May 23rd, 2005
60 Days
On Thursday, Google laid down a 60-day window for offering RSS support in their Fusion operating system/office suite hybrid. On Sunday night Steve Jobs laid down a 60-day window for RSS enclosure support inside iTunes. Today, as the smoke clears from these two cannon blasts across Microsoft’s bow, Bill Gates must surely realize he’s just been upgraded to the RSS revolution. Hoisted on his own petard.
Apple’s Trojan horse, iTunes, will carry podcasts into the heart of every one of iPod owners’ systems. Gmail will carry the rest, with RSS enclosure support promised "if customers request it." Well, they just did, Eric, Sergey, and Melissa. In fact, if Jobs is smart about this (you think?) iTunes could be the offline client for Fusion on close to 100% of desktops: wire the shownotes (aka blogosphere) up to Safari on the Mac, or bootstrap Firefox/Thunderbird on Windows. Note: Google’s Factory Tour demos ALL ran on Firefox.
Let’s see: iTunes, Gmail, Firefox, Skype. All cross-platform and carriers of RSS, email, voice, IM, and enclosures. Note: Skype is encrypted, just right for attention-enhanced notification of podcast promos, affinity casts, and other transactions. And if Skype teamed up with Sun and its Java-unified carrier handset monoculture, a Skype cell player could intelligently sync up based on attention-driven intelligent caching. Welcome aboard, Bill. Oh, and fire Jeff Raikes please. Give him 60 days severance.
