Is this the Day Apple Truly Banishes the Ghost of PC Past?

Posted by: Peter Burrows on March 06

OK, I suppose that ghost may have taken his leave long ago, given how well Apple is doing relative to other PC makers. But as of this moment, a few hours before Steve Jobs announces Apple’s SDK, there’s lots of talk about how far Apple is prepared to go to really open up the iPhone and iPod touch to developers. If it opens up just a little, these products will likely get a nice increase in sales as Apple focuses on a few defined opportunities — like harvesting demand from companies that want to let their employees use iPhones with the corporate network.

But if Apple opens up a lot and manages to attract a tidal wave of software development, Apple has a shot at becoming the Microsoft of the mobile market. Given the unique specs and appeal of the iPhone and iPod touch, Apple may become impossible to ignore for any developer that wants to satisfy the monster demand for no-compromise portable devices for the Information Age. Software giant SAP, for example, sees the smart phone becoming a very serious rival to the PC in the future. “It’s a matter of time before you have a 160 gig iPhone,” says Bob Stutz, executive vp of SAP’s CRM unit. “There’s nothing you couldn’t run on that iPhone.”

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but think of it this way. Back in the early 1980s, Microsoft stole the PC market from Apple—despite the Mac’s superiority over the PC—because it won the war for developers. Now the fight is over what may be the next big platform war, and Apple has the superior product once again. We’ll know a lot more in a few hours, as to whether it intends to win that developer war this time—and whether Jobs’ ambition is to turn the iPhone into a product that can rival the importance of the PC. “We all assume that Apple thinks about these things, but I’m not sure they do. We’ll have to wait and see,” says Stutz.

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