Stolen Thunder

That was one of the weirdest and flattest "big hype" technology events of all time.

I'm talking about this morning's Apple WWDC keynote of course.

I guess - given the level of hype around these things - it was inevitable that sooner or later we'd see one that simply fell flat. And maybe the leaked / lost / stolen phone made this result a foregone conclusion.

But to be honest - after the Android Froyo release, I'd expected different. I told multiple people that Android catching up to iPhone was purely temporary and that this announcement would show Apple again taking the lead.

Instead - what we got was Apple doing its own thing - going in a different direction than Google entirely.

You see... I'd expected some real "shot across the bow" stuff. In my head I was thinking about things like tethering (of course) but more than that was wondering if they would show off tight integration with cloud based MS Office. Or maybe even just a "super fast browser. I mean - if they REALLY wanted to steal Google's thunder and actually stake out a future looking position, I would have expected over-the-air iTunes integration or perhaps an announcement about a streaming store (aka "this is what we're doing with LaLa").

Instead we got video chat, iMovie on the phone, iBooks on the phone, better and richer gaming (if I were a gaming company I'd be working on using the iPhone as a controller)... basically a series of incremental improvements and additions. Fundamentally, nothing truly innovative, nothing surprising and nothing revolutionary.

Did I expect too much? Probably.

Should they have delivered more? Absolutely.

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