The Flip Medley

I’ve been thinking about the Apple iPhone on and off all day, and I have come to the realization that it’s impending release is going to be incredibly disruptive to the status quo in the cell phone industry, but it will snake through the entire IT industry and perhaps allow Apple to perform an end-around Microsoft using a technique that, ironically, has served Microsoft well in its battle in new and emerging markets.

In short, Apple is raising the bar so high in the cell phone marketplace that competitors will have a tough time matching up, simply because their “legacy” aims too low — their platforms were not designed to be as rich and as functional as the iPhones, and as a result, software for those platforms is diluted to play on the “lowest common denominator”.

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because we’ve been watching this play out between Microsoft Windows Mobile (née Windows CE aand Pocket PC) and Palm OS.

Palm was the undisputed leader in the PDA marketplace in the days before cell phones began taking on the functionality of PDAs. They were lauded for being elegant and simple, and, like the Mac and the iPod, they “just worked”. It also had geek appeal with the ability to wirelessly beam data to your peers over infrared. Palm PDAs balanced performance, size, and battery life.

When Microsoft made their first foray into the PDA marketplace, it appeared to be classic Microsoft: bloated, buggy, and woefully inept at performing the core functions of a PDA well. The common criticism was that Microsoft was trying to wedge a desktop operating system (Windows) in to a device that simply was not powerful enough to handle it. PDA processors, memory, and battery life could not support the demands a full-fledge OS like WIndows CE brought to the table.

Then the hardware began to improve, and Palm OS simply could not “scale up” to take advantage of the new features. This became obvious to me when I saw the split in functionality between Sony Clîe devices and the rest of the PalmOS-based PDAs. PalmOS was not reeally ready for prime time, and much like Apple during their System 9 days, they found themselves with an underpowered operating system that simply could not perform up to the expectations of users whose needs had exceeded the elegant and simple requirements that were present at the inception of the PDA market.

You can look at the various releases of PalmOS over the past few years, but the promised “Linux-based” PalmOS 6 with multimedia capabilities possibly culled from the defunct BeOS has yet to materialize in any PDA or cell phone. For all the success they’ve had, Palm still ships the Treo line with PalmOS 5 variants. PalmOS has been evolving, but it’s obvious that outside of the Treo smartphones, PalmOS has given way to Windows Mobile… simply because Windows Mobile delivers a richer platform for developers and integrators to build applications upon.

Like most people, I felt that Microsoft, by entering the market late, had been able to aim higher and wait for hardware to catch up to their vision, and simply fight a war of attrition with the expectation that PalmOS would fail simply because Windows CE / Windows Mobile would eventually win out as rich mobile applications demanded more of a platform than what Palm could offer. Quite frankly, despite Palm’s protestations to the contrary, when they released the Palm Treo 700w which ran Windows Mobile, they were essentially running up the white flag to surrender because they were acknowledging that there were some things Windows Mobile was clearly better at. Sure, on the surface, it was all about “synching to Microsoft Exchange” and “leveraging the mobile versions of Microsoft Office”, but really… that class of application simply does not exist (at least not in an elegant form!) on PalmOS.

RIM’s Blackberry, for all of its vaunted coolness, is really a glorified e-mail client + cell phone. As a platform for developers, it’s not far removed from the Palm platform.

Enter Apple, fashionably late.

If you look at what Apple is doing, they are aiming to provide an experience far beyond what Microsoft’s Mobile platform has been pitching to developers. In fact, if you look at it, you’ll see that the iPhone is running Mac OS X — the same operating system as the PowerMac G5 I’m typing this blog entry on. The same operrating system that also runs on my Mac Mini G4 and my MacBook Pro with Intel Core Duo processors. It’s an operating system with roots in the FreeBSD operating system, so it has the rich heritage and stability of a UNIX-variant, but it also has powerful multimedia capabilities courtesy of Apple’s longstanding efforts to provide a platform for content developers (artists) and consumers.

Think about the desktop applications that demonstrate Apple’s commitment to being a multimedia platform — Quicktime. iTunes. iPhoto. iMovie.

But it’s not just the operating system that is impressive. Look at the functionality demonstrated on the iPhone… it has rich graphical capabilities in its core applications. Look at the “Widescreen iPod” example on Apple’s website — the “CoverFlow” may seem to be pure eye candy, but it hints at a powerful platform for application developers. The “lowest common denominator” in the world of iPhone applications is pretty frickin’ powerful, and it’ll be fun to explore how much of the desktop Mac OS X has made its way into the iPhone. It will be interesting to see if CoreImage, CoreAudio, OpenGL, OpenAL, and other APIs developers use for writing desktop applications for Mac OS X are enabled on the iPhone, because if they are….

Long term, we’re looking at a mobile platform that will cause other cell phone makers and carriers to step up the plate to deliver a more powerful integrated platform for developers to create mashups. The key is for Apple and Cingular to keep the platform open enough to allow developers to deploy applications on to the iPhone… something we’re not sure will happen at this time.

People have been underestimating the importance of Apple’s ability to forge alliances: notice that Steve Jobs shared the stage at MacWorld with the CEO’s of Yahoo! and Google, as well as Cingular. To “get it right”, Apple needed to get buy-in from all of these players to make this platform compelling to end-users, who in turn would see Yahoo!, Google, and Cingular as holding a clear competitive advantage over other providers. Only Apple could have had the pull (and the audacity) to get Cingular to rework their voice mail system to suit the way the device needed to work. Only Apple could get both Yahoo! and Google to the table to help bring Web 2.0 to mobile devices.

Of course looking ahead to the future… the next generation will be true peer-to-peer (P2P) applications where mobiles devices cooperate to the benefit of their owners to perform tasks. Social networking. Agent-based computing. Spontaneous networks of mobile devides (not just phones!), working on behalf of their owners, to get things done. I’ll write more on this later, but the bottom line is that the next generation of applications won’t be “hosted” by Google or Yahoo!, but on devices that cooperate to work together, much like a dynamic grid of computers.

Imagine the power of a “hivemind” of devices that continuously work on behalf of users, making requests of nearby devices and their owners to allow people to share information, transact socially, and even do a bit of commerce to pay the bills… all based on proximity, all leveraging a platform that uses standards-based technologies.

Of course, at that point, we’re going to need the ability to do servers, and that means it will only be a matter of time before you see elements of a service infrastructure running on your cell phone.

And I, for one, am curious as to whether I’ll be able to run WebLogic Server on an iPhone…