iTV = Console Gaming?

Businessweek asks the burning question as to whether Apple's recently pre-announced iTV could be a trojan horse designed to get Apple into the living room so that it can take over the gaming console world. The question: "Could Apple Become Games Console King?" The answer: "Sure, but probably not." While iTV may in fact be the answer to a alot of questions, those answers are in Steve Jobs continuing to figure out how to make more and more download-for-dollars content available over broadband to American consumers. That's clearly where they're spending their time.

It's conceivable, of course, that Apple would offer gaming downloads from the iTunes Store that could play on the iTV -- and I certainly hope they turn the iTV in a family/home server for files and home folders as well as for multimedia. But it seems unlikely that the iTV would be engineered to kill other gaming boxes...not when the real trick is going to be pushing high speed data through the thing and decompressing data feeds into video streams. Those are core competencies for Apple, whereas, as of right now, gaming APIs and high-end graphics card support isn't.

Of course, they might be working all that stuff in secret, but why jump into a cut-throat market like console gaming when there are entire pioneer markets waiting for an easy, reliable, downloadable movie solution?

Google CEO on Apple's Board Means...What?

Apple announced today that Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was joining the board of directors. GigaOM suggests that the move is something of an informal alliance between the two companies, which could spell headaches for Microsoft. One interesting observation is the idea that Google is getting close to releasing a suite of office tools online, including the already-beta Google Spreadsheets and the upcoming Writely transition from a standalone tool to part of the Google suite. Apple is anything if not interested in something that can keep the Microsoft Office albatross from around it's neck, and the death of its own AppleWorks suite a while back suggests that a lower-end office solution might be something it would bargain for. Google would be an interesting partner in another respect...the anemic 2.0 offerings of .Mac, once a shining light of Web application offers. An alliance between Google tools and .Mac could breathe a little life into that offering. In exchange, Google and Apple could be working up something on the partnership front to take advantage of synergies between Google initiatives and iTunes.

Or, Dr. Schmidt might just be a cool cat in Jobs' eyes, and he invited him on the board so that he could say, whoa, I'm on the Apple board. Hey, look...there's Al Gore.