Not everything takes place in the clouds

Steve Jobs looks like he was correct in his 2007 head-to-head panel at "All Things Digital - D5 Conference. With Bill Gates at his side, Jobs and Gates were asked where software was headed and where computers where headed. In 2007 here is what Jobs had to say:

(The future)... will be the PC maybe used a little more tightly coupled with some back-end Internet services and some things like that. And, of course, PCs are going mobile in an ever greater degree.

The big secret about Apple, of course–not-so-big secret maybe–is that Apple views itself as a software company and there aren’t very many software companies left, and Microsoft is a software company.

I think people want to enjoy their entertainment when they want it and how they want it, on the device that they want it on. So ultimately, that’s going to drive the entertainment companies into all sorts of different business models. And that’s a good thing. I mean, if you’re a content company, that’s a great thing. More people wanting to, you know, enjoy your content more often in more different ways, that’s why you’re in business, but the transitions are hard sometimes.

So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not. But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices, on lower and lower power devices. And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.What I’m saying is, I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful and right now, can be way more powerful than just having a browser on the client.

So fast-forward 13 months and a couple of weekends. This last weekend, Apple sold 1 million iPhone around the world. It appears to me the highest number of them in Shanghai given the traffic analytics over at MoboVivo, where Shanghai iPhone users represented 10% of the traffic on MoboVivo.com on the weekend. 12 months ago when the first iPhone was released, it took 74 days to sell 1 million iPhones - now 3 days! 

Also, over the weekend, Apple announced that over 10 million applications were downloaded. These are applications that didn't exist last week, almost all would use the cloud to add core functions, but are all outside of the browser experiences. 

The top paid applications are entertainment applications - games (top 7 out of top 10) and music and entertainment round out the rest of the top 10. There is speculation that Apple made over $5 million on downloaded applications for its iPhone in the first weekend.

The top free applications are utilities like social networking (Facebook) and weather, and  entertainment and games. 

Steve stated that downloadable entertainment applications on mobile 

devices connected to the cloud would be pretty interesting and powerful. After this weekend he looks right.

For the record, Gates discussed tablet computing and 3D in response to the same questions.

Software is doing vision and so, you know, imagine a game machine where you’re just going to pick up the bat and swing it or the tennis racket and swing it.

Walt: We have one of those.

Kara: Yeah. Wii.

Bill: No, that’s not it. You can’t pick up your tennis racket. And swing it.

Bill: You can’t sit there with your friends and do those natural things. That’s a 3D positional device. This is video recognition.

Kara: Steve? I know you’re working on something, it’s going to be beautiful, we’ll see it soon.