The contrast couldn't have been starker. The Consumer Electronics Show's chaos form-fitted to Las Vegas while in San Francisco, the Moscone Center drew the faithful to Apple's Macworld. But this year, Macworld trumped CES in a way that may not be fully understood for some time. To be sure, Vegas saw a flood of "wow!" products last week, amid a battle over which box would form the center of the digital home--the TV or the PC. But if you can't get a cab in Vegas during CES, neither can you get standardization and architectural agreement--or even a glimmer of it. Unless fixed, this will end up being the

CES crowd's Achilles' heel. Bill Gates himself made the understatement of the conference during his keynote: "The key thing missing is connectivity. That's what we as an industry have to deliver on."

The big wow at CES lay in various attempts at getting Web video into your living room, to morph what the pundits are calling the "lean forward" PC experience into the "lean back" couch potato way of life. Watching it from afar, it looked like cars trying to get through a major intersection during a power outage. "All the current products are flawed because they are dealing with a subset of the Internet," Sling Media CEO Blake Kirkorian told our man Rick Merritt (story, page 1).

Apple won the day, but not because it rolled out the cool-looking iPhone at Macworld, news that eclipsed anything that came out of the desert for two days straight (story, page 10). It won for the less publicized but more intriguing Apple TV, formerly known as iTV. This is a $300 box that plugs into a flat-panel TV and will play media stored on your Mac or PC on the television screen. It blends lean-forward and lean-back. It's not the answer, but it's a start.

Some used to think Microsoft's Xbox was the Trojan horse Redmond was using to take over the home. Hasn't happened. But it could happen with Apple TV. Apple gets the man-machine interface issues. It gets multimedia, gets consumer. Game over. Right?

Not quite.

Apple has succeeded because it has always lived in a closed environment. No need to sit in tedious standards sessions when you have your own. It's easy to work out interface and interoperability issues when you reside on an island. But to scale in the home will require playing well with others. At CES, the opposite could be seen: CE companies that haven't gotten Apple to open up have bent a little themselves. Philips, for example, rolled out new hi-fi systems that serve as docking stations for the iPod.

But no one wants to make a living building what amounts to connectors for Apple products. So everyone's running around trying to capture a piece of a much larger puzzle--one that continues to confound consumers. Apple is in the best position to put the pieces together, but the rest of the CE world isn't about to concede. The really entertaining outcome would be if a company in the model of a TiVO or a Sling Media, without the baggage of any existing CE vendors, comes from out of nowhere to solve the problem.

We don't have to wait for a new processor or DSP; all the technological building blocks are there. It will just take someone to, um, think differently.