As I type this, there are less than 36 hours to go before the open­ing keynote of Apple’s 2009 World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence. The inter­nets are buzzing with spec­u­la­tion as to what we are going to see. I’ve read all the rumors, spec­u­la­tion and pre­dic­tions, and run them through my sophis­ti­cated bull­shit detec­tor, and applied my years of expe­ri­ence ana­lyz­ing the mobile indus­try to suss out what I think we’re actu­ally going to see. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. But I really don’t think it’s likely.

(and for what it’s worth, I think this is not too far from how it might go down)

I don’t think Apple intended for this to be a release con­fer­ence. I think even as recently as a month ago, they expected to have Phil Schiller make some announce­ments about iPhone OS 3.0 and Snow Leop­ard, and maybe announce the third gen­er­a­tion iPhone, which I think was intended to be called the iPhone HD. The actual release of the 3.0 firmware and the new iPhone would be in mid-​July.

The events of May and the first week of June have, I believe, changed Apple’s plans, and forced them to accel­er­ate their time table. Microsoft’s announce­ment of the Zune HD and the incred­i­ble media hype sur­round­ing the release of the Palm Pre, not to men­tion Palm’s sur­prise announce­ment that the Pre accom­plishes media sync by pre­tend­ing to be an iPod and using Apple’s own iTunes soft­ware, has, shall we say, fired the com­pet­i­tive flames within Apple’s Tim Cook, Phil Schiller and yes, Steve Jobs.

Check your iTunes instal­la­tion. Does it say it will check for the next update on June 8? Even if you just installed 8.2? That’s because it knows some­thing we don’t, namely that the new iTunes firmware will be avail­able right after the keynote, rather than in July. If you have a jail­bro­ken iPhone, restore it now, because you’ll need a clean instal­la­tion to upgrade on Mon­day. The 3.0 firmware will be pretty much what we saw in beta 5, with no big new fea­tures like back­ground processes. AT&T will offer to add unlim­ited teth­er­ing for your lap­top to your account for an addi­tional $30 a month.

More than that, Schiller (and maybe Jobs) will unveil the new iPhone Video, a name which has already shown up in some behind the scenes code. This will be very sim­i­lar to the iPhone 3G in size and shape, but will have a slightly dif­fer­ent face. It will have a 320×570, 16×9 aspect screen. push­ing the ear­piece grill fur­ther towards the top of the device. In many ways it will look like a “stealth” 3G, with a gun­metal bezel and a matte fin­ish black back. The front glass will con­ceal a VGA front fac­ing video cam­era for iChat to go along with the 3.2 MP aut­o­fo­cus cam­era on the back.

The iPhone Video will be avail­able imme­di­ately via Apple.com, and at Apple stores either Mon­day or Tues­day. Not sure when AT&T retail out­lets will get it. It will come in three capac­i­ties: 8GB for $99 with a two year con­tract, 16GB for $199 and 32GB for $299.

That’s a lot, and I think they’ll stop there. I don’t expect them to announce the iTablet or iPad or what­ever they call the Kindle-​sized iPod Touch we all sus­pect them to be work­ing on. Steve’s a show­man and he knows the first rule of show­man­ship: always leave them want­ing more. We’ll hear a lit­tle about Snow Leop­ard in the open­ing com­ments, which I expect to be released sooner rather than later, prob­a­bly late July or August. And of course, judg­ing by the ban­ners already hang­ing at WWDC, they’ll be play­ing up the App Store, and will show­case a few big name appli­ca­tions that take advan­tage of fea­tures exclu­sive to 3.0. Look for Doc­u­ments to Go and Bee­jive to fig­ure prominently.

Am I off base? We have 36 hours to find out. Josh Curry and I are plan­ning to record our return to Max­i­mum Geek Mon­day night, so be sure to check in for our analy­sis and other tech news hijinks.

Palm has trou­ble, right here in River City. Apple’s COO and interim CEO said on their recent earn­ings call that they would aggres­sively defend their intel­lec­tual prop­erty. He didn’t call out the Palm Pre by name, but the sub­text was there.

Palm needs to be ready for this. Apple files for every patent they can think of, and they believe they have defend­able patents on mul­ti­touch and using a prox­im­ity sen­sor on a smart­phone to turn off the screen (which is why you don’t see that fea­ture on HTC devices). Apple also has lots of land sharks, I mean lawyers, and a lot more cash than Palm to han­dle legal fees.

I know Ruben­stein saw this com­ing, he’s too smart to have missed it and he knows well how his old com­pany oper­ates. So he imple­mented those two fea­tures on the Pre know­ing Apple would come after him. Why? What does he know that we don’t?

It’s about time some­thing went Palm’s way. And now, sud­denly, every­thing seems to be going Palm’s way. They blew every­one away at CES, are get­ting tons of pos­i­tive press in the national media, and now, their biggest rival in the mobile space looks primed to falter.

I don’t think any­one at Palm was root­ing for Jobs to step down for health rea­sons, but the sit­u­a­tion is what it is. Cur­rently the mobile mar­ket is Apple’s to lose, but their hold is a lot more ten­u­ous than it ini­tially appears. No one has a lock on the still grow­ing mobile mar­ket, no one has estab­lished numer­i­cal dom­i­nance, and Apple’s early lead in a field that has only just recently pen­e­trated the con­scious­ness of “nor­mal” con­sumers could eas­ily repeat their early lead in per­sonal com­put­ing, and we see how that turned out.

And now, Apple is los­ing their rud­der. Steve Jobs, the “tyrant with excep­tional taste” that has dri­ven Apple in all their suc­cess­ful years, is tak­ing an indef­i­nite leave of absence from the com­pany. He says he’ll be back by sum­mer, but given how much he’s pub­li­cally under­es­ti­mated his health prob­lems already, many ana­lysts think this is really the end of the Jobs era and he won’t be com­ing back, ever. As 2009 wears on, Tim Cook will offi­cially lead the com­pany he’s been de facto lead­ing for a while now.

But there will be a dif­fer­ence. Cook may have kept the trains run­ning on time, but Jobs was the vision­ary. Jobs was the cre­ative force behind Apple’s big moves. With­out him, Apple will have a ten­dency to coast, to con­tinue doing what they know already works and stop inno­vat­ing. (It’s worth not­ing that the inter­nal force at Apple really respon­si­ble for two of their big Jobs 2.0 inno­va­tions, the first iMac and the iPod, is Palm’s Jon Rubenstein.)

So Palm may have an oppor­tu­nity here to swipe smart­phone dom­i­nance out from under a sleep­ing Apple. If the Pre really is every­thing peo­ple like about the iPhone and fixes every­thing peo­ple don’t like about the iPhone, Palm really could have the tri­fecta of industry-​defining devices (Pilot, Treo, Pre) and take the lead as the com­pany every­one else wants to beat. Before CES, I wouldn’t have bet that Palm could exe­cute well enough to take advan­tage of that oppor­tu­nity, but now I’m not so sure. Ed Colligan’s expe­ri­ence with mobile and the cell phone mar­ket com­bined with Jon Rubenstein’s knack for inno­va­tion and design are prov­ing a tough com­bi­na­tion to beat.

There are shap­ing up to be four big ecosys­tems in com­put­ing. As all four diver­sify into the cat­e­gories below, I’m notic­ing that a lot of users are stan­dard­iz­ing on using every­thing from a sin­gle ven­dor, a silo­ing of the mar­ket rather than embrac­ing vari­ety. You can do nearly every­thing you need to do with offer­ings from any one of them, and they tend to work bet­ter if you don’t mix and match. But is it really pos­si­ble to put all your eggs in one basket?

Microsoft

Microsoft has, by far, the best selec­tion of the bunch, with every sin­gle cat­e­gory I could think of cov­ered. They have gone out of their way to pro­vide solu­tions for the office, liv­ing room and on the go. Some of the options here aren’t best-​in-​class (though I’d say the Zune is bet­ter than the iPod clas­sic and IE 8 can give Fire­fox and Chrome a run for their money if you give it chance), but they all work. And more impor­tantly, they all work together. If you use the soft­ware and ser­vices listed above, they inter­op­er­ate cleanly and effi­ciently, exactly the way con­ven­tional wis­dom says Microsoft doesn’t do. The biggest prob­lem Microsoft has is the snarky haters who have their minds made up and won’t give them a break.

Google

Google has a lot of gaps in their ecosys­tem offer­ings, but they make up for it with even bet­ter inte­gra­tion than Microsoft. Once you start using one Google prod­uct (Gmail seems to be the most pop­u­lar “gate­way drug” aside from search itself), it’s all too easy to start using the rest. But where Google wins in inter­op­er­abil­ity, they lose in power. Google Docs, for exam­ple, is fine for light use, but most users wouldn’t think of using it to com­pletely replace a more pow­er­ful desk­top office suite. Google also lacks an OS and vir­tu­ally any enter­tain­ment options. Even Google’s Android plat­form offers only the most basic media playback.

Apple

For Apple, inter­op­er­abil­ity is king, but it comes at the cost of choice. Apple’s offer­ings work seam­lessly together, often appear­ing to be one organic sys­tem, but heaven help you if you need to replace one of them because it doesn’t entirely meet your needs. Their gaps are fairly minor, and the lock-​in pro­vided by iTunes over portable media and home the­ater offer­ings keeps a lot of users in their camp.

Linux/​Open Source

The open source route is for the free spir­its out there who so don’t want to be in thrall to one com­pany that they’re will­ing to cob­ble together every­thing them­selves, even when it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily even try to work together. Think of these as the polar oppo­sites to the Apple users. A lot of this stuff is build your own, but at least most of it doesn’t require you to com­pile it your­self any­more. It’s also so frag­mented between dif­fer­ent Linux dis­tros (KDE and Gnome both have their own photo man­agers, and there are oth­ers as well if you don’t like those), that any kind of consensus-​based inter­op­er­abil­ity is unlikely.

Con­clu­sions, my ecosystem

I tried to stay within a sin­gle ecosys­tem, and my life would prob­a­bly be eas­ier if I did. But because of the var­i­ous gaps or miss­ing func­tion­al­ity, I’ve been forced to mix and match a bit, fully know­ing that that would be up to me to find my own ways to makes the pieces interoperate.

Most of my ecosys­tem is based on Microsoft offer­ings, but I’ve swapped out a bit from the Google and Open Source stacks where appro­pri­ate. Fire­fox per­forms bet­ter on my net­book than IE 8, and the IE Tab plu­gin allows me to use the IE ren­der­ing engine when I need it. Google Talk is lighter and less noisy than Live Mes­sen­ger, and I find Google’s search results a lit­tle bit more reli­able than Live Search’s. My blog­ging solu­tion is also a three-​headed mon­ster with some quick posts done in Live Writer but most of my blog­ging done in OneNote for early drafts, and then Word for post­ing. I’ve also bypassed Zune in favor of Win­dows Media Player and my Win­dows Mobile smart­phone, but I know peo­ple that use both.

What are your choices? Do you stick mostly to a sin­gle ven­dor, or do you play the field?

I remem­ber vividly read­ing the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of great Hous­ton Rock­ets cen­ter Hakeem Ola­juwan. He recounted how the Rock­ets orga­ni­za­tion passed on sev­eral trades they could have made in the late 1980s and early 90s that would have given the Rock­ets the fol­low­ing rook­ies devel­op­ing together as a team:

• Hakeem at center
• Karl Mal­one at power forward
• Clyde Drexler at small forward
• Michael Jor­dan at shoot­ing guard

You could have added my grand­mother at point guard and still had team that would have put the clas­sic Lak­ers and Celtics dynas­ties to shame. But the Rock­ets didn’t pull the trig­ger on those trades and the rest is history.

Now we find out that some­thing sim­i­lar went down 11 years ago in the mobile tech­nol­ogy indus­try. Accord­ing to Jean-​Louis Gassee, for­merly of Be and run­ner up to revive Apple after John Scully’s reign (a job he lost to Steve Jobs):

A per­haps lit­tle known fact: in the Sum­mer of 1997, Steve Jobs called Eric Ben­hamou, 3Com’s CEO (the com­pany owned Palm). “Give me the Palm and come and join my Board of Direc­tors. Only Apple can make Palm a true con­sumer brand.” Noth­ing hap­pened. Apple’s foray into the prod­uct seg­ment had to wait ten more years.

http://www.mondaynote.com/2008/10/26/android-first-impressions/

As it turns out, Jobs’s arro­gance was, as it often is, mis­placed. Palm was able to become a potent con­sumer brand on their own, hav­ing a mar­ket val­u­a­tion at the peak of the dot­com bub­ble higher than Gen­eral Motors. But even so, imag­ine what Apple, work­ing with all the Palmies for­merly of Apple now brought back into the fold, could have done with the suc­ces­sors to the Palm Pilot. With a ready-​made Apple-​branded replace­ment for John Scully’s ill-​fated New­ton, Apple could have been a leader in hand­held com­put­ing for the last decade, lead­ing to devices like the iPhone and iPod touch years sooner. I’m no fan of Apple, but I have to mar­vel at what might have been.

The big news out of Cuper­tino today was more of the same. While a lot of the tech press, yours truly included, expected Apple to announce a net­book (albeit a pricey one at $800), what we got was more 13 and 15 inch Mac­books that look pretty much like the ones already on the mar­ket. The old plas­tic Mac­book dropped in price to “under a thou­sand dol­lars” (that would be $999) but it’s still 13 inches and over four pounds. Pass.

When asked why Apple wasn’t releas­ing a net­book in the Q&A, Jobs replied that net­books are still a “nascent” mar­ket and Apple doesn’t do that. That’s a may be, but that also means that Apple is glee­fully ignor­ing 37% of the mar­ket, which, oh, by the way, just hap­pens to be the only part that’s actu­ally grow­ing.

Given that it’s pretty easy to put OS X on a net­book if you really want to, maybe this is for the best. Let Apple keep their over­priced shiny to them­selves, and the next gen­er­a­tion of mobile com­put­ing will just move on with­out them.