Nick's Blog

The Gartner Group provides some very interesting analysis of the IT world. In the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday they weighed into the iPad discussion, and gave a very good summary of the 'content' side of Apple's genius. The article was about Google's plans to launch a similar device. Gartner analyst Robin Simpson said other companies including Google would have trouble competing with Apple's iPad because Apple had already developed a strong ecosystem around its products, allowing users to buy content from iTunes with one click. There is its. There is no such thing as technology, the reason devices succeed and continue to exist is if you get the whole 'ecosystem' surrounding them right. It's all the one thing, a device or technology is not separate to getting all those other ecosystem things right. He goes on: "You can make great hardware, you can have a fantastic, easy-to-use operating system, but to make it commercially successful I think you n...

So what's the genius of the iPad? Time will tell if it sells, obviously, but it's a fascinating experiment. You always know when somebody is onto something new when others struggle to describe it. Specifically the best they can do is describe it as being 'like' other things they know. That's what most of the descriptions of the iPad have been. It's like an oversized iPod Touch, and like an ebook reader, and like a tablet PC, etc. The (always so spectacularly clever) reviewers then jump to what their hamster-cage brains then think must be the logical conclusion, that the new technology is 'nothing but' some variation on these other things. (Art and music reviewers do the same thing, and nearly always miss new talent, for the same reasons.) Steve Jobs gave an insight into the sort of there-is-no-such-thing-as-technology thinking Apple does in his presentation for the iPad. He described the iPad as fitting between the iPod Touch/iPhone and the Macbook i.e. ...