Jobs' iPhone demo was so powerful that he actually made people believe that Apple invented a whole new user interface. In fact, Apple did something more important than that. The company took some of the best -- hitherto obscure -- UI research and put it into a product that you will be able to buy. It did the same thing with three other products, the original Apple computer, the Mac and the iPod.
This is how Apple changes the world. It takes awesome research out of other people's labs, polishes and perfects it, and then ship it as warm-and-fuzzy consumer products everyone can buy.
Succeed or fail, the iPhone will be remembered as the first major step toward the third-generation PC user interface.
The first-generation UI was the command line. Apple didn't invent it, but used the concept for early Apple computers.
The second-generation UI is the icon-based, folder-driven, resizable overlapping windows interface that we use today. Again, Apple didn't invent it -- Xerox did. But Apple was the first major company to build it into a consumer product, the original Macintosh computer, which came out in 1984.
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The iPhone's relevance lies not in its convergence of phone and iPod or even the mobilization of OS X, but that it's the first-ever mass-market computer with a third-generation UI.
But will the desktop version of this third-generation UI come from Apple, or Microsoft?
Apple's next update to OS X is expected by late spring.
