Who Will Rule the New Internet?

Wednesday, Jun. 04, 2008 By JOSH QUITTNER / SAN FRANCISCO

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Matt Murphy — a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers who oversees the $100 million iFund to seed start-ups that build great iPhone apps — goes even further. He claims that the iPhone will "absolutely be the driver of the post-PC world." Murphy points out that the kit needed by developers to build iPhone apps has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, and he estimates that about 1,000 applications will be available to consumers when the iPhone-apps store launches with the phone. "If you look at so many of the constraints that have held back the mobile ecosystem, Apple basically takes all of those away and provides an open platform, a great device and a user base that's rabid for these new kinds of applications," he says.

Jobs' great skill has always been integrating cutting-edge technology and making it accessible. Flat-panel monitors, moviemaking software, wi-fi, digital-music players, touch-sensitive screens — these have all been out there over the past decade or so in ragged and unpolished ways. His genius was finding and repackaging them, making the technology work to delight the masses. Similarly, Apple's iPhone 2.0 will popularize "geo-location" — think of the satellite-based navigation systems in many cars — as a way for people to communicate wherever they are.

Yet again, Google, which is fighting the platform wars on multiple fronts, could be Apple's stiffest competition. It is leading another coalition to build an open-operating system called Android that will work in the next generation of cell phones as well as other consumer devices. The Open Handset Alliance has 34 members — mobile-phone carriers as well as handset makers, including Motorola, LG Electronics, Samsung, China Mobile, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. Though Google ceo Eric Schmidt sits on Apple's board of directors and Jobs saluted Google as a partner whose apps were on the iPhone, Apple is notably not in the alliance.

This appears to be a case of — in Valleyspeak — "frenemies," companies that work together in some businesses while competing in others.

The first Android-powered phones will arrive, Google says, in the second half of the year, possibly around the same time as the new iPhone. At a recent Google developers' conference, the company showed off, for the first time, a generic cell phone running the operating system. Touch sensitive, with an onboard, motion-sensing accelerometer that can also place a user precisely on a Google satellite map, the device resembles nothing so much as an iPhone. Android, explains Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms, is an open platform for developers à la Facebook; the code is theirs to modify. He says developers have so far written more than 1,800 applications, which could be distributed on a Google site arranged according to popularity, as YouTube is. "There's some pretty innovative stuff there," Rubin explains. "This is merging the handset and the Web and coming up with something completely new."

To spark development, Google held a competition that will ultimately seed 10 application developers with $275,000 for the best apps. Robert Lam, whose Eco2go was named last month as one of the 50 finalists for the top prizes, says he decided to develop his application, which helps users compute and reduce their carbon footprints, for the Android platform rather than the iPhone because it's so much easier. Developing for the iPhone "would have cost us an annual fee to list our application, and we would have to share 30% of our revenue with Apple as well," Lam says. That said, Lam is already looking into porting the app over to the iPhone after Eco2go is established. The iPhone could end up being enormously popular, and at this stage of the game there's no sense in foreclosing options.

I agree. Like him, I'm rooting for everyone in this war because it sounds as if — the concerns of Harvard's Zittrain notwithstanding — we all win here. Andreessen is right when he says the Web is so vast that it defies attempts to control it. With Google riding shotgun, it strikes me as unlikely that Facebook or anyone else can pull too far ahead. Also, I believe Zuckerberg when he says Facebook will continue to open over time. It's the smart move, and he's a smart cookie. Finally, I want to get my hands on the new iPhone. Its time will come and go. But for now? Great technology, today as always, renders us as gods.

The original version of this article incorrectly stated that F8 is the name of the Facebook platform. It is the name of the developer's conference.