humantypo

Earlier this week The Steve unveiled Apple’s much-anticipated iPhone to the eager masses.  Only after the parade of corporate Big Wigs—who I often think are brought out solely to highlight Job’s speaking abilities in contrast—completed did the message of what was presented began to sink in. Sure, the iPhone is cool and perfect and everyone will want one and “using the phone will never be the same…,” yada, yada. yada. However, this is not as interesting as the subtext in the presentation and that is nature of the relationships that were presented as part of this announcement.

We are not talking about your garden variety public back scratching here. What was repeatedly pointed out is that the partnerships were created in a manner that openly acknowledged the discrete role member each played. What wasn’t presented was the iPhoneSearchMailServerKludge. Apple built a cool phone. It will only do phone/computer. Cingular has a voce/data network. It will only do network (OK, some email pushing, but lets call that higher order data networking for the sake of this argument). Yahoo has search and email. It will only do search and email. Google provides Internet gizmania, none of which will appear as a core part of the phone either.

Google and Yahoo together? Or as Schmidt said, “mergere without merging…” The only way this type of ménage a poisson can be explained is that a common object oriented design philosophy, the creation of a separation of concerns, has been transmogrified into a business construct.  In other words, unlike the usual conjoined corporate atrocity most public announcements of this size typically try to sell, each MegaExec stood up and effectively said, “we are here because this scene allows us to do what we do independently, but as part of something that is collectively useful.”

Forget the phone, this is news. For decades the IT world has been about monolithic domination. IBM kicked it off with the Big Iron and Microsoft ran off with the desktop. The result of this was a multitude of half hearted “standards” bodies, coalitions and technology cabals aimed at allowing the second tier players to compete. The vast majority of these efforts did little more than create financial craters where IT budgets used to be.

The Steve–through vision, thought harvesting or simple desperation–has just announced to the world that we are about to take a right turn very quickly. As is the case with well developed large scale applications, large scale corporate partnerships are going to begin to be defined by the interfaces presented.

Google cut a path into the into the technology wilderness embracing technologies that allow vendors, clients, customers to have a simple and clean, neigh… disinterested way to leverage each others resources without requiring intimate knowledge of each party. This sort of “Black Box” concept–the one that the XML/Web Services types have been crowing about for years–allowed Google to literally explode onto the scene and has unleashed a torrent of new thinking and creation on the internet. With these tools in hand has come a level of freedom that has been missing since the early PC days. Freedom for the technoratti anyway.

Heady stuff and exciting, but largely obscured from the view of the non-technical. Rejoice oh Ye of “The Rest of Us,” The Steve has just announced that you are about to be free… at least free enough to take advantage of Apple’s multi-hundred patent solution (but that is a story for another day…)