eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
LAS VEGAS—In back-to-back keynotes in San Francisco and Las Vegas, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates this week underlined the vanishing difference between consumer and enterprise markets. Convergence has been the password for at least the past two Comdex and CES events, and both Apple and Microsoft are rolling out products loosely based on the notion of a home information hub.
Microsofts chief software architect was uncharacteristically off-center on Wednesday here as he let Jay Leno and an MSN product manager entertain the theater-sized crowd at the Consumer Electronics Show keynote. He stumbled frequently as he winged it in a presentation revolving around “consumer” experiences in the home and on the move. Even the demos had a slap-dash feel to them.
However, dont mistake these surface messages for a lack of preparation. If anything, the technologies Microsoft is readying represent the culmination of years of planning, investment and R&D. But the results somehow fell flat—becoming only small flashes of brilliance buried in miles of cable and duct tape across Microsofts splayed divisions.
At MacWorld Expo San Francisco on Tuesday, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs made the best of a largely transitional set of announcements. The iPod Mini has some form-factor appeal, limited price incentive, and some momentum-building for Apples cross-platform iTunes-iPod strategy. But the headline was Apples move into the music creation space, via the companys new GarageBand sequencer and recorder add-in to its iLife software bundle.
Just as last years intro of Final Cut Pro Express was a warning shot across Adobe Systems Premiere Pros bow, GarageBand must send shivers down the spines of DigiDesign ProTools developers. Even if Apple stays in the so-called consumer space with GarageBand, ProTools IT priesthood and we-come-and-install service requirements are sure to dissipate over time.
But more significantly, GarageBand is an RIAA DRM-free zone. Not only can you use Apple-supplied samples, but you can also record your own audio and mix it in.
Take a look at hip-hop artists like Jay-Z or Eminem who employ both samples and Firesign Theatre-like comedy “skits” in their work. Perhaps GarageBand will trigger a new hybrid art form that resamples, reworks and otherwise regrooves elements of RIAA music into “private” personal CDs and AAC files that are transferred around the network outside of the usual DRM restrictions.
This movement is an attempt to sidestep the issue of copying by creating new material out of the fair-use infrastructure popularized by satire and viral marketing. Certainly, as these files become more widely circulated, the publishing and sample-owning corporations will extract their pound of flesh. But by then the growing network of consumer producers will have momentum and that immutable bargaining chip—hits—on their side.
Next page: The next Beatles? Convergence comes to the music business.
The next Beatles
? Convergence comes to music biz”>
The GarageBand move is more than a little reminiscent of the arc the Beatles rode in the 60s. Or what the Dean campaign appears to be leveraging in the political world. Its 40 years later, and the Beatles still havent faded from the scene—nor has their influence and thought leadership in style, humor, politics and you name it.
The Fab Four (with George Martins assistance) broke the back of the record businesss lock on the creative process of the day. They wrote, performed, recorded, filmed and marketed their material—and leveraged each new wave of success to bootstrap themselves into more and more control over each stage of the business process.
At CES, Gates showed what he hopes is an iPod killer, the Portable Media Center. It is only a prototype, but a raft of hardware partners promise to deliver products in the second half of the year. But Microsofts DRM model tends to limit (rather than inspire) the kind of next-gen content made possible by the iPod platform of tools and add-ons.
The convergence of consumer and enterprise technologies has reached the intersection point: the individual. Whether its digital video recorders, or personal media devices, or RSS information routers, or hub-and-spoke device architectures, the unifying principle is time management. As these devices, services and standards blur the boundaries of work and play, family and collaborative group, and office and virtual shared space, time-slicing becomes paramount.
Thus the consumer platform becomes the vehicle for a technology to reach critical mass in the market, and with its commodity pricing allowing business applications and processes to climb on board.
For example, the camera phone stimulates image creation, fostering ubiquity of format and incenting services to move the images around the network. As quality matures, so too do delivery systems, hosted services and packaged application-integration scenarios.
Gates understands the need for synchronizing personal and professional data. On Wednesday, he demoed an MSN Premium feature that connects Hotmail and corporate Exchange accounts.
But what users want is a common schema across all that data, combined with presence and location information from an IM stream, and a core engine that emits notifications and RSS streams to trusted subscribers.
Users are converged. Jobs may see it. Gates may not.
Discuss This in the eWEEK Forum
eWEEK.com Messaging & Collaboration Center Editor Steve Gillmor can be reached at [email protected].