The blogophere's thoughts on Apple's September 12 announcements

After having anticipated Apple's product and service announcements for a fortnight, now it's time to cover what some of the blogosphere's leading minds had to say about the news yesterday. Mark Cuban breaks down Apple's possible ulterior motive (to take on cable and satellite businesses) over at his site. And Om Malik blogs on why he believes Steve Jobs is the reincarnation of the Bill Gates from 20 years ago. Both points of view are very perceptive, so let's discuss, shall we?

Cuban (like our own Matthew Himler), argues that the most important thing to come out of San Francisco yesterday was that Apple made the iPod interface available on the television set. Aside from TiVo's great interface, there is hardly any nice and average-joe UI (user interface) for consumer electronics that attach to the main viewing device these days (some DVRs get close). Will Apple consumers soon download *all* their music from iTunes as well as all their television shows and many movies -- and then port all this content to the living-room television?

If so, Apple could theoretically become a serious competitor to the standard cable and satellite companies. Cuban argues this point pretty well -- and remember, there are millions of consumers "trained" on the iPod/Front Row interface. That's huge.

On the flip side, Om Malik sees parallels between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs -- 20 years apart. Gates found that the way to profits (and then some) is to sell the brains behind the commodity hardware while the hardware companies battled for margins and market share. All machines run Microsoft's product, so what does Gates care? Now Jobs is putting on the same hat, but in reverse. By taking small-to-no margins with selling software content (music, television shows and now movies), he's created a huge market for the hardware (which is tightly controlled), and Apple is the only company that can benefit (unless that SanDisk Sansa can play content off iTunes -- which it can't).

It's an interesting reversal that has now worked for both computer titans in different ages; Gates created the PC revolution to a large degree. And now in the digital age, Jobs has married software and hardware in a closed platform to remake the entertainment business.