In mulling over the various critical articles about the iPad I’ve seen that the discussion seems to have become an oversimplified view of the world that reduces the choices to creation or consumption. This binary view of things splits the computing landscape into the camps of traditional PCs, be they Macs, Windows or Linux PCs, and this new type of device like the iPad and smartphones, driven primarily by tactile input.
There are a few missing pieces in this argument though, notably that the primary purpose of the majority of home computer purchases are ’to get on the Internet’. The Internet means many different things to many different people, but for people outside of IT, it is a means being able to find and communicate information. There any many ways of communicating in this environment. For some it’s being able to keep in touch via email, for others, it’s using a consolidated tool like FaceBook. Real-time chat and VOIP offer affordable means of maintaining contact with family and friends dispersed about the world.
The vast majority of people will never open an IDE, will never parse lines of code, will never do any kind of document management more complicated than keeping a household budget on a spreadsheet or a list of addresses for a wedding. Their preoccupation with computers is as tools to accomplish tasks that are the digital replacements of what went before. Mail by email, iPhoto & Picasa for the box of photos and negatives, Excel for the graph paper, scanned PDF files of their important documents and so on. The more creatively inclined will use tools like Garageband and Brushes or possibly even applications as complex as Photoshop. In almost all cases, they will use one tool for the job, whether its truly adapted for the task at hand or not simply because its the tool at hand.
The common thread here is that these people are actively creating, managing and interacting with information. They use tools to do so and the underlying component that enables these tools is the computer. The difference is that the computer itself is not a useful tool. It is simply the enabler and the interface required - it’s the toolbox and the work table. The difference here is that unlike most toolboxes, this one can be exceedingly complicated, cranky and requires considerable maintenance. For most people this aspect of their toolbox is not particularly useful to them, nor productive. When the toolbox breaks, it’s exceedingly frustrating since their knowledge of how to use the tools is not necessarily applicable to fixing the toolbox itself. I could list off a pile of stories from my tech support days dealing with highly educated telecom engineers that can design protocols and switches that couldn’t grasp the basics of their desktop computers. (Including those that unplugged it every night since nobody had thought to point out the Shutdown menu item…)
The appeal of the iPad is that it raises the bar in several unique ways:
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accessibility - it’s always on, just asleep so it’s immediately available when you need it.
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performance - the tactile interface reacts immediately - you are manipulating your information directly without mediation by a keyboard or a mouse.
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reliability - the iPhone OS, coupled with a curated application environment, is an exceedingly stable environment. In a worst case, troubleshooting consists simply of a reboot.
This is what many people have been looking for from computers for a while now: they want the tools, but without the bother of the toolbox that can misbehave or requires any kind of significant care and feeding. On the performance point, the distance between, ‘I want to…’ and having the tool available is exceedingly small - home button and swipe to wake, tap on mail and I’m there.
Mediation and limitations
The other difference is the issue of mediation: the presence of the toolbox in the classic computing model is always front and center. Windows displayed on the screen are full of administrative trivia required by the interface. The iPad is magical in the sense that when you enter an app, you aren’t opening another drawer on your toolbox, but rather the toolbox transforms itself into the tool in question. It becomes the screwdriver, the hammer, the vise-grips, the paint brush or whatever you need to work with. There is no visual clutter required by the toolbox itself.
The iPad is just the first salvo in the ability to bring these things to a larger public, without imposing the overhead that comes with traditional ‘computing’. There is a considerable learning curve associated with getting computers to do what you want them to do. There is also considerable housekeeping required with any current desktop operating system, that is more or less demanding and potentially opaque to anyone who is not a ‘computer person’.
Currently the environment is limited by the tools that are available to cross that creative/consumption divide, but much also depends on your definition of creation. Many in the IT world are still living in a document-centric world where anything that is not encapsulated in a convenient block of bits identified as a file is not considered with the same weight as other forms of information. I’ve had clients that refused to accept auto-generated html web site as documentation (accessible via local browsing) because it was a collection of little pieces, and not a ‘deliverable’ since it wasn’t all in a single Microsoft Office file format.
The shift from a document centric model to an information centric model
If your definition of creation is limited to creating files in Office formats then it’s true that the iPad with the current application suite is not the best tool for the job. But we are moving towards a more information centric model, where information lives on servers in various forms like editable pages.
An interesting point in a recent Paul Thurrott article about the iPad not being useful in a business environment highlights a very specific world-view that is the outgrowth of the current PC model. He sees knowledge workers as people who’s product is documents and everything about the Microsoft model is based on this point of view. Even their forays into the web world with things like Sharepoint are mostly just a fancy file server that uses http as the transport protocol and adds some additional metadata as a layer on top of the documents.
I disagree that as a knowledge worker my work consists of passing around files and commenting on them directly using Microsoft Office. The real work is done in my head, and the output is the synthesis of this reflection. The exchange of MS Office documents does happen to be the workflow in a number of business environments, but much of this is shifting towards better automated tools, where the document itself is generated by in-house tools that are used via web interfaces and backed by dynamic database applications. In these cases, the iPad is fully capable of participating with the other types of computing devices.
Going further, much of the job of a knowledge worker is ingesting massive amounts of information from various sources - consumption, if you will, but not the passive consumption of watching a film, but the active integration of new information in order to produce something new. In my workflow, the something new starts off life as a text file in SimpleNote, and may go directly from there to a message or a blog post, or it may go back to a computer for more intensive treatment of the presentation, but the core of the creation is happening on my iPad.
Update 17 sept 2010: well, creation was happening on my iPad until it got hijacked by my wife to play Plants vs. Zombies :-)