by Josh Bernoff
Two key announcements (one is a preannouncement) today.
1. Apple added YouTube to Apple TV. And it announced a 160GB hard drive option. As I said on the Devices and Media blog in January, these were the two pieces missing from AppleTV (bigger hard drive, more streaming content) when it was announced. Apple TV is officially no longer lame.
2. Google will announce Google Gears, a set of offline browsing APIs. There's a nice writeup on TechCrunch. As we said earlier right here, offline browsing is what's needed to make apps like Google documents not just little toys, but realistic applications.
Now, put everything together. Offline browsing = more powerful apps on browsers = apps that run on all sorts of browser-enabled devices and non Windows PCs, compatibly. (Yeah, it's a ways off, but bear with me here.) And YouTube on TV = one of the first PC apps to run on a browsing device that's not a computer.
For those who've been waiting for browsing devices to get diverse, today is a milestone.
For those who've been waiting for "desktop"-type applications development to start focusing on browsers instead of OSes, today is a milestone.
For those who put their faith in Windows as the center of the universe, today is a milestone, too. Maalox sales in Redmond are going up.
May 30 isn't the end of the power of the OS. But it's the beginning of the end.
Tags: YouTube, Apple TV, Google gears, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell
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