

Back in June 2010, when he unveiled the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs also presented a new video-conferencing technology called FaceTime. The technology allowed for easy face to face communication over a video-conferencing network, similar to what Skype has offered for a long time. As mister Jobs himself put it then, "this is one of those moments that reminds us of why we do what we do" and it was indeed impressive. He then provided a stunner of an announcement by adding "Now it's based on a handful of standards… but this is going to be an open industry standard."


Apple's offerings have now gone through a complete round of refreshes since that promise was made. Whether it is the iPhone, which was upgraded to iPhone 4S the following year, the iPad, which is now in its second iteration since the announcement, AppleTV (which also just saw a recent refresh) or OSX, which will incorporate FaceTime in its next version and was refreshed at least once since Mr. Jobs' announcement, or Macs, which have seen their own upgrade cycle, there isn't a product in Apple's offering that has not seen an upgrade since Mr. Jobs announced that FaceTime would be an industry standard.

Honor thy founder


Apple has established a substantial amount of leadership and goodwill by opening up w ebkit, their web browsing library, thus making it possible for them to have a substantial impact on the development of web browsers for mobile devices (today, the vast majority of mobile devices use a webkit-based browser, with the exception of the Windows Phone platform).



Because Apple has had a long tradition of supporting open standards, and because it also has a long tradition of keeping things it doesn't consider an open standard fully closed and proprietary, when they announce that they are going to open something up, they generally do.

In fact, I could not find any evidence in Apple's past of the company announcing they would turn a technology of theirs into an industry standard and then recanted on doing so.

However, I realize that things have changed since Mr. Jobs made his announcement. He has since stepped down as the company's CEO and was lost way too young to illness. But much has been made about the fact that his spirit lives on at the company.


Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential weblog, where this was initially posted under the title When will Facetime be an industry standard?. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

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