Apple vs. World

Another day, another set of tech company feuds. Some of you may know that Apple, Google and the Federal Trade Commission are looking into whether anything is amiss when Google people and Apple people are on each others executive boards. Well, whoop-dee-doo. I’d argue they’re in different tech sectors altogether, but with the announcement of Google’s Chrome OS (i.e. Linux), and the fact that the second generation of Android-based smart-phones are on the horizon, maybe there is some credibility there.

I’m a big fan of strategy games, and I think the smartphone market is the perfect place to whet my appetite with a good bit of strategy talk. Palm and Google have said that each of their respective mobile-platform operating systems, WebOS and Android, are going to eventually support Adobe’s Flash standard. Great! Right?

Apple has continually refused to nudge on the Flash-support front, and, from the Apple point-of-view, I think this is a rather smart move. First off, Apple’s always going to tick off a few people that are really wanting to see Flash on the iPhone. However, as Apple continues to gain marketshare, up from 5% to 10% over the last year, I think we will notice companies think twice about putting any content in the public domain that cannot be accessed by the entire smartphone market. Translation: if Apple’s market share continues to climb, more and more websites are going to have to find a method of making their product or company available to their entire user-base, and that means stripping Flash from their websites and opting for XHTML (or HTML5 whenever that one comes to fruition).

So what does Apple gain from not supporting Flash? I think their goal would be to make obsolete the Flash standard. If every other smartphone has spent time to bring such functionality to market, and it becomes moot, that means Apple has that much more strength. Apple’s never been a company to be “open” and, in fact, remains quite closed. I think we’ll see that Apple, by slowing development and deployment of Flash-based applications, will erode the future need to become “open” on any alternative platform. We won’t see Apple cave to anyone if they can move this mountain (or rather, prevent it from moving). If users were really wanting Flash and started buying Palm’s Pre in place of the iPhone, I think we’d see the chink in Apple’s armor become bigger, but if users accept the lack of Flash functionality, the use of Flash-based applications will, in turn, dissapate.

The RIAA really wanted Apple to have DRM in the iTunes store, but after Apple got enough of the downloadable music market, look what happened… Suddenly the RIAA’s bargaining power was lost because Apple was strong enough to say that DRM wasn’t gonna fly with them anymore. Sure enough, if Apple gets to the point where businesses are purposefully not using Flash because they don’t want to alienate potential end-users then Apple has more strength down the road negotiating standards and formats. This is something that could be massively powerful for the company when they do support a specific technology…

Wireless... In My Pocket

I think it was Bill Gates that said something like…

“In the future, the internet will be in everyone’s pocket.”

I think the relization of his dream hasn’t come yet, but in doing research about some of the latest and greatest mobile internet solutions brought to us by top U.S. cell carriers such as Sprint, AT&T and Verizon, it is clear that the technology is starting to come to fruition.

Oddly enough, I think Sprint is going to be leading the pack with their 4G network. Rumors have been appearing of late about Verizon “fast-tracking” their 4G solution for another rumor of an Apple table PC. These rumors are getting a bit old, but as soon as I start really knocking the rumor-blogsters I’ll be aghast to find a press-release from Apple stating that the tablet is real.

Enough of hi-jacking my own blog post… Sprint has already rolled out the “Beta” version of it’s 4G network in Baltimore and has concrete plans for rollouts in many other cities Q1 2010. The thing that excites me about the 4G network is that there are:

• No Bandwidth Caps! All the major carriers currently limit you to 5 Gigabytes per month over their 3G networks.
• Fast speeds! Imagine in 5 more years what hi-speed wifi brought to us over the air will mean—fiber-to-the-home will be moot, we’ll have hi-speed internet traveling straight to your pocket!
• Competition! Eventually (maybe on the 5G networks) we will have a choice of having internet provided by any of Comcast, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon or whatever other cable/DSL companies that exist in the neighborhood. This is great for the consumers because as TV and telephony converge into the Internet we’ll finally have a TV/phone/internet solution that will be the equivalent of a modem and router that is mobile, fast and, most importantly, cheap!

This is bad news for some of the companies that have invested heavily in land-line infrastructure, such as Comcast and AT&T, because eventually I’d bet that most everything to the end-user will arrive from over-the-air. Well, that’s my two cents. I could be totally off course, but I know what companies I’m going to be investing in and watching over the next few years.