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Steve Gillmor on iPhonomics
I love talking to Steve Gillmor because he expands my world view several notches each time. I spent a whole afternoon at the Internet Identity Workshop with him and enjoyed every minute of it. He put up a post yesterday called iPhonomics that says that “[i]n a world post-iPhone where everything changes, battery life becomes the arbiter of usage.”
The iPhone will kill the Blackberry. Apple TV will kill the DVR. In Steve’s view, the iPhone is center-stage—everything else is a peripheral to it. The secret to understanding this is to realize that more and more, text, images, audio, and video are “cached across the surface area of my environment: laptop, AppleTV, iPhone,” in Steve’s words.
Of course Gears, Google’s project to enable offline Web applications is a key component here—it’s not just data, but applications that are ultimately networked, but can function apart from their home environment.
iTunes is a microcasm of this effect. Your iPod is just a cache for what in iTunes, which is just a cache for what’s on your shelf or at the iTunes Music Store. The iPhone extends that across multiple modalites.
Dan Farber, extends the battery life riff, suggesting that “with every purchase of a [Starbucks] double latte with soy milk you get access to a charging station.” It used to be that free Wi-Fi was a draw, but with mobile Internet cards and devices—like the iPhone—raw power is the thing.
Posted by windley on June 6, 2007 8:21 PM
Comment from Michael Neale at June 6, 2007 11:17 PM
No way. Thats so wrong: "Soy" in coffee? seriously, if you can't or don't want to have milk, learn to love a nicely made black coffee or espresso. Not Soy ! NOOOOOOOO.
Comment from Michael Neale at June 6, 2007 11:52 PM
Actually on reading the article in more detail, I think he is right, *in theory*.
But I don't think anyone really has seen the real bandwidth crunch coming at us. We have been getting a free ride from all the freely available bandwidth left over from the crazy 1999/2000 spending era, but its now being used up (exponentially) with no internet wide expansion (google are probably aware of it and doing their best).
However, my ISP, and others, are for the first time having to put up their prices for the high end users (mostly due to video, they claim). They just can't keep up.
Another reason why people aren't seeing this is cause its probably less of a problem in the US then the rest of the world.
But as the rest of the world is increasingly important economically to the internet, this is a problem.
It won't stop the revolution, but it may slow it down, a lot. So much so people might not realise it is happening at all.
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