Back when I was youthful, unmarried, broke and debt-free, my first techno-love was an Apple SE-30 to which, in the early 90s, I attached a full-page grey-scale Epsom monitor.
WordPerfect had been changing my documents for years. So I went cold turkey on PCs and rushed into my affair with Word-for-Mac's WYSIWYG features as though Angelina Jolie had just phoned and left her number.
Ever since that first involvement with Apple, I've been following and puzzling over Steve Jobs without really being able to pin him down psychically.
Last week, it finally came to me... Jobs is IT's Phil Jackson.
The thought popped up when I took my attention off my boy's basketball game to fumble with the playwheel of a borrowed iPod. A ball sailed out of the blue and thunked me in the left earbud shaking loose a chain of free associations. Shitty rebound. Broken earbud. Pierced eardrums. Pierced ears. Dennis Rodman. Chicago Bulls. Phil Jackson. Then...
Steve Jobs!
It's perfect when you think of it, and it explains so much. If you see Steve Jobs as a Phil Jackson-style coach, there's a remarkable consistency to the curve of Apple's development since the days of Steve Wozniak. Of course like Michael Jordan, iWoz is out of the picture now, and Steve has moved on to bringing the best out of his Kobe Bryant, a guy called Anthony Michael Faddell.
It was Faddell who designed the guts of Apple's iPod. It was probably also Faddell who realized that Apple would make much more money if the iPod was a disposable device. The best Apple has to offer these days is the lethal combination of aTV and the iPhone, and together they're Tony's equivalent of shooting 60 points a game.
Let me tell you why.
At this year's International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the biggest electronics companies massed for the opening battle in the DVD 'wars,' a contest to win market dominance for a new DVD disk format. (The sides in this war, were clustered around Sony's Blu-Ray or Toshiba's HD-DVD format).
Then somehow, the war stalled... LG revealed a hybrid player (the Super Multi Blue) accommodating both disk formats and Warner Home Video announced its impending release of double formatted DVD disks that let you play new videos on any machine you choose.
What happened?
Well, somebody finally noticed that video had followed music and that DVDs -- actually any kind of disks -- are now old technology. By December of 2006 it was widely known that the DVD industry's growth had shrunk to 5% in 2006 from 9% in 2005.
CES took place in January 2007. As fast as you can say 'planned obsolescence' the video entertainment industry nodded its heads collectively and moved to Internet downloads. No time for a Beta-VHS stye format war. In their decline disks will still be with us for a few more years, but they are already passé.
To cinch this, Sony unveiled its Bravia internet video link at the same CES show. As their press release said, this device allows "new televisions to access free Internet video content..."
The Bravia appeared days before Jobs debuted a similar device -- Apple TV or aTV -- at the Macworld Expo where the world also learned about the coming (on June 15th) iPhone. Both Apple devices accommodate Internet video downloads, a technology that hasn't quite matured yet, but one that is now coming on strong.
In the months since the iPhone announcement, the biggest DVD retail outlet, Wal-Mart, has begun its shift to Internet movie downloads, and, after exploring the purchase of a download company called MovieLink, Blockbuster too has announced it will enter the digital download market before the end of the year.
Okay, so what does this have to do with iPhone?
Well, Apple is clever. Apple sees all. In addition to the obsolescence of DVDs, other technologies are also rapidly going the way of the buffalo. Of these, home-based TVs and plain old (wired) telephone service (or POTs) have a 90-100% market penetration, and, in the near future, mobiles devices will stop acting as supplementary devices to both of these old school technologies and start replacing them wholesale.
Cell phones already completely replace POTs for the youngest consumers. Young people simply don't subscribe to wired phones anymore. In a year or so, mobile TVs will join them in replacing the living room set for a generation raised on handheld screen-devices like GameBoys.
The good news for Apple is that every American needs a phone and a TV. So although Apple will only say that they expect to sell 10 million iPhones in 2008, their consumer-base for handheld devices -- the 'third' screen that cutting-edge marketers now drool over -- might well e-x-p-a-n-d from 48 million American iPods currently in circulation to as many as 350 million units, each selling at either $499 for a 4GB model or $599 for the 8GB. The new TV market will also get a big nudge in 2009 when all current, working analog TVs in America -- yes, all 300, 000, 000 of them -- become garbage as the country shifts over to digital.
-- Are we at 60 points yet? I thought so.
So like I say: Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant; Steve Jobs and Tony Faddell.
Now, if only they could hurry up in making these toys less toxic and easier to recycle. Jobs is promising to do this by 2010, but that's 3 years, and a lot of e-waste away... The sooner Apple greens itself the sooner we can all feel better about throwing out our old, lead filled boob-tube, and replacing it with a cool new iPhone. Once again, Apple could lead the way...
-- But meanwhile Steve, thanks for listening.