For a while now I've been banging on about Software + Services being an industry thing not a Microsoft thing and then something odd happened. I was at Web 2.0 and someone showed me the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs interview from All Things D on their iPod Touch. I've watched the video before but for some reason decided to take another look (it's a stunning interview). About 30 mins in, Steve gives a brilliant description of Software + Services. For a moment I even thought he was going to use the phrase and Kara gets very close to saying it.

Scroll the video above forward to 06:30 (or see the transcript below) and sit back for a few minutes of Steve Jobs on S+S. We should get him on the marketing team. Or get the marketing team all wearing black polo necks maybe. I dunno. Anyway...

Namaste Steve. Peace out.

 

Steve: I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.

So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not.

But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices, on lower and lower power devices. And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.

Walt: OK. So you’re saying rich clients still matter, but–maybe I misunderstood you, but your example was about a rich client that is not a personal computer as we have thought of a personal computer.

Steve: What I’m saying is, I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful and right now, can be way more powerful than just having a browser on the client.

Kara: You’re talking about a software company being a software and services company rather than a …

Steve: I’m saying the marriage of these services plus a more sophisticated client is a very powerful marriage.