Posts Tagged ‘iPad’
Beyond the Chasm
Laurence Hart recently warned on his excellent Word-of-Pie blog that we should not count the PC out too soon. He pointed out in the title that “Mobile Devices Sell Faster and Die Sooner”, a sentiment I agree with, but I would tack on “for now.” I would also add that a lot of those devices don’t die, they are handed down to other people, the way we used to handle laptops.
I had just returned from my trip to the AIIM Conference in San Francisco, which I extended by four days with a family visit in beautiful Iowa when I read @Pieword’s post. It struck me that during those 9 days of travel, I had used my laptop less than 6 hours, while I lost track of how often I was using my iPad. I think that is worth noting because I am an IT guy who never travels without a laptop.
I carry my laptop with me, always, because the responsibilities of my job include maintenance and support for the in-house applications that I developed, maintenance of our company website and the possible need to use some desktop applications that only run under Windows. However, since none of those things occurred, my laptop mainly stayed in the bag. I did use it to place 2 Lync calls to a coworker, and I used it to practice my PowerPoint presentation. AIIM supplied the hardware for the presentations during the conference, so my laptop never had to leave the hotel room. I could have placed those Lync calls on my iPhone, and I could have easily practiced my presentation from my iPad, I chose the laptop because, for the moment, it’s familiar.
In his book “Crossing the Chasm” author Geoffrey Moore talks about the technology adoption lifecycle and the work by Everett Rogers and others. It is from this work that we have the expression “early adopters”. Moore explores what he describes as a chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. I don’t know how Messer’s Moore and Rogers would describe tablet and smartphone adoption, but I think we are beyond the chasm on both. Oh sure, I’m surrounded by people clinging to their laptops, but a lot of them would rather use their iPad, and I will help them get to that point. The people most loyal to the complete PC model are the ones whose work day involves processing transactions or reporting on the transactions processed in our organization. These folks are using those applications that we developed, and those applications are not iPad ready – nor will they be anytime soon. Ironically, these were the first people in our organization to get computers of any sort, but the last people to get laptops. Other users, the ones who travel often and need the ability to stay connected to the mother ship, create content and give presentations, have been carrying laptops since before they were an affordable solution. I can remember a day when people preferred desktop computers because you could swap hard drives, add memory and install add-on cards with ease compared to a laptop. Desktops were more powerful and more versatile which meant that only travelers chose laptops, and they did it for the convenience.
Laptops grew to equal the power of business desktops several years ago, or they simply got beyond the point where it mattered; I can’t remember the last time, I ran out of disk space before retiring my computer. Frankly, I see the same trend today; tablets are becoming as good as laptops, or they are getting good enough to the point of it not mattering. For example, I use the App Photogene on my iPhone and iPad to edit digital pictures; I use Adobe Creative Suite on my laptop. For most of my photo editing work, Photogene does the job. The other way to look at that is to point out that I use very little of Photoshop’s rich feature set. The same can be said of my use of Microsoft Office, and I honestly think I use more features of Creative Suite and Office than most people I know. While my iPad will continue to encroach on my laptop’s capability, my laptop is stuck in a bigger-is-better model. I use Photogene instead of PhotoShop, because I can take the photo, edit the photo, email the photo and post the photo to Facebook from the same device. In fact, I can do ALL those things from within Photogene! My laptop tries to lure me in with the promise of better software, but increasingly, I find that I don’t need what it has to offer. Contrast the meager benefits with the fact that I have to carry a power brick, find a place to rest the laptop and wait forever for the thing to boot up, and it’s game-set-match iPad.
Since Nobody Asked
Looking down the road to what appears to be a one-Windows-fits-all offering from Microsoft; I can say without hesitation, I dread the day it arrives. If you want to embarrass me, I’ll save you the trouble – I also said I didn’t want an iPad. Ironically, when I wrote that I didn’t want an iPad, I said that I was looking for the features Microsoft seems to be building into Windows 8 for tablets. What I failed to consider at that time is that I am a geek. I wanted those features, and I wanted the ability to build on that complex platform to give my users what I think they expect from me. It turns out, that most of my users don’t want that at all.
Since 1981, when first IBM PC came out, I have been giving my users something that was way more complicated, way more powerful and that demands way more knowledge than they wanted. In fact, most of the users that I support (work, friends, family) really don’t understand the PCs I provide to them or help them use. They learn specific applications and they use Windows the way a passenger uses a bus. The fact that Windows can do so much more than run Word, Outlook and Internet Explorer is lost on most users. In fact, most of the features of Word and Outlook go unused, and most users aren’t fully comfortable with Windows Explorer! If you want to test that, ask someone to change the default application for opening a file type – go ahead, I’ll wait.
For the first time, I am giving people something they want, like and understand – an iPad. Oh, I have some who complain that they can’t find their files, but they are in a minority that, amazingly no longer includes me. I don’t care where the files are. My apps always know where the files are, I can always open, delete and share those files, so why should I care where they actually reside? I was driving with a friend last week and I asked him if he felt the absence of a file system on his iPad was a drawback. He immediately replied: “it’s a blessing!”
Microsoft seems to be banking on the fact that users want more from a tablet; I doubt it. I think they want tablets to be, as Einstein said, "as simple as they can be, but no simpler" and for my money, and the money my boss trusts me to spend, I think Apple has nailed that with the iPad. The app that I developed for our iPhone and iPad users is dirt-simple to use, and I can honestly say that I’ve gotten more positive feedback on that app than any other piece of software I’ve ever written.
In fairness to Microsoft, maybe they do get it, maybe they know where this all has to go, but they also realize that there are a gazillion PCs out there running Windows and they can’t just throw the switch and change things. Microsoft is fighting momentum (conservation of energy) Einstein had something to say about that too. In fact, Einstein changed the law from conservation of energy to conservation of "mass-energy", recognizing that mass is converted to energy by E=mc2. One of the sad realities revealed by that simple equation is the amount of energy required to counteract momentum. So maybe the iPad is just a disruptive technology and Microsoft is fighting back the best way it can, or maybe Microsoft is trying to wring every last dollar out of its customer base at every turn and they are afraid to actually make life simpler for those who want it. A Windows world where some users have desktops and some laptops and some tablets, might be a nice place to live, if each user had what they want, and an operating system that fully exploited the box it was running on. Giving a desktop or laptop user a touch-based OS is like turning the on the sound on a TV in a sports bar – it’s a distraction that provides no benefit.
For almost 10 years, I used a Toshiba Portege Tablet PC. I loved those laptops; they worked as fully functional laptops and flipped around to create awesome slates. Unfortunately, the last model (M800) featured a full touch screen, even though Windows 7 was ill-equipped to take advantage of it. It caused me constant grief as people would point to stuff on my screen and cause actions to occur. When I tried to use the stylus for input, my palm was always doing something I wasn’t trying to do. After I got my first iPad, I ditched the Portege in favor of a lighter, no-touch ThinkPad.
Windows is like a railroad that never unloads its trains. The trains run for a while and then they stop and add a few more cars. The routes get more complex, serving more and more customers. The trains have gotten longer, carrying a wider and wider variety of loads. Microsoft seems to think we want an N-gauge version of the whole Windows train. I think most people want a mix of unit trains (like the one shown above), light-rail, subways, buses, cars and bicycles, and I think we are right to want those things.
