Come together

THE BIG LIE — that consumer and enterprise markets are completely different animals — is coming apart at the seams. For those few holdouts who still think Apple is focused solely on the creative, educational, and digital elitist markets, the time has come, the walrus said.

Steve Jobs’ annual gathering of the tribe and his patented Reality Distortion Field have broken out of their base. Even as Mac devotees drool over the largest and smallest notebooks on the planet, and software revisions of Apple’s iLife home digital tools, Jobs sends a heat-seeking missile into the heart of Microsoft Office.

By now I’m sure you’ve read all about Keynote, Apple’s turbocharged PowerPoint killer for OS X. It’s the software analogue to the 17-inch Titanium notebook Jobs plucked from under a cloth midway through his MacWorld Conference & Expo keynote: sleek, sexy, and a stone-cold enterprise application.

Not so, protests OS X chief architect Avi Tevanian. “It’s for the educational market,” he grins, locking onto one sturdy leg of Apple’s market tripod. Conspiracy buffs might discount Steve Jobs’ insistence that the application was built just for him, but I believe it. How else can the CEO of both Apple and Pixar keep ahead of not one but two curves?

The synergy between computer company and entertainment vendor has never been more front and center. From a subtly dumbed-down (and nimbly priced) version of Final Cut Pro’s dominant video editing software to the studio quality OS X Pro Tools audio processing market leader, professional creative tools are now accessible to students of all ages.

Anti-aliased 3-D graphics; alpha-channel support; real-time video transition rendering; iLife’s integration of digital media across photos, video, music, and writable DVDs: It’s easy to pigeonhole these freebies and low-cost modules as placeholders for Apple’s core audience.

But Keynote? Sure it’s educational software for managing up and out, across enterprise domains. Does anybody else think it’s ironic that the two defining applications of digital convergence both have the same last syllable? Just as Microsoft’s OneNote idea processor will one day form the hub of the Office suite, so too will Keynote anchor the Mac.

Wait, you say. Where’s the word processor, the spreadsheet? Tevanian answers that later in our conversation, asking rhetorically why Apple should invest in apps or hardware that are already in place. That’s why Jobs gives slide time to Intuit’s OS X QuickBooks and Microsoft’s extended bundle discount on Office OS X for the Mac.

And then Tevanian lets the big secret slip. Besides, he says, Steve lives in three apps most of the time: Keynote, e-mail, and the browser. With Apple, it’s not what they say that’s as important as what they don’t say.

Take the new PDA that Jobs announced. Did you hear about it? No, I didn’t either. But what I did hear — twice — was a reference to using Bluetooth to communicate between the new Mini-Me 12-inch screen T-book and the cell phone buried in the backpack. Jobs said it first, and then a professional photographer reiterated it in a video.

The message: Who needs a PDA? You’ve got the iPOD for tunes, store your calendar and contacts on the phone, use Bluetooth to bridge between the laptop and the world on the move, and use Airport Extreme (aka Wi-Fi 80211g) when available. Apple’s growing software grid (iCAL, iSync, Rendezvous, and iCHAT) provides the glue between the so-called “consumer” suite of iLife applications.

Oh, and by the way, that same software grid begins to offer significant elements of messaging functionality — calendaring, scheduling, instant messaging, presence, and identity management. That leaves the browser, and presto change-o, Apple produces Safari. It’s fast, it’s free, it’s not IE. I could not believe it — Lotus had me convinced that building a browser from scratch for Notes was just too hard. Guess not.

The messages are building one on top of the other — control of our destiny, freedom of choice, the elegant marriage of design and vision. As Jobs demos Keynote, I slowly become aware of how he has used his tools to build a powerful connection with his audience. Jobs himself is caught up in the momentum as he blurts out, “This is why we do what we do,” after one compelling digital creation.

Postscript: It’s much later now, as I prepare to leave for Las Vegas and CES. I know: Last week I promised to follow up on Bill Gates’ unveiling of his SPOT (Smart Personal Object Technology) devices. The details are just as compelling: a custom radio receiver, a wide area network based on low-bit-rate noise-tolerant FM subcarrier technology, and a first generation of SPOT-enabled wristwatches.

We haven’t heard everything that’s on Bill’s mind — he too understands that digital convergence is not coming. It’s already here. And he knows that if Steve Jobs and his talented team didn’t exist, he’d have to invent them. To use a baseball analogy from the ’60s, Apple is the Kansas City A’s to Microsoft’s New York Yankees.

But try as I might, I can’t shake the warm glow of Jobs’ vision. Where Bill presides over a parade of demonstrators and partners, Jobs shares his excitement as he sits down alone on the stage and fires up Keynote. In that moment, he is all of us — consumer, worker, teacher, student, creator, communicator, parent, and child.

It’s a powerful message — opportunity for all. And one that Apple is doing a very good job of communicating. It’s so easy, even the CEO of two large corporations can do it. For at least one brief moment, I stop thinking about the possibilities of OneNote and start wondering how fast it might run on OS X in Windows XP emulation mode. Up onstage, I could swear Steve Jobs drags some music into the background, humming quietly. Come together … right now … over me.