Once again, Google and Apple get it, the rest of us don't. The revolution will not be televised. If you can solve a major problem I have, I don't care whether you try and solve all my other problems.
Quite so, treating feature sets as a laundry list or a shopping list is a recipe for mediocrity. The most important features of every product are implicit: usability, performance, efficiency, aesthetics, robustness, etc. Every product has these aspects, if you ignore them then you will fail to deliver on them.
The really slick companies, like Apple and Google, have these concepts baked into their DNA, which is why they seem to be able to take everyone else's lunch money whenever they damned well feel like it.
It's better to try and succeed at making something simple, coherent, and excellent (like a well seasoned, perfectly cooked steak) than it is to try and fail at making something overly complicated (like a 12-course meal, which ends up as 7-courses, some of them missing key ingredients, burnt, or raw).
You don't get points from the judges for degree of difficulty.
You don't get points from the judges for degree of difficulty.
Well, in most cases you'd have a "judge" you actually do. But I think the point you were trying to make - that normal people don't care if you made a really good effort and the task was really hard, they just care about the final taste, is 100% correct.
Well, the only time when ordinary people care that a task is hard is when it's difficulty been floridly demonstrated to them - when they've been wanting something for a long time and someone comes up with something that barely succeeds, you might get a pass.
Apps with barely functional features that a group of users have been chafing for often succeed.
But if you're trying to sell someone on something they didn't know they might want, if that something works in a clumsy and unreliable fashion, you probably convince the person the whole thing is a poor idea.
That's not a problem. Paint me the picture of when you REALLY wish you could hand around photos, movies, and web pages. 95% of the time, methinks, it's when you are NOT toting around a laptop/tablet (i.e. it's a smartphone problem).
I can see the market for road warriors who do demos and/or fly a lot, rich folk who love tech, etc. Other than, "I'd love to have one on my coffee table from time to time", I don't see a draw for most people that'd cause them to cough up $600-$1000.
And, for the record, the "it's a computer for non-geeks" argument is pretty weak, IMO. My parents HATE onscreen touch keyboards and print everything.
The problem I'm hoping it will solve is a great portable pdf reader. If the iPad doesn't solve this problem hopefully something else will and I'll buy that. Of course having bought an iPad (or other tablet) I'll no doubt use other functions, but reading pdf docs is the problem I want solved and whoever solves it the best gets my money.
Whatever anyone says is a reason for them, the naysayers don't find convincing. Coincidence?
* I want a simple, small, light tablet.
Naysayers: You can't do Photoshop on it, so no one will want it.
* I want to give it to my mom so she can just browse, with no tech support.
Naysayers: No moms are going to buy it, how many people will buy it for their moms?
Good article and the core idea is so spot on that I did not mind it riding the iPad publicity wave...
This made me chuckle:
"""For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability."""
That quote pretty much sums up enterprise/government software consulting and sales. A committee will come up with a grocery list of features that must work, but don't need to work well. The longer the list, the more the consultants make, so they gladly help their clients lengthen the list for a fee.
I've sat in some multiple-day long RFP sessions where there the sales guy "moderates" items like "14.2.2 Support integration with process engine...ok on to section 14.3"
It's a scary mentality / even if 14.2.2 is not supported - they might lose the sale on too many N/A's so the sales guy will gloss over it (with the assumption, usually right, that the client doesn't really need that). And if they really do - litigation after the sale
It can also describe something as simple as desktop publishing.
I want something produces a certain print effect. I don't care how spiffy, reliable or pleasant your app is if it doesn't do what I need. Why did Indesign take so long to catch up with Pagemaker?
Come to think of it, I think the feature-effect goes for just about program that is used as a tool. To succeed, a "serious tool" has to do everything the old tool did plus be nicer to use. You can see that in everything from drills to spreadsheets to programming language (inspire a stubborn conservativism in their users).
I'd say that in the business product space, this concept still applies. However, the lack of features becomes a marketing problem to be solved (hopefully not by adding more features).
Fortunately for Apple, marketing isn't a problem because they're Apple. But you're right, like many others we've discovered that lack of features is a marketing problem.
There's no clear answer. Demonstrating that we had something which was clearly better than the alternative for a specific problem has got us a long way. People will forgive an awful lot if you can make their day easier.
Basically, make the tool so easy to adopt that it gets adopted from below, by people who are actually using it, rather than needing to be imposed from above. This obviously doesn't apply to all tools and all industries.
web browsing, email, media (videos, photos), reading?
I'm not sure in what order or even if those are right. I think the iPad gets a slight break though since others in its "category" have many more features and because it is in some ways and iphone/ipod successor, not a brand new product.
1) Instant—in broad sense: instant on, rendering speed, responsiveness to manipulation.
2) Comfortable—allows more flexibility orientation and holding-wise than notebooks. IPS screen with 178 viewing angle helps a lot there too.
3) Interface. Combined with 1) it makes to happen the thing that David Carr noticed: "the gadget disappears" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq7mmGaWoU). When you get impression that you are directly manipulating web page, photos or e-book with your bare fingers without much effort why would you think about GHz, number of USB ports, etc.?
One of my favorite quotes about design is "Good design is invisible".
Most people don't even know what "Trusted Computing" is, leave alone why would they should be scared by that.
Frankly, I am a bit tired of "open is good, closed is bad" rubberstamping without putting much effort into thinking why is that and is it always the case.
Reminds me "Four legs good, two legs bad" from the Animal Farm.
What really scares me about the iPad is that as a whole, it is the ultimate consumer's device: you don't produce with the iPad.
You don't produce with the iPad because of DRMs, lock down etc. You don't produce with the iPad because of the glorification of the "point and grunt" interface. You don't produce with the iPad because it is more like an interactive TV or a game console than a general purpose computer.
If the iPad proves sufficient for most common customers and purposes, it could be successful. Worse, it could set an example. Worse, that new kind of computers could take over most of the world. A world of very very few producers, and many many consumers. Precisely what the internet allow us to avoid, and not very democratic to boot.
This, is my "why". About the iPad, at least.
Anyway, I don't think such a dystopia will occur. Yet I am certain that many people want it to occur. We have to fight them. I do by not buying the iPad, and telling whoever wants to hear it that this kind of device convey dangerous ideas.
Also, how many people will not be producers in any capacity at all?
I mean, cut out the student, then cut out the managers and accountants, then the writers, then the geeks and designers. Cut out anyone who want to write long emails and even those who want to write long hn replies. I think you're left with a smaller group than you'd think.
Those three well-executed features need to be done in the context of marketing/sales magic, otherwise the product won't take off. GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail. FriendFeed should be bigger than Twitter. I'll admit that twitter got the "few things" part, but I don't think they won based on doing those few things well.
FriendFeed is about discussion. It's back and forth. There are lot's of software/site/thing on the Internet doing this, in many forms.
Twitter is about publishing. It's one way. It's a minified blog without comments. A mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently. Only Twitter is doing it.
Your assumption is that a product takes off because it meets a need. When you say, "a mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently" you're reiterating that assumption, not supporting it.
"GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail."
Except that Conversation View is the only reason I avoid using the GMail web interface at all costs.
I can understand why someone would like them - but by making them mandatory they've removed one of the major things I use email for - reminders for myself/to-do lists. If I can't tag/file different emails differently, and I can't leave just one or two parts of a 100-mail conversation in my inbox for later action then it's no use to me.
Star is what I use for later action, which you can do to not only to conversations, but also to individual messages. You can tag conversations too. Maybe you can even tag individual messages, but I haven't tried.
"""GMail by all rights should be the dominant email client today, or at least every other surviving email client should have copied the conversation view from GMail."""
Some people (for example, anyone on a *-devel list) use email for things more like meetings or group discussions, rather than one-on-one conversations; an email thread can be concurrent/nonlinear. Collapsing everything into a single list interferes with seeing what's been responded to and what hasn't.
Totally agree. But I think that even in hindsight, it's not always obvious which of even just 3 qualities was actually crucial for success.
With google search, it was fast, uncluttered, had a patented pagerank algorithm and didn't sell search placements. Though "the algorithm" was seen as crucial, I've heard people argue that it wasn't (though it added a PR factor). I remember comparing it with other searches early on, and it wasn't that different - but it felt a lot better to use, probably because fast, clear, honest and cool.
With gmail, it was 1 GB, fast, and used search and tags instead of hierarchical folders (btw what was new about conversations?) - but how can one tell what was crucial for its success? Perhaps the 1 GB was the main thing? (was there evidence showing how crucial each aspect was?)
It's a focus on the core functions. With the iPad, Apple looked at what most people did with their computers most of the time - music, video, games, social networking - and concentrated on that, ignoring all the other stuff. The furore and the criticism has shown that this kind of thinking is rather uncommon amongst geeks, the endless "what about x" arguments, but most people don't care about x. The mass market is remarkably consistent in it's desires.
Google were the first big player to just do search. They didn't aspire to be a directory or a gateway or a hub, just a search box on a page. All the other major search providers had (and most still have) a page cluttered with all sorts of crap. They were obsessed with adding features and increasing revenue at the cost of their core product. A page with nothing but search is a convincing marketing message about how confident Google are in their search technology.
Gmail focussed on how people used email to communicate and organise their lives. Google realised that if you had emails going back and forth in a conversation, it made sense to put it on one page. They realised that having a memory limit was a convenience for the provider that inconvenienced the user. They realised that most people struggled to find and organise things in their inbox.
I don't think any of this stuff is particularly difficult or radical, it just requires a monomaniacal focus on the user's needs. Most businesses think from the inside out and do what is convenient or logical for them, rather than thinking from the outside in and thinking about what the user wants. The conversation on HN seems to make this clear to me - we spend endless time discussing new technologies, new methods, about profit and marketing and the latest buzzword, but when was the last time you read a thread about users?
"I remember comparing it with other searches early on, and it wasn't that different"
It wasn't that different? For me it was just radically different:
ALtavista->Advanced search->"car AND red AND 200 AND horsepower"
You had been redirected to a "portal". Ads flashing every second, and the first two pages filled only with sponsored links. Slow search with non related pics.
Google "car red 200 horsepower"
Clean and lean, text only, with just the information that you were searching for in the first page.
Actually this advice is pretty difficult to follow IMHO. We tend to give-in to the demands of clients/users and add complexity without even realizing it. So it needs continuous hammering.
one thing I've noticed is that I spend more time browsing the web from my iPhone than from my laptop
can't say I agree with that. The iPhone has a great browser - considering - but a laptop is orders of magnitude superior for my usage. I bet he didn't type that blog post on his iPhone, for example.
If I add up all of the 5 minute long "killing time while waiting to pick up my daughter" types of browsing sessions that I do on my phone (a Droid :-) I bet it would easily add up to the amount of time I spend with my netbook on my lap.
Gmail's killer features for me upon launch were (1) exclusivity of the address invites, (2) storage space, and ultimately (3) POP support so I didn't have to use the web client any more.
One important thing to note in this "pick three features" strategy is that you can't please all of the people all of the time. There will always be people happy to chime in that they don't like some GMail feature or other but that doesn't take away from the product's successes.
My dad chooses a generic USB MP3 player over the iPod but that doesn't say anything bad about the iPod.
I think 'great is simple' applies to programming too. The reason I learned BASIC at school was because there were computers lying around which all had the same BASIC pre-installed on ROM. They switched on in less than a second.
Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. This is hard, especially for beginners. In the meantime, you're using your computer for other important things.
If I could buy a pad with the major languages and text editors pre-installed, or even just with one language and one editor, I would. It would be separate from my browsing pad. Which would be separate from my gaming pad. Etc.
Hopefully pads will continue to get thinner and cheaper because they will be a lot of them lying around the house by 2020.
Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS.
Counterpoint: Linux and Python.
Which makes the strong intersection between Mac-weenie-ism and Ruby-weenie-ism all the more idiosyncratic. Python is a much more Apple-y language: it works right out of the box; and the way you'd expect to do something is usually the way it is in fact done in Python.
The points about board games and the device being easily shared are nice observations.
Using the device for board games would save on storage, solve the problem of missing pieces, and save time setting up, all while maintaining the immediacy of sitting around the table with a friend or three.
Chess and Risk strike me as particularly well suited to be played on the iPad.
You could even have iPad / iPhone combination for where the players required to keep their 'hand' hidden from the other players.
Eg a HN favourite of Settlers of Catan comes to mind - the game board on the iPad, and each player has an iPhone with their resource / victory points cards and they all interface to the iPad to play...
Of course, playing an actual board game with actual cards might be more fun :)
I'm not so sure that's what the focus of the iPad naysayers is. It's more "why do I want this?". Nobody questioned why everyone would want a tiny, pocketable device that held every song they would ever want. They questioned whether Apple's mp3 player would be the one people wanted (and, by the way, the first iPod was not, it took a few generations). Nobody questioned whether people would want a smartphone at all, they'd been popular for years, just where in the market the iPhone would end up.
The iPad's a different animal because it's trying to sell people something they don't even know they want. It's more akin to the Apple TV than the iPod. Maybe they want something like this or maybe they don't, but it isn't the feature set that's worrisome, it's the fact that we all have a smartphone and a laptop, and do we really need something in between?
I agree with your premise. One thing I would add though, at least in my opinion, is that the iPad will likely be word of mouth experience. What I mean is that one of your friends will get an iPad, you'll use it and eventually you might see where it fits into your life. I see the Kindle falling into a similar category. I'm not arguing that the iPad is so revolutionary we cannot predict how it will be used, just that until people can get their hands on one it's hard for them to foresee how it will augment their life.
I think it's even hard for Apple to see. They didn't get what the iPhone or iPod touch really were at first either. Their party line of "all apps should be webpages" turned out to be clearly wrong, and now they realize that those devices are mainly mobile app platforms. The iPod touch, which, though you rarely hear anything about it, has outsold the iPhone by 2:1 and is arguably the most successful product in their lineup currently and maybe of all time, is viewed by them now as the cheapest route to the App Store they thought was unnecessary when they launched.
The iPad platform does ensure that if there's a market for the form factor, someone will find it. Assuming it doesn't get rejected by an App Store intern :)
Again agree. I'll just add (again my opinion only) that I'm on the fence about the whole app store thing. I think if Apple had, at release, provided a comprehensive Javascript API that really allowed for very low level functionality on the iPhone we might all be happily making iPhone 'apps' as webpages. But we all know that didn't happen and opening the app platform may have revealed an unforeseen sweet spot of consumer software. One where the buyer no longer has to worry about installations, complex conflicts, software dependencies, drivers, etc. Consumer software may not be the same again. Who knows, perhaps this portends the downfall of the filesystem we all know and love.
Well, that's what Palm did, and it did make for a lot of apps. They were slow about opening up the platform to the public, but the homebrew apps took off, and there are now something like 1,500 in the app store and hundreds in the homebrews. That's not insubstantial given how few users they have relative to the iPhone.
But still, it felt like something was missing, because what these devices, like all sufficiently popular platforms, are really used for is gaming, and the quality of games you can write in C++ is still vastly ahead of what you can make in HTML/JS.
I could see the iPad eventually being more of a gaming device than anything else.
That is simply not true. Not everyone has a laptop and a smartphone. The ipad is far more compelling than a smartphone for me, maybe not for you. I can think of a dozen innowative usas for it. If it lives up to the promise of 10 hrs battery that's amazing in itself.
It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it. I see this as innovation rater than the last 10 years of immatation.
Maybe. I'm not sure you're wrong by any means. There could be people who don't have a smartphone or a laptop who would drop $500 on this. And, to be honest, it's not useful to focus on price. The original iPhone was priced out of popularity but it rapidly dropped.
But the point is still valid, which is that it has to create a market. Apple is 0 for 1 at this in recent years. I consider the Apple TV the only real attempt at creating a market rather than launching a more compelling product in an existing one, and it's been a failure.
I agree with that. I don't own a notebook, and here's why: as a developer, I find it very hard to work on a laptop: I need two displays, a proper keyboard, a proper mouse and a powerful machine. It's question of taste, I suppose. For my "mobile communcation needs", my Android phone is satisfactory most of the times. However, for casual browsing / reading, the smartphone is too small / slow and the desktop computer is too big / uncomfortable. Laptops are way to big for casual browsing either in my opinion. I believe a tablet would be an ideal device for me.
I don't know yet if the iPad will be the "one" for me, but right now I'm pretty much certain that I will purchase a tablet in the next few years.
I have a laptop, a smartphone and a Kindle. The smartphone screen is terrible for hours of reading. The laptop is too heavy and the battery doesn't last long enough.
On the other hand, the Kindle's battery is as good as it gets. I hope to never be away from a power outlet long enough for it to run out of juice. It's very light and the screen size is perfect for reading. There will be many similar applications for the iPad that people don't even think about right now.
The critics of the iPad seem unfocused because they are in two contradictory camps.
One side say "the ipad is a DRM platform, it's threatening to become the dominant consumer platform and that would be a nightmare. It may be super great but it will take away our freedom"
The other side says "It's just a big iPhone, If a consumer was going to bother carrying something as big and expensive as an iPad, they'd expect to do extended data entry on it and that's just not possible, so it's not threatening to take over very much all. It's the computer for people who never use their computer".
I think I've decided the second camp is right so there's less reasons for the first camp's worries.
I think the first camp's worries are justified a bit by the second camp's perspective and mistake (at least the way you've phrased it). Yes, it may end up being the "computer for people who never use their computer," but by some estimates that is most people, which means it will take over for the content consumer majority and leave full-fledged computers to the content producers. It all depends on your definition of "use" since as netbook-crowd would argue, most people don't need beefy processor and lots of ram, just a way to get online and run some basic applications.
There's more to a computer that you can use than a beefy processor.
I'm not sure you could classify most people as non-content producers. A student that writes a paper needs a keyboard. An executive needs a keyboard and mouse to create presentation.
Even more, I suspect our society is generating more, not less, content producer jobs and these content producers will want to be able to work at home.
Probably the best iPad article so far. I think the iPad's winning features are misjudged. That it's simple to use is pointless; YouTube clearly illustrates idiots can use computers and do stuff on the internet. However since it's "just a large iPhone", it's UI is designed around the fact your finger is far fatter than a mouse pointer. Also opening and closing laptops is a pain in the ass.
Where the iPad is risky is that it has enough potential UI bandwidth that you want to use it like a normal computer but the OS may be too close to the iPhone model.
I've personally always wanted a phone with a 5-6 inch screen. I really, really wouldn't mind carrying it and would use it all the time.
As it is now, I use my phone's 3inch screen so often, just becaues I'm too lazy to pull out my laptop. I think previous articles have hit this one home pretty well - most users simply don't need a computer. I know that when all I want to do is check email quickly and catch up on reading (blogs, hn, etc.), I certainly don't.
This article is very much in sync with what 37 signals preaches.In fact in their book also they suggested this thing, to work on features that are important and can make the product successful, and to cut the rest.
In short the product is designed for something specific and it does that brilliantly so it doesnot need any add ons for marketing gimmicks.
I agree with the jist of this article. And Apple's strong point IMO has always been their IJFW technology (it just fing works), which seems to elude so many others who cram in 10,000 features and wonder why nobody uses their product which takes a Ph.D in computer science to decipher (especially open source projects in many cases steps off soapbox).
The problem is, I actually think Apple is starting to abandon this approach for a more of a corporate driven 'I want you to lock you into this' model, which will NOT work.
The whole Flash debacle is the prime example of this IMO: if I want to use a Flash application on a webpage, and I'm the average user who doesn't even know* what Flash is, it better just f*ing work. Otherwise this product will be going back to the store, and I as Joe Public average computer-illiterate internet user will be on to something else. End of story.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 52.5 ms ] threadIt's hard to disagree with this guy. What's the point of a 5 megapixel camera if it can't focus properly?
The really slick companies, like Apple and Google, have these concepts baked into their DNA, which is why they seem to be able to take everyone else's lunch money whenever they damned well feel like it.
It's better to try and succeed at making something simple, coherent, and excellent (like a well seasoned, perfectly cooked steak) than it is to try and fail at making something overly complicated (like a 12-course meal, which ends up as 7-courses, some of them missing key ingredients, burnt, or raw).
You don't get points from the judges for degree of difficulty.
Well, in most cases you'd have a "judge" you actually do. But I think the point you were trying to make - that normal people don't care if you made a really good effort and the task was really hard, they just care about the final taste, is 100% correct.
Apps with barely functional features that a group of users have been chafing for often succeed.
But if you're trying to sell someone on something they didn't know they might want, if that something works in a clumsy and unreliable fashion, you probably convince the person the whole thing is a poor idea.
This is a common enough use right now with the iPhone I recognize it immediately.
The fact that the screen is viewable from wide angles is not a coincidence me thinks.
I can see the market for road warriors who do demos and/or fly a lot, rich folk who love tech, etc. Other than, "I'd love to have one on my coffee table from time to time", I don't see a draw for most people that'd cause them to cough up $600-$1000.
And, for the record, the "it's a computer for non-geeks" argument is pretty weak, IMO. My parents HATE onscreen touch keyboards and print everything.
* I want a simple, small, light tablet. Naysayers: You can't do Photoshop on it, so no one will want it.
* I want to give it to my mom so she can just browse, with no tech support. Naysayers: No moms are going to buy it, how many people will buy it for their moms?
Rinse. Repeat.
This made me chuckle:
"""For markets that have purchasing processes with long lists of feature requirements, you should probably just crank out as many features as possible and not waste time on simplicity or usability."""
It's a scary mentality / even if 14.2.2 is not supported - they might lose the sale on too many N/A's so the sales guy will gloss over it (with the assumption, usually right, that the client doesn't really need that). And if they really do - litigation after the sale
I want something produces a certain print effect. I don't care how spiffy, reliable or pleasant your app is if it doesn't do what I need. Why did Indesign take so long to catch up with Pagemaker?
Come to think of it, I think the feature-effect goes for just about program that is used as a tool. To succeed, a "serious tool" has to do everything the old tool did plus be nicer to use. You can see that in everything from drills to spreadsheets to programming language (inspire a stubborn conservativism in their users).
There's no clear answer. Demonstrating that we had something which was clearly better than the alternative for a specific problem has got us a long way. People will forgive an awful lot if you can make their day easier.
Basically, make the tool so easy to adopt that it gets adopted from below, by people who are actually using it, rather than needing to be imposed from above. This obviously doesn't apply to all tools and all industries.
I'm not sure in what order or even if those are right. I think the iPad gets a slight break though since others in its "category" have many more features and because it is in some ways and iphone/ipod successor, not a brand new product.
2) Comfortable—allows more flexibility orientation and holding-wise than notebooks. IPS screen with 178 viewing angle helps a lot there too.
3) Interface. Combined with 1) it makes to happen the thing that David Carr noticed: "the gadget disappears" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysq7mmGaWoU). When you get impression that you are directly manipulating web page, photos or e-book with your bare fingers without much effort why would you think about GHz, number of USB ports, etc.?
One of my favorite quotes about design is "Good design is invisible".
More seriously, their design is so good that even their "Trusted Computing" scheme is invisible to most people. This is scary.
Frankly, I am a bit tired of "open is good, closed is bad" rubberstamping without putting much effort into thinking why is that and is it always the case. Reminds me "Four legs good, two legs bad" from the Animal Farm.
You don't produce with the iPad because of DRMs, lock down etc. You don't produce with the iPad because of the glorification of the "point and grunt" interface. You don't produce with the iPad because it is more like an interactive TV or a game console than a general purpose computer.
If the iPad proves sufficient for most common customers and purposes, it could be successful. Worse, it could set an example. Worse, that new kind of computers could take over most of the world. A world of very very few producers, and many many consumers. Precisely what the internet allow us to avoid, and not very democratic to boot.
This, is my "why". About the iPad, at least.
Anyway, I don't think such a dystopia will occur. Yet I am certain that many people want it to occur. We have to fight them. I do by not buying the iPad, and telling whoever wants to hear it that this kind of device convey dangerous ideas.
Do you also refuse to buy a TV that doesn't include a camera?
Also, how many people will not be producers in any capacity at all?
I mean, cut out the student, then cut out the managers and accountants, then the writers, then the geeks and designers. Cut out anyone who want to write long emails and even those who want to write long hn replies. I think you're left with a smaller group than you'd think.
Of course not, silly, that's what Macs are for.
...which, naturally, was the other well-known book that Amazon deleted from the Kindle. :)
2) Long battery.
3) Great touch UI/apps that use it.
4) cheap enough
EDIT: More discussion at http://friendfeed.com/paul/e75a7022/if-your-product-is-great...
Twitter is about publishing. It's one way. It's a minified blog without comments. A mini-blog for everyone is a need, apparently. Only Twitter is doing it.
Facebook hits that need too (and adds a lot of other things which obfuscate the public take up of your miniblogged "wisdom").
I keep hearing this, but it simply rings false for me.
It feels nothing like blogging to me.
It's apparently filling some need (or interest), but micro-blogging ain't it.
Except that Conversation View is the only reason I avoid using the GMail web interface at all costs.
http://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2010-02-09
Some people (for example, anyone on a *-devel list) use email for things more like meetings or group discussions, rather than one-on-one conversations; an email thread can be concurrent/nonlinear. Collapsing everything into a single list interferes with seeing what's been responded to and what hasn't.
With google search, it was fast, uncluttered, had a patented pagerank algorithm and didn't sell search placements. Though "the algorithm" was seen as crucial, I've heard people argue that it wasn't (though it added a PR factor). I remember comparing it with other searches early on, and it wasn't that different - but it felt a lot better to use, probably because fast, clear, honest and cool.
With gmail, it was 1 GB, fast, and used search and tags instead of hierarchical folders (btw what was new about conversations?) - but how can one tell what was crucial for its success? Perhaps the 1 GB was the main thing? (was there evidence showing how crucial each aspect was?)
Google were the first big player to just do search. They didn't aspire to be a directory or a gateway or a hub, just a search box on a page. All the other major search providers had (and most still have) a page cluttered with all sorts of crap. They were obsessed with adding features and increasing revenue at the cost of their core product. A page with nothing but search is a convincing marketing message about how confident Google are in their search technology.
Gmail focussed on how people used email to communicate and organise their lives. Google realised that if you had emails going back and forth in a conversation, it made sense to put it on one page. They realised that having a memory limit was a convenience for the provider that inconvenienced the user. They realised that most people struggled to find and organise things in their inbox.
I don't think any of this stuff is particularly difficult or radical, it just requires a monomaniacal focus on the user's needs. Most businesses think from the inside out and do what is convenient or logical for them, rather than thinking from the outside in and thinking about what the user wants. The conversation on HN seems to make this clear to me - we spend endless time discussing new technologies, new methods, about profit and marketing and the latest buzzword, but when was the last time you read a thread about users?
It wasn't that different? For me it was just radically different:
ALtavista->Advanced search->"car AND red AND 200 AND horsepower"
You had been redirected to a "portal". Ads flashing every second, and the first two pages filled only with sponsored links. Slow search with non related pics.
Google "car red 200 horsepower"
Clean and lean, text only, with just the information that you were searching for in the first page.
I'm not seeing any relevant results on the first page
can't say I agree with that. The iPhone has a great browser - considering - but a laptop is orders of magnitude superior for my usage. I bet he didn't type that blog post on his iPhone, for example.
I almost never use the GMail web interface.
My dad chooses a generic USB MP3 player over the iPod but that doesn't say anything bad about the iPod.
Nowadays, apart from a few web-based 'try it out' pages, learning a language usually requires installing it and several other packages and getting everything to work together and with your OS. This is hard, especially for beginners. In the meantime, you're using your computer for other important things.
If I could buy a pad with the major languages and text editors pre-installed, or even just with one language and one editor, I would. It would be separate from my browsing pad. Which would be separate from my gaming pad. Etc.
Hopefully pads will continue to get thinner and cheaper because they will be a lot of them lying around the house by 2020.
Counterpoint: Linux and Python.
Which makes the strong intersection between Mac-weenie-ism and Ruby-weenie-ism all the more idiosyncratic. Python is a much more Apple-y language: it works right out of the box; and the way you'd expect to do something is usually the way it is in fact done in Python.
Using the device for board games would save on storage, solve the problem of missing pieces, and save time setting up, all while maintaining the immediacy of sitting around the table with a friend or three.
Chess and Risk strike me as particularly well suited to be played on the iPad.
Eg a HN favourite of Settlers of Catan comes to mind - the game board on the iPad, and each player has an iPhone with their resource / victory points cards and they all interface to the iPad to play...
Of course, playing an actual board game with actual cards might be more fun :)
The iPad's a different animal because it's trying to sell people something they don't even know they want. It's more akin to the Apple TV than the iPod. Maybe they want something like this or maybe they don't, but it isn't the feature set that's worrisome, it's the fact that we all have a smartphone and a laptop, and do we really need something in between?
Only time will tell.
The iPad platform does ensure that if there's a market for the form factor, someone will find it. Assuming it doesn't get rejected by an App Store intern :)
But still, it felt like something was missing, because what these devices, like all sufficiently popular platforms, are really used for is gaming, and the quality of games you can write in C++ is still vastly ahead of what you can make in HTML/JS.
I could see the iPad eventually being more of a gaming device than anything else.
It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it. I see this as innovation rater than the last 10 years of immatation.
But the point is still valid, which is that it has to create a market. Apple is 0 for 1 at this in recent years. I consider the Apple TV the only real attempt at creating a market rather than launching a more compelling product in an existing one, and it's been a failure.
I don't know yet if the iPad will be the "one" for me, but right now I'm pretty much certain that I will purchase a tablet in the next few years.
On the other hand, the Kindle's battery is as good as it gets. I hope to never be away from a power outlet long enough for it to run out of juice. It's very light and the screen size is perfect for reading. There will be many similar applications for the iPad that people don't even think about right now.
One side say "the ipad is a DRM platform, it's threatening to become the dominant consumer platform and that would be a nightmare. It may be super great but it will take away our freedom"
The other side says "It's just a big iPhone, If a consumer was going to bother carrying something as big and expensive as an iPad, they'd expect to do extended data entry on it and that's just not possible, so it's not threatening to take over very much all. It's the computer for people who never use their computer".
I think I've decided the second camp is right so there's less reasons for the first camp's worries.
I'm not sure you could classify most people as non-content producers. A student that writes a paper needs a keyboard. An executive needs a keyboard and mouse to create presentation.
Even more, I suspect our society is generating more, not less, content producer jobs and these content producers will want to be able to work at home.
Where the iPad is risky is that it has enough potential UI bandwidth that you want to use it like a normal computer but the OS may be too close to the iPhone model.
As it is now, I use my phone's 3inch screen so often, just becaues I'm too lazy to pull out my laptop. I think previous articles have hit this one home pretty well - most users simply don't need a computer. I know that when all I want to do is check email quickly and catch up on reading (blogs, hn, etc.), I certainly don't.
The problem is, I actually think Apple is starting to abandon this approach for a more of a corporate driven 'I want you to lock you into this' model, which will NOT work.
The whole Flash debacle is the prime example of this IMO: if I want to use a Flash application on a webpage, and I'm the average user who doesn't even know* what Flash is, it better just f*ing work. Otherwise this product will be going back to the store, and I as Joe Public average computer-illiterate internet user will be on to something else. End of story.