Rocket Bomber - article - commentary - Apple's Mad Genius

So.

• The iPod wasn’t the first MP3[AAC] player. It did everything other players did, just in a fancy case and with the Apple logo.
• The killer app was iTunes. You buy the thing, & then you buy into the website [99 cents, score!], and Apple becomes a segment leader, a market leader, an industry leader (Music industry leader, not their primary market of hardware) and all of a sudden we’re living in Steve Job’s World and we’re not sure how we got here.

You don’t need iTunes to fill an iPod. You can rip CDs, you can buy music elsewhere, you can even pirate music if that is your chosen path. Apple made the right thing (paying for music) also the easy thing… and that has been good for record companies and extremely profitable for Apple. Next:

• The iPhone wasn’t the first smart phone. It did everything other smart phones did, just in a fancy case and with the Apple logo.
• Depending on your point of view, the iPhone didn’t even do things better. But it did everything well enough, and it was pretty, and easy, and easy for first time users to pick up.
• The killer app was the App Store: no, really. Apple didn’t need to figure out everything we might want on a smart phone — I don’t know if a single company, no matter how smart, could have anticipated that. But by opening up the hardware (with caveats, and of course taking a cut from the top of any app sold) Apple—in a small, small way—handed the device back to the user and said, “Hey guys, we think this is cool: show us all the cool things you want to do with it.”
• Apple controls a gate, the App Store, but has otherwise opened up the process to all comers. Given it’s critical mass of users (brought in by Apple fans and others willing to go with a ‘known brand’ as opposed to something new) both the user base and developer base is self-supporting at this point.
• I think the ‘critical mass of users’ is the critical point. Google Android actually has more potential than the iPhone, given that (at least technically) it isn’t tied down to a single company, or type of hardware, or device — but even with the Google brand it’s going to take longer to hit critical mass. Eventually, Google will get there… but they don’t have Steve Jobs and his fanbase to effect a product launch that takes over the whole internet for five days.

Google is on the right track. They may even be smarter than Apple. The ironic twist is that the customer base, no matter how geeky, isn’t smart. We buy into celebrity, and glitz, and glamour, and established brands. It’s so very hard for any new brand to crack this market, no matter how good the product (which is why the manufacturer of new Joojoo tablet grossly, almost criminally underestimated the value of their one-time TechCrunch partner: Hardware is easy. Branding, and Market Awareness, is hard.)

And again: So.

• The new iPad isn’t the first tablet, or netbook; it does everything other tablets and netbooks do, just in a fancy case and with the Apple logo.
• Multi-touch, multi-gesture, “minority report” style interface is fine, and may even be ‘better’, but buttons and alt-keys and various computer mice have done the same thing for years. Not revolutionary, not evolutionary, just another way to access the computer, and while necessary once one eliminates a normal keyboard and mouse/touchpad/pointer— this isn’t the selling point Apple might like it to be.
• My initial impression is that the iPad isn’t a computer, in as much as it doesn’t use MacOS but will instead run it’s own OS, and presumably with it’s own SDK. (If Apple has announced cross-platform support with iPhone apps, I didn’t see that press release — though it would be a great way to bootstrap iPad content and support with absolutely no effort required by Apple, past the software fix.)

• iPod built on a decade of past consumer use: we wanted MP3/Audio Files, we were used to finding them on a computer, we had scads of files already — the iPod merely made them portable, and made carrying around an MP3 player cool.
• iPhone was built on that concept of cool. It’s a geek device, but suddenly you weren’t a geek (per se) if you had one. Market penetration, and the previous success of the iPod, made the iPhone ‘normal’
• Once the ‘geek curb’ is overcome, technology is no longer weird, but required. You can’t be cool without one. Apple overcame this barrier (and it was as much a barrier as the speed of sound to aircraft) but once jets can travel Mach 1 (or phones can read email, access GPS, get local weather, and enable IM) it is less a feat and more a matter of daily fact.

The next iteration is the iPad. As stated, it does everything other tablets and netbooks do, just in a fancy case and with the Apple logo.

But Apple has a way of leveraging these modest moves into established hardware with customer enthusiasm, large user bases, and (more-or-less) open 3rd-party developer involvement that makes their merely incremental improvements on existing hardware seem like revolutions.

And that is Apple’s Mad Genius.