Apple Computer is not getting the credit it deserves in promoting the overall advancement of Recombinant Communications. Over the past weeks, most talk surrounded the iPad’s future as “the next big thing,” a “Kindle Killer”, newspaper reader or enterprise productivity booster. Lost in such discussion are the nearly biological forms of mutation and adaptation that are taking place inside Apple’s service delivery infrastructure (what Asymmetri’s Joe Bentzel calls “The Mashitecture”) and its implications for enabling application developers (whom I call Mashufacturers) to deliver better user experience and services to the owners of a multiplicity of devices, primarily iPods, iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s core application platform, iTunes, provides a vivid case in point. Its evolution (or adapatation) began at the turn of the century when Apple acquired SoundJam MP to serve as its digital media player as well as a library for managing media, primarily for the MacOS. Over the years, it has introduced versions of iTunes to run on Microsoft Windows operating systems (originally Windows 2000, but quickly adding Vista and Windows 7 to the mix).

But a real quantum leap occurred when Apple made iTunes the core of its application delivery and billing strategy for the iPhone AppStore. It was a bigger act of genius than the introduction of the Genius function to build playlists. Like Amazon.com, iTunes has a pre-established billing relationship with its customers. It enables very flexible pricing arrangements, including “in app” purchase of upgrades or message units. It can make recommendations based both on an individual’s purchase history and the trending of “most popular” apps or music by category.

In each of these cases, Apple refined or defined features in response to (or anticipation of) user demand. So it is that iPad owners who download the productivity applications that make up the iWorks suite, find that they can use iTunes as a platform for importing, exporting or “synching” business documents such as .doc .ppt, .xls or .pdf files created by Pages, Keynote or Numbers apps respectively. This use of iTunes is by no means intuitive. Users can find their docs after attaching their iPads to their PCs through the sync cord, clicking on the application tab, choosing the desired app and then dragging the document onto their desktop (or at least that’s how I did it).

Admittedly, they can export their documents from the iPad via email or “share” all documents through the iWork.com Web site. Still, I’m interested in observing the transformation of iTunes from a media player and CD burner into a platform for managing content for a variety of business apps.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Apple, Recombinant Communications, iPad