffhangers. The soaps never recovered from the OJ trial, you know.

Apparently nobody considered what would happen if the razor was software-upgradeable. Nobody but Steve Jobs, that is. The best moment of the Air demo was when Steve pinched and expanded a picture with the now-familiar iPhone multi-touch move, the one I’ve seen people reach out to their current screens and unconsciously attempt to do without thinking. Free upgrades across a wireless grid of devices send a powerful message that everybody wants in on.

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 6:38 pm.
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