multidimensional, get it?

I was watching this Bloomberg video the other day featuring Shawn Carolan, the venture capitalist who backed the Siri electronic personal assistant startup then sold it to Apple. His was the closest I’d heard to a technical explanation of how Siri works and it surprised me because it sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago at Excite, the long-defunct search engine.  Please look at the video and then meet me in the next paragraph.  The part that excited me (no pun intended) is about four minutes in.

Okay, he said they used linguistic techniques to map blocks of words against 10 possible domains of expertise to figure out what the heck you are asking Siri to do, with the real breakthrough being treating the entire user question or order as a single linguistic unit.

Now let’s jump back to 1994.  Eighteen years ago the search engine technology standard was set by Alta Vista, which spun out of Digital Equipment Corporation. Alta Vista pioneered web indexing with spiders dragging back web pages and it pioneered keyword searches. But if a keyword wasn’t present, Alta Vista would never return the web page you really needed because Alta Vista wasn’t smart enough.

Today the search engine standard is of course Google which uses PageRank to measure relevance by putting higher in the search results those pages that are linked to by more other pages.  Adding to this (yes, I know I’m over-simplifying — feel free to correct me) Google knows a lot about synonyms and how word meaning changes in different contexts — basic linguistic tools that were probably out of Alta Vista’s reach simply because of the processing power required.

And then there was Excite, which was completely different. When I first visited the company in 1994 it was called ArchiText and was six Stanford students operating from their Los Altos garage. I helped them find their first customer and their first venture capitalist, Steve Coit of Charles River Ventures. Vinod came along later.

Most of the ArchiText boys were semantic systems majors and they took a very different technical approach to search than did Alta Vista or that other up-and-coming search engine, Yahoo, which in those days did the task the old fashioned way — by hand.

ArchiText used spiders, too, and built its own web index, but from the start the company was dedicated to finding useful search results even if they didn’t include any search terms from the original user query — seemingly an enormous job.  Google does some of that through its elaborate algorithm, mentioned above, but Google’s technique is for the most part hard coded and brute force while ArchiText’s was very different and, well, elegant.

Here’s how the ArchiText (later Excite) search engine worked. Every query was stripped to its significant words — subjects, objects, verbs and adjectives — then each query became a vector in a multidimensional space with each unique word being a dimension.  “How do space rockets stay in orbit when they are flying through space?” would become a vector string one unit long for each of those words but two units long for the word “space.”  This bit of semantic DNA was then mapped against an index of millions of web pages that had all been similarly converted to multidimensional vectors.

Finding the most relevant results then became a simple matter of grabbing the N vectors (web pages) nearest to the query vector in that multidimensional space.  It was quick, scalable, concentrated the processing load on the indexing where it didn’t bog down retrieval, and could reliably return pages like “Why satellites fall from the sky” that might answer the question even though none of the same words were used.

Compare that to the description of Siri from the Bloomberg video.  Siri takes the entire query as a single block and maps it against a corpus composed of 10 domains of expertise looking for a fit, or perhaps for the best fit.

Technically it sounds darned similar to me, but then I’m forever condemned to remember old crap like this.

In the long run PageRank was more useful to the real world, Excite got sucked into @Home and the whole mess blew up with the dot-com meltdown, but not before all this technology was patented — patents owned today by Excite@Home’s creditors, which surprised me given that the original inventor, Graham Spencer, now works at Google.

Those old Excite patents, while nearing the end of their lives, could turn out to be very valuable to, say, a Google trying to compete with Siri on Android or even to an Apple trying to defend Siri from competitors.

I expect we’ll see those patents change hands sometime soon.

If Apple gives up its position of industry leadership in 2012 the only company capable of assuming that role is Amazon.com. What other company is there?  In the PC space giants like HP and Dell are good followers, not leaders. Intel doesn’t even see itself in such a leadership role. Microsoft is having trouble just holding onto what it has already while Google is a herd of cats. Oracle is too enterprise-centric and everyone else is too darned small. That leaves Amazon.

This doesn’t mean Amazon is a perfect or even an easy replacement for Apple as a design leader because in many ways Amazon is so much less than what Apple has become. But in other ways Amazon is so much more as we’ll see below.

Amazon lacks Apple’s design sense, but Amazon has shown through its many Kindle models an ability and willingness to learn.  This is a big deal. Most companies (heck, most people) don’t really learn anything unless their ass is on fire. One company can copy another, sure, but fully adopting another company’s philosophy almost never happens except in desperation, which is usually too late. Amazon is different. They are willing to do the work to get things right. Today’s Kindle Fire is far from perfect but tomorrow’s Kindle Fire will be much, much better.

How many tries has it taken Microsoft to get to Windows Phone 7?  Amazon can do it quicker.

Amazon is led by its founder, Jeff Bezos, who really wants to assume the Steve Jobs role.  Being led by an inspired founder is vital as Jobs showed through his return to Apple. Bezos seems to me the only CEO of the companies mentioned here who has balls on the scale of Steve Jobs. Bezos is willing to make big bets on new markets. Beyond Jobs even, he’s willing to accept financial losses as a cost of making those bets. With another decade or more available to him as CEO, absent some horrible accident, Bezos is unstoppable.

And here’s the part that many people don’t understand: Amazon can scale its business to a level far beyond anything Apple could ever have imagined.

Steve Jobs had extraordinary success at Apple, growing the company more than 300X in market cap, but how much more can Apple grow?  Apple as envisioned by Jobs could grow to be the biggest computer company, the biggest consumer electronics company, the biggest music company, the biggest telephone company, and the biggest TV company — Apple+Sony+Warner Music+Verizon+Liberty Media. That’s big, but it’s an imaginable number — a number with very real limits.

But Amazon competes with all those same companies and Walmart.

Apple would never sell cars, for example. Can you see Amazon selling cars?  I can.

Bezos and Amazon are willing to do the hard work and make the big bets to assume Apple’s leadership positions in computers, music, video, and consumer electronics. Then they’ll translate that into every other customer-facing industry as well as the Cloud.

Amazon.com will be the world’s first $1 trillion company — not in 2012, but eventually.

2012 will be a year of great transition in the technology industry with the big changes coming more on the corporate level than in products. Sure, Windows 8 is on its way as are any number of new products, services, and whole companies, but the major story playing-out is who will lead the mobile transition?  Will Apple continue its resurgence even without Steve Jobs?  Will Microsoft retain its market share dominance and find a way to translate that into the mobile market as PCs continue to whither?  Will Google beat Facebook?  Will Facebook beat Google?  Will some tablet dethrone the iPad?  How will the industry look a year from today?  I think that every one of those companies mentioned except Google will have a new CEO a year from now.  Yes, even Apple.

Prediction #1 — Insurrection at Apple.

I wrote a column last summer when Steve Jobs retired from Apple saying that Tim Cook would not be CEO for long. Though Steve wrote to me (our last-ever communication) to say I was wrong, I think more than ever that I was correct.  Apple will get a new CEO in 2012 and while I have a guess who that person might be I think I’ll wait before making that particular prediction.

If you are wondering when Apple will peak, well we’re about there folks.  Yes, there will be more iPhones and cool computers but it is my belief that Apple’s best days have come and gone.

There was an original Star Trek episode from 1968 called The Tholian Web, in which Kirk appeared in a posthumous video prepared specifically for Bones and Spock. The gist of Kirk’s speech was that if they were watching the video he must be dead and if he was dead then they were also probably at each other’s throats. This is the almost inevitable outcome in a system built solely from A-players when the spiritual leader (the only A+) dies.

Steve Jobs is dead and Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs. He knows that, we know that, and anyone who works directly for him at Apple (those A-players) knows it, too. Following a period of shock, mourning, and pretending to get along, those rocks will start rubbing on each other again only this time there won’t be a founder willing (eager even) to make the hard choices.  Chaos will ensue.

This is not all bad for Apple. Steve could have done many things faster so an accelerated rate of change might in some ways be good for the company. But it doesn’t bode well for Cook, who will become a target for those beneath him. Eventually (and by eventually I mean this year) he’ll have to either clean house, throwing away a lot of those A-players, or give up power, which is to say Cook will take the chairman’s job and find another CEO.

I think he’ll gratefully take the chairman position, keeping his Apple stock in the process.

I’m not saying Apple is doomed by any means. The company has resources to survive any number of bonehead moves. But Apple without Steve Jobs will never be the same and some regression seems inevitable.

My next prediction concerns which company I believe will assume Apple’s mantle of product leadership. It’s not who you expect.

I was speaking recently at a software company very interested in mobile apps. One of their concerns had to do with which operating systems to support.  Should they do them all?  Just a couple? My advice was that three’s a crowd.

Technical markets tend to divide like bettors at the racetrack where five percent win, 10 percent break even while 85 percent lose. Turning these numbers on their head and applying them to mobile OS revenue, IOS (iPhone, iPad, iGizmo to be named later) will generate 85 percent, Android 10 percent (because it is Open Source and free) leaving only five percent max for mobile OS number three, which could be Blackberry or Windows Phone 7 but can’t be both.

Notice this is all about revenue.  I’m not saying Android won’t have more phones in use than Apple, just that Apple will make a lot more money from its phones.

Since Microsoft feels it can’t afford to miss the mobile transition, they’ll do anything to hold at least the third spot, which is why I expect Redmond to eventually acquire RIM. That would actually be a better than usual deal for Microsoft. RIM has (residual and fading) market share as well as incredible talent at its Waterloo, Ontario HQ, not to mention a bootload of cash. What they don’t have is a clue, which is why they need Microsoft, which is clueless, too, but will at least provide desperate new leadership, mass, and marketing clout.

Hey, I think that was my first prediction for 2012!

Another option for Microsoft would be to embrace Android and reposition Windows Phone as a shell, making Android apps look and function like Windows apps. This is not as stupid as it sounds. Thanks to its aggressive legal department, Microsoft already makes more money from Android than does Google, so Android’s success can be seen as Microsoft’s success if you squint a little. Microsoft could specialize in Android services where Google might be letting users down a bit and the Microsoft/Android Application Store could sell apps for both OS variants, undercutting Google.

That’s prediction #2: If Microsoft doesn’t buy RIM they’ll license Android.

If they are really on their game Microsoft will do both (buy RIM and license Android) which would be a true game changer.

This potentially leaves a little room for other candidates for mobile OS position #3, but I’m at a loss for a good business case for even trying. Consider, for example, Intel’s new mobile OS project called Tizen, which replaces the failed Meego.

Tizen looks to me like a bad bet. Intel even championing a mobile OS against IOS and Android is spitting in the wind. The best that Intel can hope is to grab third place, which would still take a miracle.

Is a potential five percent market share worth Intel’s time?  I don’t think so.

Prediction #3: Tizen will fail in 2012.

Just a short thought. Apple has lost control of the iPad trademark in China but retains it in the rest of the world. Readers warn that China will be soon awash in iPad clones.

ProView Technologies, the Taiwanese company that presently controls the iPad trademark, was near bankruptcy until yesterday. Apple has $80 billion in cash.

Do we really think Cupertino will let go of an important trademark in what will eventually be the largest IT market in the world?

I don’t think so.

Note — Reader consensus below seems to be that I’m the one drinking the Flav-r-ade in this post, so proceed at your own risk. That’s not how I see it, of course.  CNN asked me about this issue yesterday and I think it is pretty clear, but that may be in part a reflection of my background, who knows? Just as readers expect me to take responsibility for my words, I expect Apple to take responsibility for the performance of its products. The issue isn’t so much abortion clinics as what other big gaps exist in this service? When you call your doctor the recording says “If this is an emergency hang up and call 9-1-1…”

I don’t think Apple really wants to keep its customers from finding abortion services using Siri, the voice-based automated assistant built into iPhone 4S’s. But the company has been remarkably obtuse on the issue, making statements that deny intent, deny culpability, yet at the same time seem evasive. It’s time for Cupertino to learn a lesson in damage control.

Apple has been a charmed company since the 1997 return of co-founder Steve Jobs. Jobs enforced a culture of secrecy on Apple that worked well with its event marketing to make product launches really special and help Apple to become the success it is today. Elements of this strategy are refusing comment, making vague denials, deliberately delaying news or releasing out of cadence with normal news flow, in at least two incidents threatening or actually filing lawsuits against the media, or alternately not appearing to give a damn.

To paraphrase Steve Jobs, I don’t mean this in a small way, I mean it in a big way when I say this attitude appears to me to be by design and pervades the entire company, not just PR.

Visit any Apple store and you’ll see it. Those Apple kids in their t-shirts are friendly and helpful and good at their jobs but don’t you get the sense that they’re drunk on Flav-r-ade? They know what they can and can’t, will and won’t do for you and for all the tattoos and Converse sneakers they aren’t going to go a millimeter over that line. And then there’s their sense of time — AppleTime — which is different from yours and mine, have you noticed?

They live in the zone, while we’re just visiting.

This is fine when things are going beautifully and customers are lined-up down the block, but how well does it work when things aren’t going right, like in this Siri situation?  Badly.  Apple comes off looking insensitive and smug.

They blamed the problem on Yelp, its supplier of local business data, which could well be correct, but Apple never said “and we’ll fix it right away.”

They blamed the problem on Siri being in beta. I didn’t know that, did you?  Siri is part of IOS 5, is that in beta?  I didn’t know that and I suspect most of the folks at Apple didn’t know that.  In fact I might even go so far as to wonder if it is even true?

Blaming beta software for bad performance is Google’s bag, not Apple’s.  That was a stupid PR move and stupid PR moves happen when companies panic.

Which suggests a leadership vacuum of sorts at Apple.

With Steve Jobs gone, the company has told itself and told the world that it won’t try to second-guess Steve’s ghost — no asking “what would Steve do?” But what happens if they don’t have a ready answer to the question “What should Apple do?”

I think that’s what we are seeing here.

There’s a huge lesson for Apple PR in my movie Steve Jobs — The Lost Interview.  In one section Steve talks about how companies with monopolies (the examples he used were Xerox and IBM) get caught-up in process because — as monopolies — their content is almost immaterial to success.  If everyone is already buying your product then there’s little incentive to make better products so companies come to concentrate on themselves rather than pleasing customers.

Ironically Apple appears to have fallen into this very abyss. They are so caught up in their own process of information and damage control that the actual problem with Siri doesn’t appear to matter to them. Their statements suggest things will improve in a few weeks. This is an example of AppleTime.

Why should it take that long to fix?  It shouldn’t and it won’t, but Apple appears to not want to empower us by communicating honestly.  They want to surprise us by fixing it by next Tuesday, yet don’t respect us enough to explain the plan.

Their first thought is to dissemble, not to accept responsibility. They seem to think solely about how this abortion incident could hurt them, not how it could be a chance to show Apple’s character — a chance to have character.

Everyone appears to be too busy covering asses and trying to control the process to actually fix the problem.

Maybe after 16 years Steve forgot his own lesson, but I’m guessing that if he read this column he’d get it right away. And Steve would learn from it, because he was one guy who wasn’t afraid to admit when he was wrong.

At least that’s what he says in our movie.

Walter Isaacson, in his new biography of Steve Jobs, reveals that Apple is planning to introduce its own televisions, attempting to revolutionize that space in the same way it did mobile phones with the iPhone. He quotes Jobs as having said that he had finally cracked the technical issues of controlling such a TV, though giving no details. This has led to a lot of speculation, but it seems obvious to me that Jobs was referring to IOS 5’s new Siri personal assistance capability. We’ll control our Apple TVs by telling them what to do.

Apple has tried to do TVs before. A few years ago, inspired by the TV success of Gateway and then Dell, Apple had an OEM line of TV’s queued-up and ready to go only to be cancelled when Steve Jobs decided they weren’t good enough. The issue was always controlling the TVs, especially if they were part of a multi-vendor home theater system. We all know the nightmare of multiple remotes, which Apple back then tried and failed to cure.

But Siri is different since it requires no remote.  That means in a house like ours filled with little boys no more losing remotes controls, too.

There are two key issues here that make Siri ideal for this control function. First is what I’m calling do what I mean, not what I say. As an intelligent process backed-up by a ton of knowledge on the net, Siri can learn all the devices attached to your system then easily tell them not just what to do, but what you mean. So instead of a big sequence of button pushes, Siri will respond to your command “Get me Dr. Phil” by finding you the latest (or any other) episode of the TV shrink.

The other advantage of Siri (at least for Apple) is what I’d call bait and switch, which is to say that Siri can offer you Dr. Phil from a variety of sources, but the first one will probably be from Apple.

Bait and switch will be Apple’s way of disintermediating TV networks, cable systems, and ISPs, grabbing their TV, movie, and advertising revenue for itself.

Not to mention Google. Apple is hardly going to give up search revenue, either, and Google TV will look pathetic compared to this.

Now that big data center in North Carolina is starting to make more sense.

A reader from Israel first suggested this idea to me. Neither of us know diddly whether it is true, of course, but it makes sense to me.

So Apple’s television would be an iPhone 4S minus the display and telephone parts velcro’d to a big 1080p screen. Figure an extra $100 or so for the Apple bits on a TV that will be marketed initially toward the top of the market but will eventually be aimed, like the iPod, at everyone. Between hardware, content, and advertising there’s another $100 billion market to be conquered there, just for the U.S.  Then add extensive language support to Siri and conquer the TV world.

He cracked it alright.

Note — A reader asked why Apple would make expensieve HDTVs rather than cheaper set top boxes like the Apple TV? That’s a good question. And answering it further illuminates Apple’s probable strategy.

Apple may do both, but they’ll want to make high margins for the bits they actually make so it is better to be selling $2000 TVs than $100 set-top-boxes. 

A lot has been said about Steve Jobs in the 24 hours since his death and some of that has come from me. It has been 24 hours of round-the-world media interviews, most of them live but you can see an edited version of me this Friday on ABC’s 20/20, which is doing a Jobs tribute of some sort. Remember ABC’s parent is Disney and Jobs was Disney’s largest shareholder.  With all that has been said and written, however, I’m hard put to know what there is I can add here. I can tell you though the two Jobs questions I still want answers for, and where I hope to find those answers.

Question #1 — Was there a grand plan for Apple?  Did Steve and his little circle set out in 1997 to do an iMac followed by an iPod with iTunes followed by an iPhone followed by an iPad?  And if they did have such a plan, what was next on their list after the iPad?

Some technical and product transitions are no-brainers. Computers get smaller, faster, and cheaper over time. After a certain point smaller, faster, and cheaper begets mobility.  After mobility gets smaller, faster, and cheaper we want all our stuff to be available anywhere anytime. After we have all our stuff with us anywhere anytime the platform itself begins to disappear.  All of these steps except the last happened in Steve Jobs’s lifetime, and it is easy to see that last step coming, too. But while these steps were no-brainers in retrospect, were they obvious beyond Apple, were they part of a plan?

I like to think that there was a plan, which might explain why Apple never made televisions in Steve’s life, though I know they came very close. If there was a plan I’d love to know the value set and algorithms at its heart.

But my sense is actually that there was no plan or maybe that the plan changed, perhaps many times, explaining the exodus of top Apple talent over the years. I’d like to hear what Avie Tevanian has to say, for example.

Question #2 — What happens to Steve’s money?  This may seem crass to some, but no more crass than a billionaire with no outward signs of philanthropy. It was Steve’s money of course and he could do with it whatever he liked, but what was his reason for outwardly appearing to have little interest in others?  Maybe he was a closet philanthropist. Certainly in recent years the considerable amounts he spent on cancer research aimed at his own cure will benefit thousands of others.  I’d still like to know, though, Steve’s plan for his fortune.

I hope to learn the answers to both questions from Walter Isaacson when his authorized biography of Steve Jobs is released on October 24th. I haven’t read the book yet and know nobody who has, but I hope Walter got around to my silly questions and that Steve answered them.

He was a busy guy, Steve Jobs — so busy living for the moment that maybe he didn’t have to live so far (or indeed at all) into the future. Maybe none of this matters, but I’d still like to know.

What unanswered questions would you have for Steve Jobs?

Tomorrow I’ll respond to the 200+ comments on my Final Frontier column, hopefully setting off another burst of discussion and discovery — just the sort of discourse Steve Jobs would have liked, especially if it riled people up.

And now the frenzy begins. Running this story in reverse it’s suddenly clear why Apple didn’t introduce the iPhone 5 this week. It would have been lost in the news of Jobs’s death, killing the marketing value he would have loved. I’m sure the phone will appear in a week or two with that appearance in part to encourage the recovery of Apple shares from what is sure to be a short-term decline.

I first met Steve Jobs in the spring of 1977 when I helped the two Steves take a prototype computer out of Woz’s Fiat at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting. In the 34 years that followed I was hired and fired by Steve more than once, our relationship conducted in large part through screaming. “Sometimes I can be an asshole,” he said to me many times, and it was true, but I miss him already.

Steve Jobs was an iconic figure. Everybody knows his name. He was perceived as being personally responsible for the growth of the most valuable U.S. corporation. Steve Jobs changed the way people live by making popular everything from desktop publishing to digital music, to revolutionary smart phones and computer-animated films. He changed forever the computer, music, and film industries, doing so through the simple expedient of better design. He redefined the notion of taste in an industry dominated by engineers and a general lack of style. Steve Jobs had a billion dollar eye. No, make that a $300 billion eye.

Jobs was a 21st century combination of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton. As an aesthete, a corporate leader, a salesman and a wrangler of geeks there was no person in American business — maybe in the world — who compared to this adopted child of Syrian extraction. Yet who actually knew him? Almost nobody.

I’ll be writing more about Jobs in the coming days, but for now here is the best public moment of insight into this man, the commencement address he gave at Stanford University in 2005.

I was about to board an airplane Wednesday when Apple announced the resignation of Steve Jobs as CEO and his replacement by Tim Cook. With a couple hours to think on my flight to Charleston it became clear to me that this story is far from over and the long-term leadership of Apple has not yet been determined.

There were rumblings a month ago about Apple board members interviewing possible successors to Steve Jobs. There’s nothing surprising in that, given Jobs’ poor health and the fact that the primary function of any board is hiring and firing CEOs. But it evidently didn’t go down well with Steve, perhaps because he had his own succession plan or simply because it showed a crack in Apple’s armor against news leaks. The story was quickly shot down.

Then a week ago the publication date of Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs was changed from March 6, 2012 to November 21, 2011. This shocked me, because the last I read Isaacson was still writing his book, which was due with the publisher, Simon & Schuster, in September. Huge biographies aren’t finished early or rushed to completion.  Figuring the book will still be finished in September, that it will take a month to print and ship the books, this means that the publisher’s part of this process — the copy editing, designing, formatting, building indexes and so forth — is being reduced from a normal minimum of at least six months to less than six weeks. It makes business sense to do this, sure, but I don’t think that’s enough: some external force is pushing the deadline.

I suspect that force accelerating the publication may be Steve Jobs.

And now we have Jobs’ resignation. But he’s not going away, not signing-up for Apple COBRA benefits, just giving up to Cook his duties as CEO. Jobs will remain an Apple employee and chairman of the board.  That makes him what’s called an executive chairman — one who is on the job every day. And that job he’ll be doing every day is overseeing Tim Cook’s execution of the corporate strategy designed by Steve Jobs.

This looks to me like Cook continuing to function in his Chief Operating Officer role. Oh he’ll get a big raise and an even bigger bonus, but my sense is that next week the guy really in charge will still be Steve Jobs. And the Apple board, satisfied that the succession question has been answered and their own fiduciary asses are covered (I suspect this is a big part of it) can go back to sleep.

But it isn’t a long-term solution. Steve Jobs won’t be around forever and a true successor will have to be chosen eventually. For all his administrative skills, Cook can’t fill Jobs’ visionary shoes, so I’d look for another leadership change, maybe tied to the release of Isaacson’s book.

I say this based not only on my understanding of Steve and the way things work in Cupertino, but also based on my reading of Isaacson’s last book, a very good biography of Albert Einstein. That book is what attracted Jobs to Isaacson as his biographer. This was no chance encounter.  Steve doesn’t believe in them.

In his Einstein book Isaacson tried (and I think succeeded) to take us into the mind and ideas of the German physicist who changed the world. He’ll do the same with Jobs.  And in the case of Jobs, the understanding that’s missing is less his maturing as a technology visionary and more the vision, itself. Where is Apple going?  What’s the grand plan?

We know there is such a plan — there has to be, Apple’s moves have been too deliberate, if inscrutable, to be some executive random walk.  But nobody near the top has ever tried to explain where the company is going, preferring to be mysterious instead.  Bill Gates had Nathan Myhrvold write his book for him, but Steve is classier than Bill. I believe Walter Isaacson’s book will also function as Steve’s technology manifesto, part of his legacy.

Once we have the grand plan, then it may make more sense just who should lead that plan’s execution during what will clearly be Apple’s best quarter in its 34 year history.  Steve Jobs is setting-up this (and us) for another grand reveal… just one more thing.