I’ve noticed a lot of Google-ites going absolutely manic over Google Buzz and its implications. You can tell they’ve bought into Google’s approach without question. Many are unimpressed with the new iPad to the point of parroting the usual “it’s just a big iPod touch” cliché – but they fail to recall recent history and iPhone 1G’s place in it.
It’s easy to forget that the iPhone was launched with no app store and no way to buy and run apps until much later. People criticized this in large part because they knew there would be times their device would be connectionless and/or they didn’t want to have to wait to refresh an app every time they started or ran it.
At the time no one had any idea how data would be manipulated on the device other than your basic scroll and pinch and a tight keyboard and only now they’re starting to get past the stylus or physical keyboard mindset. Every day developers are creating more intuitive uses for iPhone and copycat hardware, particularly on the games front – and the iPad will be driven by entirely new markets. Think carriers like UPS that spend millions on a system they’ve built and maintained that can be easily moved to the iPad for a fraction of the cost, or hospitals doing exactly the same thing. Small businesses will use this thing as a field POS instead of being effectively priced out of the market. Kiosks won’t need to spend thousands just to sell merchandise while other retail outlets could completely overhaul their sales model to more closely resemble what Apple does in their stores but without screen size constraints that effectively lock out other business types. This thing even replaces the pad of paper taken to meetings: people often don’t take laptops because their screen blocks others at the table and sends a negative signal. Now it’s gone and we can even work documents in these meetings using a device that can easily turn to their native portrait form factor.
The iPad is in a similar situation to the iPhone when it was launched. The OS really hasn’t come of age for the form factor and will almost certainly see a dramatic upgrade when iPhone/iPad OS 4.0 arrives. I’m betting the biggest surprise will be the merging of the Mac OS X Dashboard widget design and a class of apps (like the iPhone weather app) that work on the iPad just like they would as Mac OS X widgets. Additionally, and more importantly, the device is perfectly positioned for a substantial segment of the market that wants no part of traditional computing. Some of them purchased or considered purchasing netbooks but this OS will be far more elegant and easy to use with the iPad form factor than the traditional OS + netbook form factor, and pretty much everything they want to do will be available to them.
It’s probably also a good bet that anyone comfortable with Google apps and cloud computing as each stands right now will not have nearly as much of a use for this device. Why? Because eventually HTC or someone like them will build a device that matches its hardware capabilities (barring lawsuit fears) almost feature for feature, just as they already have with Nexus One. Sure, it won’t be nearly as elegant but it will do what it needs to do to accomplish the tasks of an OS that isn’t the iPhone OS while Apple will continue to develop seamlessly forward, rendering existing user experiences continually challenged from a relative standpoint.
Despite being a lifelong techie in an IBMer family I find myself very unfulfilled when faced with the immaturity of most cloud-dependent apps and very particularly disinclined to work with Google’s frontend. It feels like the maximum realized potential of an inferior set of design and appearance standards and forever limited by the need to be basic and cross-platform while being serviceable in a lab geek sorta way. It’s like wearing khakis and a polo shirt to an important event. And even worse, the IA painfully obscures some very important application settings, leading me to actually prefer Microsoft’s overkill design mantra more and Apple’s elegance far more.
Eventually cloud computing should be about sync to and from the device and backend, not about the app frontend since consistency across vendors is a virtual impossibility. With HTML5 fully exploited and ubiquitous the browser will capably approximate all this regardless of connection state, from synched database to synched interface. But we’ll still effectively be returning to distributed computing because computing tends to always come back to the user interface, its ease of use, and robustness and feedback. It’s hard to imagine, all things equal, that this doesn’t put interface masters like Apple in the driver’s seat. Not only do they execute better than anyone in this space, they’ve already built both closed and browser driven development platforms and baked design consistency standards deep within each.
Though I know I’m by no means speaking for a large bunch of folks, these shortcomings are defeatable by implementing a more mature connectionless/sync-oriented data model (the reason many still use IMAP mail clients, for example) and a far more robust, attractive, and logical interface.
The whole package – software, hardware, and how it works (easily, consistently, expectedly, and beautifully) seems to be the holy grail. And if the hardware paradigm for the iPhone/touch achieves the hardware part of this in its form factor building something highly similar in a larger form factor that takes advantage of the increased real estate (through as yet unreleased software) the familiarity will be a huge win that no one else can achieve. The real questions are how much of the backend will Apple build and how much they will depend (or be allowed to depend) on backend from providers like Google.
