The evidence suggests Jobs has an inordinate share of the responsibility for Apple's resurgence in the marketplace of commerce as well as the marketplace of ideas. His success at forging the future out of the same materials everyone else starts with manifests itself in his products. To his fans (I am one), he's the Edward Tufte of digital design, sculpting objects of desire out of metals and plastics that somehow marry Art Deco with Frank Gehry, the classical with rock and roll, the pragmatic with the magical.
Nowhere does this resonate more than with the iPod. The machine is a marvel as much for what it doesn't do as for what it does. It's not a radio, yet it will supplant radio. It's not a phone or a PDA, but it conveys essential information in a form that both extends and enhances those devices. It's just a hard drive with a thin layer of software, but its success at what it does suggests what other devices will need to do.
For starters, the iPod platform needs a corollary device--a Wi-Fi/cellular bridge--a data siphon that pulls down RSS feeds at the highest available data rate. The bridge should be adaptive to the environment, hooking into the car antenna, power, and audio subsystems; the cell/PDA phone/e-mail device when you're roaming between your car and your destinations; and the broadband and DVR infrastructure in the office and home.
The dominant bottleneck in this digital communications fabric is battery life. By scoping the iPod to handle audio but not video, to docking instead of transmitting, to caching but not computing, the device's designers match its use cases to maximum utility. In each case, the device turns a liability (battery life) into an asset (shifting information to a time and place where it can be consumed most efficiently.)
Disruptive technologies such as VoIP have achieved critical mass when the apparent latency is reduced to an acceptable margin. Similarly, the iPod's real-time characteristics will emerge through the conjunction of converging technologies-such as Wi-Fi and mesh networks--and the user's availability for consuming the information.
Just as an 802.11b wireless network's 10-megabit ceiling is masked (and throttled down) by your broadband's slower download and even slower upload speeds, the iPod network could mask the latency of system by caching the end of a program beneath the playback of the first part of the file.
Tuning the presentation of information to the environment enhances the effectiveness of the transfer. Video in the car is not a feature for the driver, but a liability. Audio can be consumed either intently in TiVo-like time-shifting fashion--pausing the stream for incoming phone calls or instant messages from the boss--or casually while multitasking with e-mail or feed browsing.
The iPod platform shares important characteristics with the RSS platform. In effect, the device is an aggregation hub for time-critical information. As RSS aggregators begin to prioritize information according to the user's subscription patterns (attention.xml), the resulting caching of relevant data improves. Applying this triage to audio streams will improve the iPod's value proposition accordingly. My RSS aggregator, whether in the service cloud or cached intelligently between server and client, can prioritize iPod downloads based on event triggers aggregated from my RSS feed watch lists.
Once the economics of delivering text lowered the barrier of entry to (effectively) zero, the bottleneck shifted from publishing to getting the reader's attention. Similarly, the iPod has lowered the barrier to entry for broadcasting, allowing radio to shift from licensed to unlicensed spectrum. Getting the listener's attention comes next, with intelligent caching based on attention metadata orchestrating the route down the broadband pipe to the iPod platform.
Get well soon, Steve.
