The Silent Booming Voice

A while back I posted some of my thoughts on the MacWorld keynote given by Steve Jobs last month. At that point I was already resigned to buying an Apple TV, which I did last weekend. Although I’m still waiting for the big update to the library titles (supposedly 1,000+ movies by month end) I was not disappointed. It is really cool to be able to browse through movies – including HD movies – rent with a button press and start watching within as little as 30 seconds.

I have always disliked the process of renting movies at a place like Blockbuster, and for whatever reason Netflix didn’t do it for me either. I think that movies are a pure impulse thing for me and it’s hard to beat a big, interactive video-on-demand library to scratch that itch. But that’s not all of course. Using your TV and a remote to listen to your music and your Podcasts while your favorite pictures run on a screen saver is great too, and surfing YouTube on your TV is surprisingly entertaining. I haven’t tried renting TV shows yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

This all brings me to the point of some commentary I committed to make previously on the under-rated nature of what Jobs announced without announcing at MacWorld last month. The simultaneous release of the Time Capsule, the MacBook Air, and movie rentals for iTunes paints a a not-so-subtle picture of the future of home computing and home entertainment being realized before our very eyes. Here’s what Jobs said between the lines last month:

1. Forget the wires. Apple’s implementations of 802.11 wireless technology have been great for some time, but with the introduction of the Time Capsule, the “diskless” MacBook Air and streaming HD to your television over your Wi-Fi network, Apple has made it crystal clear that the need for wired connections is quickly disappearing even from the most demanding applications. This is portentous. We easily forget just how “placeless” computing became as a result of Wi-Fi hotspots being everywhere. Cutting all of the cords at home – not just to your laptop but to everything else – will be just as big a deal over time.
2. Forget the data. Apple has done a very, very smart thing by focusing on brain-dead simple automatic backup as a killer application for home computing. With all of your pictures, music, movies, documents etc. on an Apple platform at home you can be sure that catastrophic data loss would have become a huge customer satisfaction issue over time without it. Since the dawn of the PC people have mostly accepted data loss disasters as being their fault, but that day is drawing to a close. As more and more computing is done in the cloud on data center platforms like Google Apps and others, the idea that you might “lose” your data will become as unacceptable to customers as the notion of the bank “losing” your money. Data centers just don’t lose your data. Neither should your home computing platform. With the Time Capsule providing a totally wireless means of backing up everything you own automatically, this obstacle to worry-free computing has been well and thoroughly eliminated. This is a very shrewd move that’s going to pay big dividends for Apple over time. I have suffered big data loss at home before. Almost all of the pictures of my trip to Disney World with my daughter when she was 4 years old, for example. Everybody’s been there. Now everybody can avoid it with zero effort. Building the capability into the device that also provides your home computing and entertainment equipment their connectivity to the Internet and each other a la the Time Capsule is genius. See “Forget the Wires” above.
3. Forget the disks. Neither the MacBook air nor the updated Apple TV has an optical drive. “So what?” you say. Here’s what. Long ago when the coal we burn for electricity was being formed in dinosaur infested swamps computing was in the Document Era. Floppy eating leviathans like PowerPoint files were competing for 1,440KB file spaces with the more nimble but still gigantic Excel and Word documents. Multimedia? Are you kidding? Even grainy pictures and cartoonish graphics on a PC were thrilling, and they usually came pre-installed. The first laptop PC that shipped without a built-in floppy disk drive sent a clear signal that networks were getting too fast, email getting too prevalent and files getting too big for removable media to remain important to business users over the long haul. The same signal is now being sent to the home user, who has always been more interested in gigabyte gobbling multimedia than even the most hip business user. What the new suite of Apple products now says to the home user is that media on disks is becoming the exception, not the rule. Just like you wouldn’t think of burning an Excel spreadsheet to a DVD, you’ll one year soon quit thinking of fuddling with any sort of disk to watch a movie, share pictures, etc. Seriously. It didn’t make a lot of noise but a very big object just slammed into the Iron Triangle of consumer electronics manufacturers, Hollywood studios and the home entertainment center. While Big Media was concluding a war of attrition over consumers with Blue Ray and HD-DVD, Apple told the most premium group of buyers out there that it doesn’t matter who wins. Sure, the new disk formats give even more spectacular quality in movie viewing, but who cares? Most people haven’t even adjusted to HD yet, and with an Apple TV selling for $229 to rent HD content on demand and Blue Ray players selling for twice that and coming with all the baggage of dealing with disks, do we really think that this will be much of a competition over time? Apple TV is not the end of the diskless evolution by any means, but it signals the beginning of the end for the disk in the entertainment center.
4. Forget the Networks. Really. Music labels are the failing Western Empire of Rome. The barbarians breached the gates when Napster did its damage and iTunes kept them solvent at the cost of choosing their future. The Eastern Empire of television and movie distribution has continued to thrive behind the protective walls of Bandwidth Byzantium, but it too is starting to decline. TiVo was troubling, but Apple TV is now good enough to disconnect an avid user from broadcast anything.

Obscured among the details of several product announcements, Apple has sent a message which has to be rattling the guardians of business models from New York to Tokyo. In a silent, booming voice Apple has told the consumer that they are boss. That the distribution empires will have less and less power to restrict their choices of what, how, where and when over time. That home computing and entertainment have finally merged. That all of this freedom doesn’t have to come at the cost of even more catastrophic data losses when a piece of hardware fails.

Starting now.