WWDC: See the Future

June 11. 10 a.m. The anticipation is over. The WWDC Keynote is about to begin. Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. cofounder and CEO, takes the stage to deliver a speech that no one expected… and no one will soon forget.

You see, while all of the buzz about the iPhone has swirled through the internet and the blogosphere since MacWorld 2007, Steve Jobs has been crafting the moment that WWDC early birds are about to witness. Sure it will start with the usual state of Apple Inc., and how iTunes has delivered X amount of movies and music to happy customers around the globe, and maybe some upgrades to processor speeds in the MacBook and Mac Pro lines. But there is a piece to Steve’s puzzle that will blow the crowd away. There always is. It’s what Steve does best. But no one saw this coming. No one could have imagined this.

If you Google the word iPhone, it returns about 16,900,000 English pages over the past 6 months. Ars Technica has over 150 articles that mention the iPhone since Macworld 2007. A Digg Search for iPhone reveals 477 pages of stories that mention the iPhone dating back to 2004, when Engadget started talking about the Motorola/Apple partnership, which ended up being a Motorola phone (Cingular) that synced with iTunes, but not the actual iPhone from Apple.

Where is all this going? With all of the stories about the iPhone, there is still something that doesn’t add up. Why would Apple close the phone from developers? Apple has always been a big proponent of developers extending their software. Developers have always been able to come up with creative solutions to run on Apple systems. Sometimes the products were so good Apple just had to own them. So closing the iPhone just does not make sense. I believe there is still one more thing…

Apple Developers to Write Software for the iPhone
There was a reason that Apple would not partner with Verizon (other than the fact that Verizon wanted to put their V-Cast crap on the iPhone and ruin it). I think Apple had bigger plans, and Cingular/AT&T were willing to step up and be only a service partner, and leave Apple to the hardware and software. Apple does want the iPhone to be closed to telcos, but I believe Apple wants to give developers the opportunity to write software for the iPhone, and that Steve Jobs will announce this during the keynote as one of the final items.

Apple Ready to Spend Lots of Cash
If Apple really wants to be as serious a player in the telco market as they are in the mp3 player market, what is to stop Apple from bidding on the upcoming FCC auction for frequency spectrum? After all, owning the deed to that spectrum could put Apple in a better position than Verizon and AT&T. From Wired.com:

For the same reasons, a broadband wireless network operating in the UHF range would be far more powerful than the municipal Wi-Fi and WiMax networks now being built by Google, EarthLink and other companies. Such a network would be cheaper to build as well. Because radio waves in the UHF band travel much farther than the high-frequency signals used for Wi-Fi and WiMax, a single tower could cover as much as 10 times the area.

And because this will be the last auction of unused spectrum for the foreseeable future, it represents the final opportunity to create an alternative to the major carriers. The FCC grants auction winners a license to use spectrum for a number of years, but as these licenses are almost invariably renewed at no additional cost, they are effectively deeds of ownership for the winning bidders. No surprise, then, that the fight has already gotten intense. Read article…

Apple could change the entire face of wireless access in the United States by purchasing the spectrum. They could even lease some of the spectrum back to others — Google, Skype, Vonage, aetc. — and make a decent chunk of change by undercutting the prices that AT&T and Verizon are charging for going through their access gates. An announcement of this magnitude would send Steve Ballmer into a chair-throwing frenzy. Apple’s success doesn’t come from playing the game. It comes from changing the game.

I believe this is Steve’s One More Thing moment of his career. Does Steve Jobs have the huevos to pull something this large off? Buy some AAPL stock, a ticket to the WWDC and get there early if you want a seat.

Update (From AllThingsD 2007):

Q: All indications appear that the iPhone is closed, we’d love to develop apps…

This is an important tradeoff between security and openness. We want both. We’re working through a way… we’ll find a way to let 3rd parties write apps and still preserve security on the iPhone. But until we find that way we can’t compromise the security of the phone.

I’ve used 3rd party apps… the more you add, the more your phone crashes. No one’s perfect, and we’d sure like our phone not to crash once a day. If you can just be a little more patient with us I think everyone can get what they want.

See what I mean? Steve is letting developers know that 3rd party apps development is coming to the iPhone.