“The browser wars are over. Moz doesn’t matter. IE is irrelevant. Opera is doing a swan song. Why? In a word, iTunes. And the implications for everyone from Web publishers to you, the hyper-clocked tricked-out geek, are enormous. In fact, being the hyper geek means you can cash in on this trend now. You heard it here first,” David Strom writes for Tom’s Hardware.

“What makes iTunes such a sea change in how we use content is very simple to explain. The newest version allows you to search and download podcasts from Apple’s directory, and in doing so bypasses the Web, email, RSS feeds, and a raft of other software and utilities to search and view content. And it does its work so easily and so effortlessly that you will want to use it to grab all sorts of content from the Internet, even if they aren’t audio programs that you will ever want to run on your iPod,” Strom writes. “That is exactly where Apple is heading, and while I have my own love/hate relationship with Apple, what they are doing is pure genius.”

“In a few years, if Apple is successful, their directory server, their extensions to RSS to include content tags especially for iTunes, their portal if you will – will be the number one destination on the Internet,” Strom writes. “There is a reason why the EU is now looking at why Windows Media Player, rather than IE, is the true leading edge of the Microsoft Monopoly. Too bad Microsoft didn’t lock up the portal market like Apple just did with iTunes and its Music Store. This has nothing to do with playing music or watching videos. It is how we all will be getting our content in the future, coming to a computer near you.”

MacDailyNews Take: Shhhh, David. Couldn’t you keep your big yap shut for a little while longer?

Full article here.