Last week, without much Fanfare, Apple announced their new OS, dubbed Mountain Lion, in keeping with the Feline theme.

Kudos to the A(pple)-Team to make the announcement as almost an afterthought but timed to coincide with Social Media Week.

One can almost Hear John “Hannibal” Smith’s classic one liner,  “I love it when a plan comes together”.

Let us reiterate ,  We last visited Apple in iTV, a window into Apple’s endgame.   ,  I mentioned that

“taking an Apple product out of the context of the Apple Ecosystem is missing the point. You might say that you arent comparing Apples to Apples…. . iCloud … is the element that breathes life into the ecosystem. A line is drawn in the sand and  everything till then was BC – before Cloud. It allows members of the Apple enabled tribe to become citizens in this ecosystem. Suddenly, every Apple device becomes a conduit to channel information and media from the cloud.”

In Apple world, the future is a shiny cloud. In a statement announcing Mountain Lion,  Apple called it “the first OS X release built with iCloud in mind.

“Apple’s not merging Mac OS X and iOS,” said Michael Gartenberg of Gartner research. “But they are making them feel the same. And that shows that the ecosystem is more important than the device or even the platform.” Apple understands that it is all about enabling engagement and that technology should  be unobtrusive and get out of the way.

For all the futurists, iCloud makes sense, from Knight Rider,  to Star Trek, to the Matrix, to Terminator,  to Minority Report, it was never about the interfaces, it was about content that was available through the interface. The technology simply served as a means of tapping into the knowledge and resources that were available wirelessly  through the ether.

Successful Internet companies  understand this as well, the Platforms upon which engagement is built are all but independent of interface. One can accessGoogle in all its iterations as well as Facebook from any interface one chooses of any size. The Collaborative Consumption of Collaboratively Creative Convergent Crowd-sourced, Crowd-Curated Content is what drives the growth of the collective tribe.

The promise of Personal computing, i.e. computing that is about ME, is fleshed out in a seamlessly integrated experience across its entire line of iInterfaces.

It may take another 2 years or so, but iCloud is the platform that Apple is banking on. At some point, Apple interfaces will  be like mobile phones, essentially free because the profit is made in the backend on the Cloud.

Next up :  Apple iOS – Doing it Social.