Last week's Switched On discussed Nokia's quest to help Microsoft create a third mobile ecosystem alongside those of Apple and Google. That word – ecosystem – has clearly passed into the pantheon of buzzwords, leveraging many synergies from purpose-built paradigms. And yet, building and maintaining ecosystems is something few companies really understand. True technology ecosystems are more than just successful platforms or throwing many products together simply because they are owned by the same company. They are characterized by strategically implemented nurturing.

One concept that Apple seems to have adapted from natural ecosystems is the concept of the water cycle you probably learned about in grade school. Apple turns up the heat on the life-sustaining water of innovation that passes between the well-grounded Mac market and the soaring growth of the iOS market. Apple alluded to this cycle in its Back to the Mac event. After inheriting many technologies from Mac OS X, iOS began offering Mac OS X launch screens, full-screen apps, app resuming, and document autosaving. This week's announcements, though, show that the cycle may soon be heading again in the other direction as Apple showed off two Mac technologies that may well wind up strengthening the iOS ecosystem.

The first of these is Thunderbolt, Apple's term for Light Peak: an even faster bus than the one Sandra Bullock drove in Speed. Apple is no stranger to interconnect innovation, having developed the core technology behind IEEE 1394, aka FireWire.
Now, Apple is positioned to once again differentiate based on the speed of syncing media.


FireWire was the original way iPods connected to Macs, and it provided much faster music transfer than what was available from most competitors using first-generation USB. Now with iPads and iPhones available with more than six times as many gigabytes as that first iPod, Apple is positioned to once again differentiate based on the speed of syncing media. And this time, Intel -- which once championed USB -- will be the Keanu Reeves that moves the bus forward.


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