The Gillmor Gang — Cluetrain co-author Doc Searls, Betaworks’ John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, and Kevin Marks — explored Apple’s launch of the iPad 2 and its impact on the linked worlds of television, technology, and the social wave. Scoble and I were lucky enough to attend the launch event and the appearance of Steve Jobs to a standing ovation. There may have been no “one more thing” but the event itself seemed to have that aura about it. Funny, passionate, and not about to miss this event if he could help it, Jobs alternated between a detailed dissection of Apple’s lead in the marketplace and simply standing back and marveling at the power of this emergent platform.
The Gang may not have fully endorsed my view that we’re seeing the rapid decline of Microsoft’s Windows platform, but no one can question the speed with which iOS has come from seemingly nowhere to a powerful economic engine that will likely spawn as much change as has already occurred since the iPad first launched less than a year ago. The famous couch Jobs sat on in the first announcement sat unused but with mute testimony to the distance Apple has already traveled in reinventing itself and our notions of what’s possible.