Technologies like Flash and Silverlight allow developers to create rich content that can be delivered via a web browser. There is no gatekeeper regarding who may run such content as long as the user has a web browser that supports the plug-in technology. This open access model directly threatens Apple’s obsession with retaining tight control over what applications are allowed to run on the iPad.
Apple is so reluctant to allow users to control the software that runs on the iPad that the device even lacks such basic interfaces as a USB port. Failing to support Flash and other plug-in technologies is presented to the public as an attempt to shield users from buggy software that could cause the iPad to crash. Yet Apple seems content with supporting Flash technology for Macintosh computer systems. If Flash is so buggy, perhaps Apple should eliminate support on the Macintosh computer lines as well?
For several years now I’ve been lamenting the fact that social networks have been divorced from web mail. Seems like a natural fit, right? If you’re already logging into a site that knows who your friends are, why not help me keep in touch with those friends beyond the simple “send an email” option?
What is Google Buzz? Imagine your Facebook feed interspersed with your email, and that’s pretty much it. When one of your contacts updates her Google status, you’ll see it in your Gmail inbox, and you can comment on it, making it show up in her Gmail inbox again. Adding a little jab at Foursquare, Google will also allow you to geo-tag these status updates, which makes perfect sense if you’re updating from a mobile device.
So it’s fun, it’s cool, but…it’s a couple years too late. Most of us just finished building out our Facebook friends lists, and we have co-workers, classmates, and our parents on it now, so I don’t really need another way to announce my status updates to my contacts. Will I use it? Yeah, occasionally, but I have far more friends on Facebook than I have contacts on Gmail. Not everyone uses Gmail, y’know?
This is not a new concept or a new feature, it’s just a more convenient tool for current Gmail users to keep their friends and family up-to-date. Hopefully TechCrunch will stop flogging this as soon as the “buzz” dies down.
So after the iPad announcement on Wednesday, it seems like much of the tech world has been panning the iPad for not having the features they were hoping for, like a camera, multitasking, more storage, etc.
So today we’re starting to hear more voices defending the iPad, saying that it does have a reason for being, that it does have a customer, and that customer is…moms. I first heard this from two friends of mine, then saw it on Greg Meyer’s blog, and then on Cnet and TechCrunch. The argument goes that moms don’t like laptops because they’re too bulky to carry around, but they still want to read, do light emailing, and web browse, but a smartphone is too small for these tasks, so the iPad fills the bill. The iPad is like the Nintendo Wii of tablets - it’s targeted at a mass market, not the hardcore like the PS3 and Xbox, so stop complaining that it doesn’t have every feature under the sun.
While this argument is tempting, it fails in a couple key places. First, no device that fails to win the early adopters will capture mass market support. The Wii was a hit among early adopters - primarily the under 30 set. They put it on their wishlists, got their moms to buy it for them, and then when they realized it was so easy, they showed their moms how to use it. It succeeded because of its simplicity, and with a lot of help from a $250 price point.
The iPad, on the other hand, looks simple, but really isn’t. Consider a couple of every day use cases in the form of this imaginary conversation with my mom:
“Joel, I want to watch this DVD on the plane. Can I do that on my iPad.”
“Sure, just rip the DVD on your laptop then import it into iTunes, and download it to your iPad.”
“Um…how do I do that?”
“Nevermind. I’ll do it for you.”
“Joel, I want to store a bunch of word documents on my iPad so I can have them handy when I do my volunteer work, how do I do that?”
“Um…there’s an app for that. I’ll do it for you.”
“Joel, I want to send the photos on my digital camera to your aunt. Do I do that on my iPad?”
“Do you have a 30-pin to mini USB adapter or a 30-pin to SD card adapter?”
“A what?”
“Just use your laptop.”
“Joel, I want to buy an ebook and read it while I travel.”
“Well, now you’re in business.”
Ultimately, it’s a device that has a form factor and UI that may be attractive to moms, but it requires tech savvy to actually use it for anything more than what mom already does on her smartphone or laptop. So good thing mom has you, the early adopter around to help her use it. And you’ll probably have to buy it for her, too - how many moms are going to shell out $500 on this kind of gadgetry?
So there you have it: the iPad will sell like hotcakes. To the moms of early adopters, early adopters who are nice enough to buy it for them. I’m sure Apple’s shareholders are pleased to hear that.
Stevie Jobs yesterday announced the much-anticipated iPad, a tablet device that he says fills the gap between smartphones and laptops. There have been a flurry of articles since then for and against the iPad, mainly focusing on what features it has or is missing, but I’d like to look at it from a higher level, looking at the product positioning and the problems it is trying to solve.
In introducing the iPad, Steve asserts that it is “better (than smartphones and laptops) at these tasks”: browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, eBooks. But the product he then demonstrated didn’t seem to be better at any of those tasks.
Browsing and email: these will always be easier on a laptop that has a physical, full-size (or close to full-size) keyboard with a mouse/touchpad/pointing device. The iPad’s touchscreen does not make web-browsing or email easier, nor does its small size. The iPad will be adequate for short email or browsing sessions, but for many of us our smartphone is already good enough for that.
Photos, video and music: it’s a nice photo browser, but to watch movies you’ll need some sort of stand. The hard drive (64GB max) is too small to be good at storing any of these - it would fill up with 10 DVDs, and I know many people whose music collections alone are larger than 64GB. To upload pictures from your camera to the iPad, you’ll need to stock up on dongles because it only has one 30-pin port for connectors (no USB). This device (being based on iPod/iPhone software) is clearly intended to complement a laptop or PC with larger storage capacity, not replace it.
eBooks: this is the one application in which the iPad outshines smartphones and laptops. And it could be argued that the addition of color (neato!) makes it better than the Kindle, but for people who read for long stretches the Kindle’s e-ink screen will still make it the better option, assuming they aren’t reading magazines or textbooks that rely on color.
Apple lost sight of the fact that tech devices must simplify our lives. The iPod made it easy to listen to music (and later, watch movies) on the go. The iPhone gave us a world of applications with a slick interface in our pockets. It let us take pictures without a camera and navigate without a dedicated GPS, and it let us do a myriad of light computing tasks without a laptop. The iPod and iPhone both revolutionized their markets and changed the way we live, but the iPad fails in this regard.
The iPad is too big to be truly mobile, and it’s too small and limited to replace a laptop. Rather than simplifying my life, the iPad is making it more complicated - it’s a third device I have to maintain, load media onto, and buy dongles for. And all this starts at $499? No thank you, Apple.
Even Hitler doesn’t want one.
For more details, here’s a sampling of the extensive coverage out there:
Three cheers for Valleywag, for calling it like it is. Comscore has been a scam for years, and now it’s downright committing blackmail. Read the Valleywag piece for all the color, but the gist is that websites must pay Comscore $10k/mo in order to get accurately measured, and this is huge because ad buyers at all the big advertisers and agencies rely on Comscore stats (which I can vouch for from personal experience.) Yay Valleywag, boo Comscore.
Amazon today announced that they are making an app store available for the Kindle. What they need to do is go back to the engineers and have them crank out a color Kindle, so developers can make halfway interesting apps for it. Mashable opines that this is “a huge development that completely changes the dynamics of the impending Tablet wars,” but when you consider that the imminent Apple tablet is sure to have an app store, a color screen, and will likely sell more units in their first year than the Kindle has sold cumulatively, this announcement amounts to squat. There’s a reason Amazon doesn’t talk about how many Kindles they’ve sold.
Amazon knows they’re losing all their momentum to Apple, and they’re grasping at straws. They conned EA into giving them a quote for their press release, ““Working with Amazon, we look forward to bringing some of the world’s most popular and fun games to Kindle and their users,” but what’s missing here is any mention of a specific game. EA probably hasn’t started work on any Kindle games and may very well just wait and see if the platform is going to shape up. They certainly won’t release any of their premier game licenses on a black and white screen.
If you’re a regular reader here, you know how much I love (read: hate) tagclouds. In the vast majority of implementations, they only serve SEO benefits and are almost impossible for users to read aside from the 2-3 largest links. Most are an utter waste of space.
So when I was sent this example which demonstrates everything that is unholy about tagclouds, I had to share.
Seven months before my prediction of Kindle’s slide into obscurity, Barnes and Noble today released their e-reader called the Nook. With wifi, 3G, a color touchscreen, and several other unique goodies, the device is available for pre-order for $259, the same price point as the Kindle. Amazon did well to jump-start the e-reader market segment, but now is the time for them to license out the Kindle software and leave the hardware to people who really know how to make hardware.
In what alternate universe does a service that after just over two years in existence already has a 22 percent market share count as something that has yet to catch on? This is exactly what happens when market researchers trained in the 60’s are allowed to research things they don’t understand. Any new online service would be thrilled to have a 22% market share of Gen Y, particularly a service that requires them to actually post content publicly to participate, rather than consuming content or having private conversations as they do on most social networks.
PMN is showing that they are hopelessly out of touch by positioning Twitter against the entire social networking space at large - it’s like saying “90% of adults 18-24 have cars, but only 20% are Toyota - Toyota has yet to catch on!” Yet again I am severely disappointed by market researchers, as well as the press who mindlessly regurgitate these releases.
Microsoft has now officially announced the relaunch and re-branding of Microsoft Live Search as Bing.com. One of the biggest branding blunders in Internet history, “Live Search” will thankfully go the way of the dodo.
Take this as a lesson: make sure your brand sounds like a brand. If I were to tell you that Microsoft was launching a product called “Cool Search” would you guess that it was on cool.com? Unlikely. You’d probably look on Microsoft.com, or perhaps coolsearch.com, both of which would be disappointing. When your brand sounds too much like a plain old adjective, you need to attach the .com.
They could have avoided all this and capitalized on the excellent domain Live.com by using the name Microsoft Live.com Search. It is a mouthful, but it would give you a much better idea of where to go to search. But now, with their users thoroughly confused, they’ve decided to give up and rebrand entirely to Bing.com. Some may criticize the lighthearted and nonsensical nature of the word “bing”, but I applaud the move - it’s short, it’s memorable, and if their new features are competitive with the other search engines, it’ll help build brand awareness and loyalty. Bing won’t challenge Google anytime soon, but it would be nice to have a viable alternative.
My name is Joel Downs, and I've been working in social media and online product management since 1994. In a former life, I founded Answerbag.com, one of the top 3 social Q&A sites on the web, and Gamers.com.
Formation Media is my current project My resume My RSS feed My twitter
