You can read this first since I have been saying the same things for a while when it come to phones.
The battle lines are being drawn between RIM, the shell of Nokia, Android and Google. That’s it. I really don’t see HP being able to circle back to make a difference at this point. They can try but the stakes are getting high. Everyone always talked about RIM and their BBM lock-in – which is amazing for emerging markets and cuts out carriers out but now with iMessage Apple makes it very easy for users to switch to iOS from RIM. RIM should port to all devices to see if they can hold onto a lock of some sorts but not sure it would help.
My biggest takeaway from today’s keynote – which when I woke up I went to Apple.com, hit play, airplay and watched it on my bigscreen – was that Apple sees their vision as going deep for users who buy the vision. Meaning they want to give people who use Apple products more reasons to stay on Apple products. They also showed those who are not on Apple products that it all just got easier, cheaper and better. It’s that simple.
Gruber also nails it with this:
This is a fundamentally different vision for the coming decade than Google’s. In both cases, your data is in the cloud, and you can access it from anywhere with a network connection. But Google’s vision is about software you run in a web browser. Apple’s is about native apps you run on devices. Apple is as committed to native apps — on the desktop, tablet, and handheld — as it has ever been.
Google’s frame is the browser window. Apple’s frame is the screen. That’s what we’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now.
This is a fundamental difference to some extent but I also think Apple makes using the web better as well. I am not a fanboy but I am someone who values my time and my experiences dearly – Apple gives me the best option when it comes to my laptop, phone and tablets – now they added making the cloud work for me. I have not seen it yet but it looks like the music thing just got easier and the general syncing abilities look extremely useful.
Add to this the app updates that make using the cloud more seamless and it appears my day to day work/life routines get just a little less stressful. Sure – things like dropbox, evernote and many of my go to tools are still valuable, but now it looks like email, file syncing, revision history and many useful features that will make my hours on the laptop/phone/tablet better as well.
So in my opinion Apple is going deeper which given their market value seems to be working.
On the social/user identity front we all know that Apple done helping Google. Now it would seem Apple sees Facebook as being too cozy with MSFT so that only left Twitter as a partner for social/identity. So today Twitter was kingmade. Let’s see how that goes.
Lots of little companies were possible obliterated today as well – let’s monitor the fallout.