Michael Gartenberg

When Apple changed its corporate name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc., it marked the first step in the transition from Apple's focus on the personal computer as the hub of consumer digital life to an ecosystem driven by a diverse collection of connected devices and services.

Tying this ecosystem together is iCloud, and it's the growing presence of iCloud in Apple products that marks the transition from the personal computer for the consumer. In short, Apple-like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others-is driving hard to teach consumers about the personal cloud experience and get them to set their expectations that content will flow seamlessly from device to device and location to location.

Business has had to cope with the challenge of social media for years. In the past, I've discussed how the rewards of using instant messaging and blogging at work are offset by several pitfalls, and I've laid out the challenges that IT and business managers face in dealing with these technologies.

Any business that hasn't addressed those issues with clearly communicated policies by now is behind the times, because today there is much more than just blogging and IM to think about. The rise of social media in the workplace is even more important to confront, because they have made it far easier to blog and interact socially on company time.

It was one of the hottest-selling items in the consumer electronics market in late 2007 and into 2008. At a time when many vendors were struggling to sell PCs, it was selling consistently in Amazon's top 10 list of technology devices. Sony first dismissed the category but finally embraced it. The lone holdout in the industry was Apple, which ignored quarterly advice from financial analysts and stubbornly refused to enter the category. Apple was correct, the analysts wrong.

If you haven't guessed, I'm talking about the short-lived phenomenon known as the netbook. At this point, it's looking as if netbooks will be no more than a historical footnote, a bump on the road between PCs and media tablets, such as the iPad.

Apple has taken a lot of flak for Steve Jobs's comments at the iPad 2 launch event, which heralded the coming of the post-PC world.

If you mention that statement on Twitter, you'll immediately be confronted by couple of your followers over the fact that the iPad 2 itself is dependent on a PC for activation and syncing content. Which is to say, most commentators have completely missed the point... and likely failed Latin in High School as well.

One of the more fun parts of my job is getting to see new devices and services as they come to market. Lately, though, it's been less fun, because even the segmens of the market that recently provided the most interesting gadgets are rapidly becoming commoditized. It's hard for me to get excited about a new smartphone or laptop when most of them are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. At both the Consumer Electronics Show and the Mobile World Congress, a plethora of new smartphones was unveiled. Most of them will fail to capture the imagination of consumers, and few will be remembered six months from now.

But the Motorola Atrix leapt out at me with some real differentiation. It's an Android phone and very capable, but that's not anything special right now. It's powered by a Tegra 2 dual-core chip with a super-high-resolution display on AT&Ts 4G network. That's the type of distinction that makes it the best Android device you can buy... this week. It's the sort of distinction that's often short lived.

I know you're not going to believe this, but amid the mobile-device revolution of the past ten years, one of the most important spaces in the digital world has been almost entirely ignored.

I am talking, of course, about the wrist.

There's a great episode of The West Wing where Donna, one of the White House staffers, accidentally votes for President Bartlet's opponent in the election via absentee ballot. Mortified at her mistake, she heads to the nearest polling place to try to swap votes with someone who was planning on voting for the other guy, thus canceling out her error.

When she finally finds someone (a navy lieutenant who also works in the White House, as it turns out) who's willing to swap votes, she offers to show him a photocopy of her absentee ballot as proof about how she voted. The lieutenant's response was classic: "No, no. It's an honor thing, right?".

Apple TV sometimes feels like the Rodney Dangerfield of Apple products: it gets no respect. No less than Steve Jobs calls it not a product line, but a hobby. Hobbies are funny, though. Stick with one long enough and it can transform from side interest to full-time business.

While Apple hasn't been overly forthcoming about Apple TV's future, I believe the current iteration ( Macworld rated 4 out of 5 mice ) is going to fast go from hobby to business--and more importantly, become a core part of Apple's strategic plans for the consumer digital home.

A year ago, Google began discussing the idea of offering a full operating system based on its Chrome browser. This month, Google revealed further details of its plans and began shipping a first run of test units so that developers, reporters and analysts could begin to evaluate Google's efforts. I've been testing one of these units over the last week or so, and I found Google's efforts impressive. The question is whether Google has created a new environment that will challenge more traditional PC operating systems such as Mac OS and Windows, or whether Chrome will be the latest challenger that ends up with niche success at best.

Chrome OS isn't a new idea. The idea of network computers that deliver all their functionality from somewhere other than the hard drive has been around for more than a decade. Efforts from Sun and Oracle to jump-start this market failed, but the world is a very different place than it was a decade ago. This is the cloud era, and Google has wholeheartedly embraced it.

The end of the year is often jam-packed at both work and home, and New Year's resolutions either fall by the wayside or get restricted to the same ones every year - lose weight, exercise more and get healthier. While these are certainly important goals, getting a better job or keeping the one you have is right up there. With that in mind, it might be smart to get a jump on some New Year's resolutions for your career that might just help make your annual performance report a little brighter.

1. Think ROI

Last month, Steve Jobs took to the stage, most likely for the final time this year, to launch a new version of iLife and new updates to the MacBook Air line. More importantly, he spent a lot of time talking about the product line as a whole, how the Mac and iOS platforms relate to each other and what the future of the Mac might look like with the next generation of OS X, now known as Lion. There's been a lot of speculation as to what the ramifications of all this are. Here's my take on what it all means.

The Mac is a business, not a hobby. In year dominated by iOS devices such as the iPhone 4, iPad and even Apple TV (which, it seems, is iOS based) some wondered about Apple's commitment to the Mac. At WWDC, there was hardly a mention of OS X. At the All Things D conference, Steve Jobs referred to PCs as "trucks"; useful, but with limited appeal. Apple's October event was a strong reminder that the Mac is very much a business not a hobby (a quick look at Apple's numbers confirm that). While iOS devices do more and more each day, there are some things that are (and will be for the foreseeable future) done better by a personal computer.

At what's become a fall ritual, Apple refreshed the iPod product line last month. But in the aftermath of the traditional fall iPod unveiling, one question kept coming up over and over again: Why is Apple still building iPods in an iPhone world? Are music devices still relevant? And was this year's event the last one of its kind?

Those questions are all superficially interesting, and all of them can be answered in three parts.