Apple to make iPhone SDK 'roadmap' announcement next week

Apple on Wednesday mailed out its invitation to a Cupertino campus event next Thursday about its iPhone SDK. The intriguing part of the invitation is the promise of a roadmap for developers and for customers in the enterprise space. This is something different from Apple.

Please join us to learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK andsome exciting new enterprise features.

Now, some other Apple watchers are reminding us that this is a week later than Steve Jobs promised in an open letter back in October. And this was is in a month with an extra day for the leap year yet!

Still, a week late isn't really late (maybe that's because I live in a university neighborhood where everyone expects a grace period of a few minutes for a class).

This is just over a week after Apple abruptly pulled the plug on the Xserve RAID product line and passed its server storage over to a third-party developer.

A storage professional told me last week that if Apple has any expectation of making any kind of penetration into the business or enterprise market, it must be more open with its coprporate clients.

"Sun and HP have certain terms and conditions for this kind of product. They announce the end of life 30 days in advance [of the new product release] and then allow orders for up to 6 months after that announcement. What [Apple] has happening this week, is a whole bunch of people who are ready to buy XRAIDs today and can't buy them," he said.

Apple usually puts its software developers under strict NDAs at its developer conference. While I doubt we will see much of the iPhone roadmap next week, perhaps we will see more of the developer roadmap made public.

On the developer front, I also note that Apple on Monday posted Adobe Systems' AIR download for Tiger or Leopard. It lets users run rich Internet applications on the desktop.