Jobs to PC: ‘You?re Busted!’ And Other Notes From The OS Wars
- By Steven Levy
- June 7, 2011 |
- 9:29 am |
- Categories: Cool Apps, The Cloud
Steve Jobs?s return to the stage yesterday at Apple?s World Wide Developer?s Conference focused on software. Hardware provides Apple?s brains and sinew, he told us, while software is its soul.
Though there were three chapters to the story he spun, the narrative was coherent. Apple was staking its claim in the great Operating System wars in the second decade of this century. Passing through the flak smoke of competitive visions ? from Google and Microsoft, natch ? Jobs was like a deft bombardier tweaking the flight path before releasing his payload, the Apple Way of modern computing.
(Excuse the horn-blowing, but this pretty much conforms to the outline of the near feature in my Wired cover story that came on the heels of the original iPad announcement in early 2010. Consider this blog post as an update.)
Chapter one is Lion, the latest version of OS X. The mane point (sorry) of this chapter is that the Macintosh is adopting more traits of its iOS cousins. Lion supports more multi-touch gestures. Lion has the app store built in. And so on.
Chapter two is the iOS 5, the system upgrade for iPad, iPhone and the iPod Touch. The features Apple unveiled yesterday imbue these devices with capabilities previously available only on PC?s. With iOS 5, you can edit photos, create more complex mail documents, etc. This accelerates the trend of amazingly powerful apps (Garage Band being the best example) on the iPad.
So while the Mac is morphing into the iPad, the iPad is stepping up to perform tasks that you once reserved for your Mac or PC.
The most telling feature in this transformation is the revelation (greeted with huge applause from the developers in the crowd) that Apple was untethering the iOS devices from the PC. In my Wired article, I had joked that Apple envisioned the day when the main use for your PC is syncing with your iPad. But now Jobs has topped that. Beginning with iOS 5 users won?t need a PC to set up, synch, or update their iPads or iPhones. Jobs even said that he was ?demoting? the PC to ?just another device.? Talk about a comedown. It?s like busting Jack Welch to a middle manager!
Chapter three is the new iCloud. In this initial rev, iCloud is focused less on full-scale ?cloud computing? (moving the performance of the apps themselves to the Web) than on synching a number of devices with one?s personal corpus of data ? which resides in Apple?s data center. Apple, he claimed, would achieve success in this model where others have failed. (The most striking example is Microsoft?s Live Mesh system, which you probably never heard of. In that light, a lot of iCloud?s concepts look straight outta Redmond.) Why will Apple triumph? Because, says Mr. Jobs, ?it just works.?
Jobs himself took pains to underline the significance of iCloud in the ascension of the new, pad-and-phone-oriented Post PC paradigm. iCloud, he said, marks the completion of a long quest to liberate the computer from local files and all the desktop mishigas involved. (In case you missed it, In the press release he called this the release?s ?paramount feature.?) The iPad does away with folders and file icons, but has not offered an alternative means of organizing documents. With the ability to store documents in the cloud, he crowed, the missing piece of the iPad will finally be filled in. (Of course, until now Jobs had never admitted that the piece had been missing. Classic Steve.)
So where does this leave Apple?s competitors, particularly Google? Google?s cloud embrace is still more radical than Apple?s. As of now, Apple regards the cloud as a hub; Google?s Chrome OS treats the cloud as the computer itself. The Chromebooks coming out later this year basically run a superfast browser, with the assumption that Web-based apps and services will provide all you need. (As I noted in my test of the Chrome OS, Google is designing a platform for a high-speed connected infrastructure that?s not here yet.) By comparison, Apple?s cloud is timid: it?s about storage and synching as opposed to a streaming, real-time, extension to your actual machine. At Apple, the action is not on the Web, but in the apps.
Complicating Google?s plans, though, is the fact that it has a second operating system, its Android mobile system. Android is more like iOS is that it runs client apps ? and this approach puts it at odds with its corporate, pure-Web stablemate. At the recent Google i/o conference, the dissonance between the two systems was apparent. Each day of the event featured a keynote devoted to one system followed by a press briefing where each team leader (Android?s Andy Rubin and Chrome?s Sundar Pichai) unconvincingly tried to explain why the systems weren?t competitive. Co-founder Sergey Brin addressed the question by saying that owning two promising OS?s was a problem that most companies would love to face.
And what about Microsoft? Last week at the D9 conference, Windows czar Steven Sinofsky allowed us a glimpse of Windows 8. Just as the Mac OS borrows from the iPhone and iPad, Win 8 adopts the flashy interface of Microsoft?s praiseworthy (but not yet commercially proven) Win 7 phone OS. It looks like a bold break from the past. But Sinofsky also explained that the interface will sit on top of a full version of old-style Windows. (I wonder how long the Windows 8 tablet will take to boot up.) ?Post PC? is apparently still a taboo concept at Microsoft.
But whether Microsoft admits it or not, we?ve been Post PC for years now. Our problem has been that these new devices haven?t yet morphed into tools that are every bit as capable as the one they?re replacing. At WWDC, Steve Jobs took moved us closer to filling that gap. Considering Apple?s unbelievable momentum, you have to believe that that his users will follow.
Steven Levy's deep dive into Google, In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works And Shapes Our Lives, will be published in April. Steven also blogs at StevenLevy.comFollow @stevenjayl on Twitter.
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