Keep taking the tablets
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past week you’ve probably heard how overwhelming hype gave way to underwhelming reality on Wednesday when Apple announced the iPad 2. Successor to the bizarrely successful iPad, launched just 12 months ago, the iPad 2 boasts a whole host of features that were missing from the original and whose addition is just enough to keep Apple ahead in the latest game they started.
Cameras? Check. Dual-core processor?. The things that were announced by Steve Jobs were things that could and should have been in the original iPad and things which do nothing to invigorate the market. These, along with the things that DIDN’T debut on Wednesday, probably tell us more about Apple’s business model than anything else.
What Apple do, have always done, and continue to do, is sell a lifestyle. This they do by creating and selling incredibly well designed hardware coupled with amazingly intuitive software to create a package that Just Works. They take a failing or flailing product category and breathe new life into it. Just as mp3 players existed before the iPod and smartphones existed before the iPhone, tablet computers existed before the iPad. I had the misfortune of trying quite a few of them and they were pretty universally woeful. The reason behind that is because the vast majority of tech companies have a ‘where can we go with what we have?’ attitude. Apple, on the other hand, have a ‘what do we need to get what we want?’ attitude.
The problem is, they also have a ‘bare minimum’ attitude. The iPad COULD have had all of the features of the iPad 2 and more. But why bother? When you’re innovating a category to the extent that it pretty much becomes a new category there’s no need to produce a device which does everything it ever could - all you need is a device that does enough to make people buy it. For the second generation you listen to user feedback and see what you can do but, more importantly, you look at what the competition is doing. As usual, the competition is playing a game of ‘catchup and extend’ whereby they try to come up with something that’s as good as the original but with a unique or enhanced feature which seeks to make the original look pale by comparison.
This is in no means unique in the tech world. There have always been, and will always be, companies that come up with something and other companies that take that work and run with it. The problem at the moment is that is seems Apple is the only company that’s capable of any kind of original thought. I suspect you could count on the fingers of one leg the number of companies that had tablet computers of the ‘iPad type’ in development and now there are many. But to have one company calling the shots is bad for everyone because, as we saw on Wednesday, they can come up with a point release which catches them up to the opposition, call it a major release and send the world into a spin once again.
The iPad 2 is not a bad device. In fact, it’s almost certainly a very good device and will sell in the millions. But it’s neither amazing nor revolutionary and the reason for that is that no one is providing a decent enough counterpoint to Apple. Until that happens - until there’s a tech company that understands not just technology but people too - then what we will get is fanfare-led innovation followed by ‘me too’ products and complacency.
So, you can either drink the Kool-Aid or not. But Apple’s going nowhere and neither are its profits.
