> Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs shared a secret with his audience at a technology conference outside Los Angeles Tuesday: The idea for the iPad came before the iPhone. Those of us who follow Apple as closely as I do wouldn’t consider this a secret. It’s fairly obvious, once you start using the iPad, that much of the iPhone OS was designed with the bigger form factor of the iPad in mind. Or, at the very least, most of the essential components of the user experience are not tied to a specific form factor. That’s what makes the iPhone OS so malleable.

Before I had ever used an iPad, I wouldn’t have guessed just how right for a tablet the iPhone OS is. But now that I’ve seen it in action, I think with a few refinements it will become far more powerful and game-changing than we even now realize.

I haven’t used Android enough to make a value judgement on this, but I suspect that since Android was originally conceived as a Windows Mobile OS killer and not a foundation for a whole new paradigm in portable computing, Google is going to have a rougher time making that transition from phone to tablet. They are just now adding true multi-touch input capabilities, years after the initial release. Which means multi-touch will always be an add-on for Android, whereas it’s the foundation of iPhone OS.

Clearly, Microsoft’s notion that you can slap Windows on a tablet, give users a pen, and change the world was a complete failure. Scaling down a giant beast proved to be unwise. I’m not so sure scaling UP Android will necessarily work better. But I think there’s at least a better chance of that working in the long term.

> In the past, Google has provided fairly good support for accessibility with screen readers, but that reputation has begun to slip in recent years, as the Internet giant has expanded its offerings and let its accessibility efforts slip. > > The fact that the rendering engine Google is using offers native support for OS X accessibility, and Google either broke, disabled, or chose to remove that support, does not bode well for the future of accessibility in other Google products, where ensuring access will be inherently more difficult. That first part of the quote is the key here. It’s not that Google doesn’t care about the blind, deaf, etc. It’s that Google has completely lost focus, and is taking on a lot more than it can chew in order to compete with Apple.

Rather than building a few great products, Google is instead throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. As I’ve said many times before, it’s more of a Microsoft strategy than an Apple strategy. And it’s a poor move, in my opinion. Because Microsoft’s strategy has never worked, though it’s hard to tell when Microsoft’s monopoly cash cow allows it to keep spending R&D money like a drunken sailor. Google also has a nice cash cow in Search, but it risks squandering its dominance in that market in order to try and get into all these other things.

If you stop looking at the overall bottom line of the company, and just look at which individual products actually turn a profit, Microsoft and Google start looking a lot worse. Whereas you can literally look at ANY Apple product or service and see that it at least clears some sort of profit. Nothing Apple does is a loss leader, or a product that promises to make money somewhere in the distant future. That’s pretty impressive.

> Rather than using a secure browser and creating corporate—or firewall—policies to block unwanted time-wasting sites, companies are depending on the browser’s increasing obsolescence to render the sites unusable. This allows IT managers to keep users out of [YouTube](http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/youtube-to-kill-ie6-support-on-march-13.ars) without having to actually confront the users they are supposed to be supporting; it’s the *sites’* fault that Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t work, not the IT department’s fault for foisting that legacy browser on its users. If my IT department were to suggest keeping my whole company on IE 6 just to avoid having to block YouTube, I’d fire the entire staff immediately and replace them. Seriously. How to these people keep their jobs?

> Bad news is traditionally reserved for Friday—late Friday afternoon being most promising. And last Friday, AT&T dropped a bit of bad news in an “open letter to our valued customers”: get ready to pay $325 in early termination fees (ETFs) if you want a new iPhone. A few things to say about this development, late as I may be to chime in:

First: LAME. AT&T seems absolutely hell bent on making its customers hate the company as much as humanly possible. I’m reminded of “A Bronx Tale”, when Calogero asks Sonny if it’s better to be feared than to be loved. Sonny choses fear, of course, because that’s the path he’s already gone down, and it’s too late for him to change.

Sonny is dead by the end of the film, and Calogero learns that Love is the way to go. But I digress…

Now that that’s out of the way, let me go into what I think this means for the future of the iPhone. Lots of people are speculating that this raised fee implies that a Verizon iPhone is set to be announced in a few weeks at WWDC. Actually, I believe the opposite is true. This announcement practically guarantees that there will NOT be an announcement of iPhone on Verizon, or Sprint, or anyone else in the US, at least not until well after the new iPhone HD (or whatever Apple calls it) is shipping.

Why? Think about it. This new raised ETF will only apply to people who sign up for new contracts. Evil as AT&T may be, they can’t impose a higher ETF on current contracts, like the ones we all are in now.

If Apple were going to announce a new iPhone running on Verizon in a few weeks, and AT&T would have to know that, they’d want to do whatever they could to stem the tide of people dropping AT&T for Verizon. Raising that fee on new contracts wouldn’t help convince people to sign up again.

Sure, Verizon charges the same high fee, but that’s the point. AT&T could use their lower ETF as a bargaining chip to keep their customers for a little while longer. At least some of them.

The non-AT&T US iPhone is indeed coming, but with the NEXT generation of iPhone after this one to be announced. Probably at least six months, if not a year, away from now. Most Apple fanatics can’t wait a year for the latest and greatest from Apple. So we’ll all sign up for AT&T one more time this summer. And then when the Verizon iPhone does come out a year later, we’ll be either discouraged by that extra fee from leaving, or we’ll pay the extra money. Either way, AT&T wins. If making more money in the short term could be considered winning.

You see, at this point, AT&T knows we hate them. So they are going to milk as much money as they can from us before we leave. They’ve made a clear decision that it’s cheaper to have us leave than it would be to get us to like them enough to stay. It’s not personal. It’s business.

What I can’t figure out is what AT&T plans to do AFTER that mass exodus occurs. This new fee buys them maybe an extra year of life. What do they do after that?

Then again, CEOs in the US aren’t generally known to be long-term planners. They think in quarters, not decades.

I’m also curious to see what happens once everyone does abandon AT&T for Verizon. If Verizon managed to grab even 20% of AT&T’s business with an iPhone, I’m guessing the network would experience strains similar to what AT&T has now. Then people will get angry with Verizon, pay the $350 fee, and go back to AT&T. And then back to Verizon. etc.

Maybe that’s the long-term plan.

> Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos says that his company won’t try to make the Kindle more iPad-like. At the company’s annual shareholder meeting Tuesday, Bezos stressed that the Kindle targets what he calls “serious readers,” while the iPad aims for a far broader audience. > > Of course, [the *Wall Street Journal* reports](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704026204575266511732770180.html) that Bezos added: “90 percent of households are not serious reading households.” Smartest thing I’ve heard any other CEO say about the iPad yet. What he’s saying here is that Amazon isn’t going to be stupid enough to try and compete with the iPad.

Amazon would fail miserably at this, and he knows it.

What he’s going to to do instead is concentrate on what he calls “serious readers” which is an unfortunate term, but a true niche that does exist. The glossy screen on the iPad is not ideal for outdoor beach reading, and the free anywhere connectivity of the Kindle is a nice perk. In short, there are plenty of Kindle lovers out there who wouldn’t ditch their Kindles for an iPad. So it would be stupid for Amazon to try and build a poor man’s iPad and lose the fans it currently has.

Besides, Amazon stands to make lots of money with the iPad, thanks to the App Store. I’d venture a guess that more people are using the Kindle app than Apple’s own iBooks, at least so far. The selection on Kindle is certainly much better.

If more companies did this sort of thing, carved out a market and helped it grow, rather than try to take Apple head on, they’d fare much better.