If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
paulbuchheit.blogspot.com
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It's hard to disagree with this guy. What's the point of a 5 megapixel camera if it can't focus properly?
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.