"Stop, hey, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down."
           -- For What It's Worth, Stephen Stills

That sound, the one emanating Wednesday from the stage at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and reverberating throughout the blogosphere and interwebs, the one heard in literally millions of conversations at lunch counters and water coolers and dinner tables across the globe, was the sound of another ding in the universe.

Once all the snickering about feminine hygiene finally dies down, once Apple finally puts the iPad into the retail chain that saw 50,000,000 people walk through the doors in the most recent fiscal quarter, once people -- aside from jaded technology journalists and geekazoids -- get the iPad in their hands, Apple's description of it as a "magical and revolutionary" product will begin to come into focus.

Why?

The genius of Steve Jobs and the little computer company he founded just 34 years ago has always been in making products people didn't know they know how to use, products that people didn't know how they could use before the products were invented. Some may call that making products in search of markets. Some may point to failures such as the Newton and the Cube and say, "no way." They will be wrong.

If one thing has been proved during the global economic downturn, crisis, debacle, recession -- whatever you call the contagion that has plagued financial markets and the confidence of millions worldwide during the past couple of years -- it is that the Internet is not going away. People and their communication needs and social interactions are ever increasingly tied to the Internet and to lifestyles characterized by nothing more pervasive -- regardless where in the the world you look -- than mobility.

The iPad is the first device perfectly suited to meet these needs for the broadest cross-section of people and, while imitations and alternate takes on the concept will surely follow in its wake, while improvements to its operating software and its own hardware configuration are sure to roll out just as consistently as they have done for Apple's other products, the iPad is destined to become as revolutionary and iconic as the laptop computer, the portable media player and the smartphone -- every single one of which is a product category for which Apple set and maintains the gold standard.

Ding!