iPad: Curated Computing

Forrester Research Analyst Sarah Rotman Epps’ take on the new tablet computing model in the Ars Technica article, Curated computing: what’s next for devices in a post-iPad world.

She argues that with tablet computing – for the iPad anyway, since there’s not really a counterpart to it yet – there’s a new model of ‘less choice, more relevance.’

To compete with Apple in the tablet market, product strategists must bridge the gap between what consumers expect from a PC and what a tablet actually delivers. Most importantly, they should embrace a Curated Computing experience, which limits choice in a good way, turning the limitations of the form factor into strengths rather than weaknesses. The iPad’s success can be attributed to its guided simplicity: the only way to use the device is via apps, which are expressly developed for the device.

I would add to this that, due to the broad availability of the App Store and the low barrier-to-entry for developers, the apps being created for iPad are a lot less expensive than commercial software we’re used to buying, and generally higher quality. With each app on average well under $10, and many of them under $3, buying software for a tablet is a pretty painless exercise. This could be another benefit of the curated experience: low-cost, well-designed apps that do one or two things really well.

She may be right about this. I don’t see Apple opening up the environment to allow iPad owners to purchase and install applications from sources other than the App Store, and I don’t believe that it’s just about tyrannical ‘control’ by Apple. Central to the success of iPad and iPhone is tight management over the quality of apps that get loaded. If the user experience on the device suffers from poorly-written software, many customers will think Apple has screwed up or that the device just isn’t very good.

With traditional computers there’s always been a lot of software available, so choice hasn’t been a problem. The problem has been quality. With all the software choices out there, like anything else in a saturated market, there’s also a certain amount of junk – buggy software, poorly-written interfaces, lousy support. I think Apple wants to keep a tight lid on this and maintain quality. Less choice maybe, but a better customer experience. And that’s a perfectly acceptable trade-off for many people.

There’s a maxim with regard to software development. In a perfect world you want three things — you want it (1) good, (2) fast, and (3) cheap. Software developers will tell you: pick any two.

Fremium + Moore’s Law × Murphy’s Law

Brief but good interview here with Evernote CEO Phil Libin by Todd Sattersten.

“For a new startup company, multiply Moore’s Law by Murphy’s Law: The number of things that can go wrong will double every year.”

Evernote is one of many tech companies working off the Fremium model, which basically means that you offer something of value for free, with a premium version for customers who are willing to pay for more. The Fremium business model assumes three things:

1. Your free product is good enough for casual use, and will get people talking about you
2. Your premium product is good enough to entice (and retain) paying customers who want more
3. There are enough paying customers to support the freeloaders casual customers and generate a profit

I freeloaded evaluated Evernote’s free service for a short while before upgrading to the paid account. I wrote a bit about it here last summer and I’m still a big fan of their service. I like having a digital bucket to drop things in, knowing that I can get to them from my laptop, my phone, or from any computer on the web. Evernote has executed well on the Fremium idea.

Innovation at Apple

The thing that interests me most about Apple is their focus on innovation. Right now, in the technology world, perhaps only Google comes close in terms of redefining entire industries and creating new opportunity where before there was none. GE, Nike, Amazon, Pixar, Disney and Nintendo are some others with a strong innovative culture.

In a March 2008 interview with Fortune magazine senior editor Betsy Morris, Steve Jobs spoke about Apple’s culture and how they approach product development and company strategy. Some quotable excerpts follow.

On the iPhone:

We all had cellphones. We just hated them, they were so awful to use. The software was terrible. The hardware wasn’t very good. [...] It was a great challenge. [...] Nobody had ever thought about putting operating systems as sophisticated as OS X inside a phone, so that was a real question. We had a big debate inside the company whether we could do that or not. And that was one where I had to adjudicate it and just say, ‘We’re going to do it. Let’s try.’ The smartest software guys were saying they can do it, so let’s give them a shot. And they did.

On iTunes:

We did iTunes because we all love music. We made what we thought was the best jukebox in iTunes. Then we all wanted to carry our whole music libraries around with us. [...] It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.

On listening to customers:

So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “a faster horse.”‘

On hiring consultants:

We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.

On Apple’s focus:

Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before. [...] We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.

On choosing strategy:

When we created the iTunes Music Store, we did that because we thought it would be great to be able to buy music electronically, not because we had plans to redefine the music industry. I mean, it just seemed like writing on the wall, that eventually all music would be distributed electronically.