Apple's non-disclosure warning is for whom, exactly?

Apple Inc. posted the warning in the photo, below, at the registration area of the World Wide Developers Conference held this week in San Francisco.

It is not really all that spectacular as non-disclosure agreements and similar warnings go in the IT and communications industry. However, it still seems kind of funny in light of my having been escorted to the men's room, twice, by a member of Apple's p.r. team on Monday. I blogged about that predicament already.

What is actually more interesting about the sign is, Who is the intended audience? All the developers that I met at WWDC talked in wildy exuberant fashion about iPhone 3G, and I don't think any of them intentionally would give away any of Apple's intellectual property, and I have never asked them to do so.

A few developers did say some sarcastic things about Steve Jobs and his legendary secrecy and paranoia about competition. But all of them seemed totally faithful to following the non-disclosure rules because they can benefit so much from application development with iPhone 3G and the App Store.

One reader of a piece that I wrote on Apple's faithful and the big-picture impact iPhone 3G could have globally when it is distributed in 70 countries really spoke for many developers that I met. They all basically want to be able to build and market their unusual applications in a fairly simple way, through something like the App Store that makes user downloads easy and has few up-front complications and conditions. So, all of them clearly don't want to screw up any goodwill they have with Apple.

That sign at the registration area might have been there for people like me, I decided, since Apple clearly wouldn't want me to rush into an interview room, grab a device and immediately start cracking it open. (I could identify the components, but I would be fairly hopeless at much else.) Press and analysts were banned from all but the keynote, so maybe the sign was further putting reporters on notice.

But the sign seemed, also, mostly useless to just about anybody, except the lawyers. It reminded me of the sign outside the fancy hotel I visited in Dallas that ordered visitors not to bring in their handguns. (You either will or you won't bring in a gun or steal IP, and ranting and raving by Sheriff Jobs won't matter.)

The sign also made me wonder if Apple hadn't actually fallen behind on its second-generation development of iPhone by a few weeks. Maybe Apple had originally wanted a final version of the Software Developer Kit finished well before this week's news.

Actually, I could care less that the final product won't be shipping until July 11. It totally makes sense to have apps that actually work on it. Still, some non-Apple observers were a little stunned that Apple didn't actually seem to have an iPhone 3G available for photographs, and only showed slides at the keynote of what it can do. We trust their demos were real. I'd be interested in knowing: does anybody think waiting until July 11 is a big deal?

What all this says is that Apple has really entered into a new realm. It has enormous influence in the market for smart phones. It might want to weigh how its paranoia and distrust of just about everybody is taken.