Blogosphere: Forrester chews on Apple's future

Pundits often debate whether Apple will ever make a serious play into enterprise IT, but the analysts at Forrester Research Inc. have other ideas. In a report called “The Future of Apple,” the consultancy predicted that by 2013 Apple will release a network-enabled clock radio, a digital picture frame, and a “Genius Bar” that makes house calls just like the Geek Squad. Basically, Forrester thinks Apple will take over your living room, rather than your enterprise’s IT infrastructure.

“Good thing Forrester Research doesn’t run Apple, because if it did the company would be well on its way to insolvency,” Digital Daily blogger John Paczkowski wrote. “So Apple, after reinventing the desktop UI, the digital media player, and the phone, will set its sights on the lowly clock radio and picture frame. Really? If Apple’s product dev team pitched Forrester’s clock radio idea to CEO Steve Jobs, he would probably hurl them one-by-one into rush-hour traffic from the roof of 1 Infinite Loop.”

Henry Blodget, who writes for Silicon Valley Insider, agreed: “Be honest: Are you really going to obsess about the release-date of an Apple 3G wireless clock radio? Okay, excuse us while we yawn. This is the best Forrester could come up with? Let us pray that it’s not the best Steve Jobs can come up with. You want Apple’s stock to keep rocketing higher? Then you’re going to have to help Steve do better than this.”

VentureBeat blogger MG Siegler said he could do better than Forrester and looked into his own Apple crystal ball. “I would expect Apple to come out and challenge the exciting things Microsoft is doing with its Surface computing initiative by releasing large, Multi-touch displays meant for the home and for places of work,” he wrote. “I would also expect the Apple TV to grow up in to a full media center hub with capabilities such as DVR and the ability to store your entire film collection on one device. Oh, and the ability to play games.”

“Too often, analysts think about things as they are now and extrapolate that out into the future for trends,” he continued. “It’s more likely that there will be something completely new by 2013 that Apple — or someone else comes up with that revolutionizes the technology world just as the iPod and iPhone have done. Think different, right?”