What Safari’s “Reading List” in Lion means for Instapaper
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In the Reading List case, there's no guarantee that customers that "get educated" about the product will necessarily ever find out about yours. It's still up to you to be in the same "location" as the competitor's product in order to benefit from their marketing.
This may be the case for very well-known products that are always going to be discussed in concert with a feature launched by an Apple in the media, product reviews, etc. But it's certainly not categorically the case.
1. Quicksilver <-> Spotlight. Spotlight is terrible. Everyone I know who used quicksilver just uses nothing now. They certainly haven't "switched" to Spotlight because spotlight doesn't do anything half as well as quicksilver did, not even launching apps for god's sake.
2. Kaleidoscope <-> Dashboard. Another disaster. Dashboard seems to exist solely to be accidentally opened, or I guess for some people it serves as their dedicated weather "space". Apple does not hype up widgets at all anymore.
3. Safari RSS. Does anyone actually use this? Or how about Mail.app RSS? At least here the third party RSS apps didn't die (although I see less people using RSS than ever, but I don't attribute this to OS RSS integration).
The features Apple adds are intended to add value and convenience for the average user. If you have RSS needs so great that you require a dedicated third-party application, you're more than welcome to use one.
RSS was primarily a nerd feature in the first place, which is why it is so silly that Apple added it for consumers, not once, but TWICE. No one actually uses Safari RSS. If they did, why the need to then add it to Mail.app? Would it add even MORE value to add RSS to the Finder too? Why stop there, iTunes seems to have everything else in there already, one more tab that reads "RSS" wouldn't hurt.
Dashboard being a failure is clear. If it was a success (like the App Store), we'd still see Apple touting widgets and maybe even selling them. The fact of the matter is that there is no ecosystem of people writing widgets for this thing. Dashcode was largely repurposed as an iOS web app creation tool (also unused by all). So the result: no Kaleidoscope and hardly any Dashboard use.
Spotlight: It has been shown to be much slower than other tools (and was terribly buggy for many releases, where was the value back when it needed to re-index on every reboot and dragged your computer to a halt?) Most of the "Add on" features are broken too: if you type a simple formula into it, it will show the result, but you can't copy/paste it, so what's the point?
I'm not hating on Apple, they clearly get a lot of stuff right (such as Expose!), but their track record proves they get more stuff right when its their own idea. These little feature additions that seem designed solely to kill third party devs seem almost like half-hearted mini passion projects of single engineers that then die when they get reassigned to something else.
Feel free to directly address each of my points.
RSS was primarily a nerd feature in the first place
Why is the concept of a bookmark that can tell you when it has updates a nerd feature? This was essentially Apple's implementation in Safari. (At least, initially, I haven't paid attention to how it evolved).
iTunes seems to have everything else in there already, one more tab that reads "RSS" wouldn't hurt.
This exists. It's called "Podcasts", and it's wildly successful.
Dashboard being a failure is clear.
Here, we agree. I think that if it displayed among your other windows, rather than being relegated to a modal view, it would have been much more successful. I believe this was a decision for performance reasons, but it was still never corrected once performance was no longer a concern.
Spotlight ... where was the value back when it needed to re-index on every reboot and dragged your computer to a halt?
Anecdote != data, but I never experienced these problems, and I was running 10.4 on a G4 iMac, which originally came with 10.2.
Honestly, I think Sherlock and Dashboard would be your two strongest arguments.
Then again, let's look at iTunes. Sure, it's bloated now, and sure, they bought it, but the reason it won is because it really was excellent. (I say this as someone who used Audion for years and I still have a giant place in my heart for it). Solving music library management was exactly the right problem, and iTunes (& SoundJam before it) got this right far before their competitors did.
How about iChat? It's built in, it's integrated, it's pretty darn good, but almost everyone I know who knows about Adium uses it instead.
1. Adium was an open source project that had barely started when iChat came out. The "true" competitor in this case was the official AIM client which I'm pretty sure Apple made a deal with AOL. -- This alone should disqualify it from any further discussion.
2. AIM is not the dominant network in most other countries (making iChat useless in those cases)
3. AOL owns the network and thus its pretty hard for Apple to outright "kill" other chat apps.
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Why is the concept of a bookmark that can tell you when it has updates a nerd feature?--
Spotlight issues are not anecdotal, they were widely reported. Remember that this feature is now 6 years old, but just search on the internet and you will see that Apple's support forums and articles in Apple sites are full of stuff like this:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009042206355742...
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/507442?threadID=507442
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/467039?threadID=467039
(just a few, the more curious can track it more thoroughly)
It was so bad for some people that a "spotless" application was created to remove it from particularly pesky computers (no zealots ever felt the need to remove expose). It received 4 mice from MacWorld -- http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/! This is all very well documented and 'it worked for me' is in this case the far more anecdotal stance. I will completely concede that these problems have for the most part gone away -- but again, its been 6 years. I'd hate it if this kills Instapaper and it takes a similarly long time to get parity.
--
I mentioned iTunes in my original post as something that was successful, and my analysis was that it was because it was a "real" app: in other words, something Apple cared about and created a team around. I don't think Apple cares that much about Dashboard or Safari RSS.
And yes I completely forgot about Sherlock: it does fit the bill really well. Remember how after a while they were shipping it with channels that wouldn't even work anymore? I think its funny that they still have a page for it here: http://www.apple.com/lae/sherlock/
(edits: added spotless link and grammar)
On the other hand, the Reader button in Safari is awesome and if the new Instapaper-like functionality syncs that content, it will do quite well.
"And if they build a large enough feature-set and backing service to make it a true competitor, they’re likely to create a lot of potential Instapaper demand."
Isn't that a little backwards? If Apple builds a true competitor, then it's going to create a lot less potential Instapaper demand. See Watson and Kaleidoscope for reasons why.
He states: My biggest challenge isn’t winning over converts from my competitors: it’s explaining what Instapaper does and convincing people that they actually need it.
So if apple deploys this everywhere, more people will understand it. Since Instapaper already has such a huge user base, established users will (supposedly) say 'oh, I use instapaper. It's much better'.
So apple creates new users, which are then drawn to Instapaper's superior service.
This is all dependent upon Instapaper actually implementing substantially better, but so far apple has sucked at multi-device syncing of, well, just about anything.
Sherlock beating Watson was a prime example where Apple's execution was somewhat similar (some say worse), but it still killed that product.
1: http://www.seankovacs.com/index.php/2009/07/gv-mobile-is-get...
The original version of the app is still up on the Store, but the update was rejected. Which is confusing.
I'd be more worried about a feature like this coming to Mobile Safari.
I think you run into a lot more issues with copyright enforcement, storage space, and ability to even copy files (different format, might only be served in flash) than text-based services have. We might have to wait until HTML5 video grows enough in popularity before seeing a decent implementation of this feature.
That's one of the things I like about the onboarding experience with Shelby.tv; when you sign up, you can start watching what your friends are tweeting/sharing since it pulls it from you twitter/facebook accounts.
....now if only my instapaper filled up with articles that I wanted to read all by itself....
Also, the application is extremely lightweight and doesn't get in the way of the video --- a simple, yet powerful experience.