Worrying about the iPad Imitators? Don’t
Hadley Stern recently opined that while the iPad might be glorious, the one reason why it might not succeed is because of the competition. The idea being that the competition could crank out something equal in functionality, price said device cheaper, and folks would buy that product instead of the iPad.
The scenario isn't hard to envision, a $499 iPad can't possibly compete with a $199 Google branded slate type computer. After all, who doesn't want to save three hundred bucks and still get all the functionality? If you remember computing history you'll know that the same scenario has already played out. Recall when Mac OS was way ahead of PCs running Windows and Windows PCs still out sold the Mac handily?
The memory you have is not reflective of reality. You've fallen victim to the years of Apple evangelism, a narrative that maintains the reason Windows and PCs beat the Mac is solely based on price. Sadly, the recollection is a manufactured memory that only seeks to reinforce your biases rather than to expose your preconceived notions to a healthy dose of reality.
Apple lost that battle because its product was inferior. It is that simple. You can argue that Apple didn't have the price point the PC did, and you'll be technically correct, but you'll be missing the larger picture. Apple was selling an all-in-one computer when people were trying to piece things together. Back then a monitor was a serious outlay of cash, if you already had one, the original Mac was a tough sell. It wasn't the cheapness of Windows and commodity PCs, it was everything you had to give up to use a Mac. Apple was sure they were selling the best system ever for awhile but Apple was selling easy-to-use computers to geeks and IT folks, consumers weren't interested in computers yet. When you don't understand the market or your customers you are doomed to fail.
Things have changed a great deal since the original Mac. We've got the internet, the internet everyone uses. That needs to be reinforced, the internet EVERYONE uses. Your dad who still mumbles about the 1960 world series, your mom who searches for Yahoo.com by typing "yahoo" into the Google search box, your uncle who is surprised daily by the fact that porn movies have become a commodity and can be paid for with advertising. These are the people the iPad is after, people that don't care that you can type "killall X" in the terminal to stop the overwhelming processor usage they weren't aware of in the first place.
With the understanding that the Mac failed (or took over the world via Windows) in place we can get back to the topic at hand. Will imitators kill the iPad? Here we have some more recent examples.
You remember when the iPod came out right? It wasn't exactly hailed as the best thing ever by the tech elite. No one saw the iPod taking over the world, and that includes Steve Jobs. Nine years later everyone has an iPod and the only thing that has slowed sales down, the only true iPod killer, is called the iPhone.
That example doesn't resonate at first. The only company that can take a bite of the iPod is the same company that makes the iPod? It seems almost impossible now to imagine the iPod being beaten; there are just too many of the things, people are too used to them and the ecosystem strongly favors the device.
But it wasn't always that way. The iPod wasn't ordained by god to be the dominate player. People had a chance to beat the thing as senseless as a plastic gopher at a Chuck E Cheese birthday party. They tried. The original thought was that the iPod/iTunes store combo was vulnerable because it was Mac only and about three people used Macs back then. Buymusic.com quickly rolled out. Buymusic.com had the advantage that it worked on PCs, 98% of the market, where the iTunes store worked only with Macs. Seemed like a sure fire hit, right? A market 49 times bigger then the market for the iTunes store is a can't miss! The reality was that Buymusic.com went over like pre-used Chapstick marketed by Cold Sore Sufferers of America. Without the iPod, Buymusic was doomed.
Failed music stores go hand in hand with failed iPod killers. How many of those can you name off the top of your head? You can't name many because for all the lower priced, better specced, iPod killers companies cranked out none of them ever made a difference. Because they didn't work with iTunes.
We've come full circle. So maybe the Mac, in its original incarnation wasn't all we thought it was, it was badly beaten by a combination of software and hardware. If you are thinking of a replay of the nineties you're wrong. Apple doesn't have to worry about imitators if the it makes a great product. It's got the software side covered with the App Store, so Apple only has to get the hardware part right. If the iPad is half-assed, Apple will get beaten and deservedly so. If the iPad is as great as Steve Jobs thinks it is the market for tablet computers now belongs to Apple.
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Your memories are not reflective of reality, either. The Macintosh’s main deficiency was that it was not manufactured by IBM, and it was not 100% IBM compatible.
In the eighties - before the Internet was opened to the public - one of the main reasons people bought computers was to be able to work at home. They preferred computers that were 100% compatible with their office computers so that they could bring SOFTWARE home. Document compatibility was not enough. Back then, Lotus 1-2-3, Wordperfect, and dBase cost more than a monitor.
Another major factor was the keyboard. The feel of the IBM PC keyboard was very much like the feel of the IBM Selectric typewriter keyboard, and appealed to typists. Back then, it was not unusual for a secretary to have both a computer and a typewriter. The similarity between the PC and the Selectric facilitated the back and forth transitioning.
The third factor was FUD. Outside of the geek realm, normal people saw a FIRST computer purchase as a major expenditure in an area where they had little to no expertise. The cliche inside the corporation was that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, and the corollary in the consumer space was “nobody ever got laughed at for buying IBM compatible”.
Twenty years later, the situation is different. 1) The Internet is the major reason people buy computers. 2) Keyboard compatibility is less of a factor. 3) More people feel qualified to make computer purchasing decisions; they have been using computers long enough to have their own opinions on what features are important to them. 4) Microsoft is the new IBM.
I’d argue what you both touched on. It’s the software, or more correctly, developer support.
MS won via DOS then Windows because of the massive developer support.
And the people go where the developers go.
This is where the iPad has a distinct advantage over everything else, even Windows Mobile. The iPad already has massive developer support.
And those developers will build “must-have” apps for the iPad long before other platforms.
The iPad is here and now - you can already buy over 100,000 apps for it, everything else is playing catch up, everything else is way off in the future.
But catch up is really hard when people have already committed their cash to another platform, in tis case the iPhone and soon the iPad.
I won’t disagree with your reasoning Steve W because they are sound points. But I would say that there is a big segment of the population that thinks the reason the Mac isn’t more popular is because it was over priced. An author of a really nice book I have chided Sculley for not realizing that Macs were twice as expensive than PCs back in the day. If you’ve been around a while like me you’ll also remember the old joke about apple and cars.
So I don’t disagree, but it misses the point. The point being that it wasn’t imitators that killed Apples market share or the price.
RayCon and Chris Howard make nice points,it is kind f the whole picture this time instead of one great product.
That said, I do find some irony that Apple bought NeXT to get access to a next gen operating system that could really multitask, you’ll remember that the Classic OS was not good at this, and Apple is betting on a version of OS X that doesn’t multitask.
“The iPad is here and now - you can already buy over 100,000 apps for it, everything else is playing catch up, everything else is way off in the future.”
I remember just a few short years ago, on this very site in fact, that the Apple fanboys shot down the overwhelming content advantage of Windows as any kind of selling point (it was quality, not quantity that mattered, they said). But I figured that if Apple had that advantage instead, they’d never shut up about it. And now, of course, they cite the apps as one of the biggest advantage of the iPhone (which, btw, it is - just as it is for Windows).
The problem for the iPad in the tablet computer market, IMO, is that it’s not a tablet computer. When we pined for a tablet from Apple, we wanted a scaled down Mac, not a scaled up iPhone. It doesn’t multitask. It has no expansion to speak of. You can only buy apps that Apple says you can buy. Etc. It’s the Steve Jobs “You’ll like what I tell you to like” philosophy taken to its next logical step.
This works for the iPhone because, sadly, people are used to draconian limitations of cell phones. It remains to be seen if people will accept these limitations on a device that is selling itself as somewhere between a laptop and an iPod Touch.
You are right that the “Mac owned the desktop and lost it by charging too much, or because they didn’t license to cheaper manufacturers” concept is a myth.
I was there. I saw the whole thing.
1) Mac never owned the desktop. Apple ][ did though and Apple charged way too much for Macintoshes because they didn’t want them cutting into Apple ][ profits.
2) The cheapest Macs were crappy because they did not have enough RAM. Apple charged WAY too much for RAM to make them run properly. This gave Macs a poor reputation.
You are right this is not relevant to the iPod, iPad, or iPhone discussion. The reason, however, is that Apple products are now priced aggressively without regard to whether they cannibalize sales of other Apple products. The iPad is a particularly surprising example of this.
Oops. I failed to go on to the relevant conclusion: At $499, iPad hasn’t left room for anyone to undercut them with something that isn’t cruddy, both hardware and software-wise.
The main problem for the competition is the OS. How are you going throw something together for $20 a unit profit if you don’t have an OS for it? Neither Android or, god forbid, Windows Mobile, have a shippable touch interface,or even decent video playback, you have to put large software engineering R&D;toward it with only a snowball’s chance of return on investment.
“When we pined for a tablet from Apple,” - I suppose “We” means “geek” since none of my non-technical family and friends have any idea what a “tablet” PC is and the only people I see buying netbooks are geeks. Geeks must realise that they are no longer the dominant users of computers and that most people want an easier computing experience and have a difference set of needs. Email, web browsing, shopping, social networking are all things my wife does ONE at a time in a SINGLE tab while using a browser. Outside of geekdom most computer users do not know multi-task on a computer.
The third factor was FUD. Outside of the geek realm, normal people saw a FIRST computer purchase as a major expenditure in an area where they had little to no expertise. The cliche inside the corporation was that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, and the corollary in the consumer space was “nobody ever got laughed at for buying IBM compatible”.
Russian Translations
The third factor was FUD. Outside of the geek realm, normal people saw a FIRST computer purchase as a major expenditure in an area where they had little to no expertise MQL Programming. The cliche inside the corporation was that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, and the corollary in the consumer space was “nobody ever got laughed at for buying IBM compatible”.
It’s just too bad that it’s the same price as the iPad 2; it might do extremely well if it could stop jockeying to be. hire a programmer
I am agree with that:
If you are thinking of a replay of the nineties you’re wrong. Apple doesn’t have to worry about imitators if the it makes a great product. It’s got the software side covered with the App Store, so Apple only has to get the hardware part right.
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