Silicon Valley Musings

I had a chance to visit Macworld today. It was packed. All the public parking garages around the Moscone Center were still full at two in the afternoon. The woman handing out badges said they had over thirty five thousand people attend today, some arriving as early as four this morning to get in line for the keynote.

Here are some of my comments and questions from today Macworld.

The killer app is making calls!”

My favorite quote from Steve Job’s Keynote, “We want to reinvent the phone. What’s the killer app? The killer app is making calls!” Yes! Increasingly phones have such clumsy, bloated user experiences emphasizing high-margin services so that making calls seems to be an afterthought. Apple once again demonstrates that it starts with what the consumer wants, not what the manufacturers, carriers, or content producers want. Kudos.

Is the iPhone the next frontier for software developers?

With mobile phone sales getting close to a billion units a year, most software developers would love to develop applications for phones. But BREW, Windows Mobile, and J2ME can be difficult to use and deploying and selling software for phones is very difficult on most of the U.S. mobile networks.

Several features of the iPhone including the use of OS X as its underlying operating system, WiFi support, and iTunes synchronization, make me wonder if the iPhone may become the dream target mobile platform for application development. Only time will tell how open the iPhone platform and Apple/Cingular network will be.

iTunes from modest beginnings to “wedge” app

I don’t know if it was by accident or by design, but iTunes has evolved from its modest beginnings as a music sync app to the household hub for digital media purchasing and management for iPods, Apple TV, and iPhone.

I have overhead an Apple’s salesperson tell a potential Mac convert, “Do you use iTunes on your PC? Yeah? The Mac is just like iTunes…”

I can foresee the same pitch used for selling the Apple TV. “Do you use iTunes to sync your iPod? Yeah? Your iTunes can sync your music, photos, and video, to your Apple TV just as easily.” Notwithstanding its lack of 1080 support, I think Apple TV will do well.

Apple Product Mash-ups

I would like to see Apple merge or mash-up a couple of their products. For example, a version of the Mac Mini that includes Airport Base Station feature making it a single “out of the box” media server. Or a version of Apple TV that was also a iPod docking station. Oh, and I pray the sync cable for the iPhone is compatible with the current iPod cable.

Why no mention of Leopard?

I have seen several people question the omission of Leopard from today’s keynote. Apple must have realized that the iPhone and Apple TV announcements would dominate the tech news coverage and the discussions in the blogophere. In addition, any mention of Leopard would prompt the inevitable Leopard vs Vista feature comparisons.

By not mentioning Leopard, today was all Apple’s.

My pictures from Macworld can be found here.