Wow - there’s a huge pile of confusion in this article. A little judicious use of Google to fact check before writing would be in keeping for someone so well informed about search technologies… Is The iPad A Disappointment? Depends When You Sold Your AOL Stock. - John Battelle’s SearchblogI hardly know where to start on this, so I’m just going to try and hit a few of the highlights. First off, his kick off point:
Sorry Apple fanboys, but the use case is missing, even if the thing is gorgeous and kicks ass for so many other reasons. Until the computing UI includes culturally integrated voice recognition and a new approach to browsing (see #4), the “iTablet” is just Newton 2.0. Of course, the Newton was just the iPhone, ten years early and without the phone bit….and the Mac was just Windows, ten years before Windows really took hold, and Next was just ….oh never mind.
If Apple had announced the iPad first, then I agree that there is a high likelihood that it would have ended up being another Newton, despite the elegance of the execution. Why? Because a fully touch enabled interface was too much of a change. But we now have almost 3 years of people using iPhones, with simple and effective advertising that offer an education in how to use this kind of interface. So we’ve already tackled the worst of the learning curve associated with a new technology and UI.
But where he’s really out there is his mythical use case. It seems that he has such as specific view of how people use and interact with technology that he’s lost touch with how the “Normals” use their computers. Most people use their computers as communications conduits: mail, chat, web and light document work.
Culturally contextual voice recognition and such are still a long ways out and despite everything, not ideal for manipulating on screen objects. Until we have some kind of true AI for interpreting speech, it’s just not going to happen. And the horsepower required will mean that it certainly won’t show up in mobile devices as their first port of call.
Two million sold in two months would seem to say that it’s filling some use cases out there.
What I missed, at least in my initial prediction, was how entirely hermetic and “un-weblike” the iPad would end up being. Like many others, I was surprised at how complete Apple’s disdain is for traditional computing models - including its own Macintosh. The iPad would not be an open development environment - instead it adopted the iPhone model of command and control. The iPad would not allow you to run Mac applications - only iPad/iPhone specific apps approved by Apple would work, and that meant no Microsoft Office, thank you very little. The iPad wouldn’t even let you cut and paste - an innovation Apple pioneered - and worst of all, it seemed, the iPad wouldn’t use Flash - a proxy, as it were, for “the rest of the web that Steve Jobs didn’t quite like very much.”
I think that there’s a lot of stuff going on in his head that doesn’t quite make out past the keyboard here. I’m not sure how the iPad (or any computer, for that matter) is web-like or not. And in any case, it has the a best in breed WebKit based browser built-in, and other browsers are starting to make it past the App store gatekeepers like Opera, Mini Browser Pro, Pro Browser… So how can you say that it’s not weblike or at the very least web friendly? From a practical aspect, it’s the best web browsing experience currently available, including desktop computers.
As for disdain, he’s entirely missed the point, not to mention a lot of recent history. Apple doesn’t disdain the traditional computing models, it’s a matter of the right tool for the job. We’ve seen just how well Windows Mobile has succeeded in porting the desktop metaphor to mobile devices. The successes in this arena come from taking a fresh look at how best to interact with a mobile device at various scales. We can see clearly that the iPhone OS is better model for this job : witness Android, WebOS and Windows Mobile 7 who all use similar models.
On the Office front, I see a very nice suite from Apple, plus various competitors like Documents To Go and Office2 HD. If Microsoft chooses not to play, that’s their call before it becomes Apple’s. From a practical perspective, Apple has no interest in blocking Office, since the additional level of compatibility means the iPad is even more attractive to consumers. And at the end of the day Apple is a hardware company that sells to the mass market.
Where is he getting his information from? There are 2M of them out there and he hasn’t yet checked with anyone to confirm that cut and paste works just fine on the iPad?
So let me ask you one question, right now: Can you link to an app on your iPad? And I don’t mean a link to download the app on iTunes, folks. I mean, can you create an ecosystem of links, deep into your iPad application(s), links that connect your particular activity stream inside that app with other streams, other links, and other intentions across the web? In ways that create new values, both predictable and unpredicted?
The answer is no. Anymore than you could link to pages deep inside AOL, back when it was a walled garden.
Umm - actually, yes you can link to an iPad application and applications can send information back and forth using registered URLs that contain messages. However, they are not attempting to recreate the web. We already have the web for that. The new values that we’re seeing from this platform are all about innovative ways to interact with information, whether it comes from the web, your internal Oracle Business Indicators, or entered by the user. (Note: the Oracle suite haven’t yet been upgraded to fully iPad native - they’re still iPhone apps).