Another Prognostication about Apple

So it's the end of the financial quarter, and folks are raving about how Apple sold almost as many iPads as Mac computers. And despite the fuss over the antenna, the iPhone 4 looks to be a hit. Momentum should carry Apple through Q3 pretty well. Kids are going back to school, and Macs, iPads and iPhones will certainly be on lots of kids' back-to-school lists. Of course Q4 means the holiday season, so in terms of hardware - iPads, iPods, iPhones, and Macs, Apple should do well for the rest of the year.

A few years ago, we might have looked forward to a major Q1 announcement for MacWorld. Just a few years ago, we saw the unveiing of the MacBook Air at MacWorld, and marveled at its weight and thin profile. But for new products, MacWorld just isn't in the cards any more. As Apple pointed out, it was always a bit silly to introduce new products in January, after the start of the school year and the winter holidays.

So the question is, what will Apple have for us in Q1 of 2011? With the iPhone 4 already 6 months old, and the iPad  some 9 months old, can new faster Mac computers fill in the gap? Or will Apple surprise us again? I have no idea, but there are three scenarios that come to mind:

(1) Hardware: A fix or improvement to unsung hardware that's very significant. Maybe AppleTV will get fixed, or we'll see biometric sensors (that really work) to authenticate access to our devices. Maybe the Nike-iPod thing will go further, with a FitBit acquisition.

(2) Software  & Services: Apple has bought a lot of important IP, from geolocation (Poly9) to AI-enabled services (Siri). Apple doesn't roll out services until they're ready, but everyone knows that they don't rest on past accomplishments. Maybe we'll something there.

(3) Commercial services: Now that Apple has its own ad network, maybe we'll see more revenue flowing through that. Even if we don't, it's possible that the iPad could introduce more traffic to the AppStore than we'd anticipated. And with new iPad owners, we see new first-tim App Store customers coming in every day.

So there you have it, three reasons to not panic that hsving launched the iPad, iPhone 4, and new Mac computers in 2010, Apple will run out of mojo in 2011.

Stay thirsty, my friends.

Can we please stop using these lame examples for geolocation and NFC?

The Next Web has a great article on where Apple is headed with geolocation and Near Field Communications (NFC), and all I can say is, the sooner the better. After all, our smartphones - even our beloved iPhones - are "smart" like Rain Man is "smart." They're amazingly good at doing all kinds of really hard things, but then they simply can't process critical information that (from a human perspective) is far simpler. And then there are the tasks that they simply refuse to attempt or break down when they try.

So that's why I look forward to having a phone that really knows where I am, who I'm near, and what I am there to do. But I have a little rant to go along with this. Can we please stop dragging out coupons and discounts as the default example for geolocation? And while we're at it, can we also stop imagining that we'll toss out our credit and debit card infrastructure and start using NFC-enabled phones to buy things from retailers? Yes, I know that those examples (a) demonstrate what the underlying technology could do in "real world" applications, and (b) are how lots of companies are going to try to apply those technologies.

But those examples are contrived and unimaginative, and worst of all, they just kind of suck from a user experience perspective. We owe it to ourselves to think a bit deeper about what great experiences those technologies will really enable. Mobile advertising can work, and it will work, but only when it becomes a delight and not an interruption. That means doing things that are much more intelligent, creative and exciting than offering 50 cents off a cup of coffee. Sorry, but I either want the coffee or I don't, and your ad just cost me 30 seconds of time that I wanted to spend reading e-mail.

The same thing goes for NFC. In my wallet I have a dozen different ways to pay for that cup of coffee. I don't need another. Of course, it's a different story for unbanked people in other countries, or in use cases where pricing is complex and infrastructure is highly uniform, like Japanese trains. But compared to credit and debit transactions, what value does phone based payments bring to a retailer or its customers? I'll bet that in my lifetime I never buy a cup of coffee in the US with my phone. (If I lose the bet, you can come see me and collect via NFC, by the way.)

OK, time to stop ranting and start thinking about what cool, delightful changes will be driven by better geolocation and NFC in handsets. My guess is that the best applications will begin with the cultivation of people's innate desires - sharing, discovery, convenience and sense of self.

Not fifty cents off a latte. 

The Real Problem with the iPad

Andrew McAfee is a smart guy who focuses on Enterprise 2.0, including (literally) writing the book on the topic. In his most recent post, he points to recent criticisms of the iPad by Cory Doctorow, Tim Bray and Jonathan Zittrain. He takes them to task for their hyperbole, and he's right that their language is colorful to say the least. But he also asks, "What do you think? Am I missing something important and nefarious about the iCosystem? Or are you with me in thinking that it fosters innovation rather than stifling it?"

Certainly the iPad will foster innovation, in three important ways. First, it will help drive development of new types of media experiences that integrate text, images, video and sound in interactive media that we have (so far) only experienced in computer games. On devices like the iPad, you might still say "I'm reading an article" but you will also be interacting with the content dynamically, in a manner that's unique to you, your context, and your behavior patterns. I'm with the crowd that says that the iPad - and its descendants - will change the way we consume content, as well as changing the content itself. If you agree with Marshall McLuhan that the medium is the message, then you ignore the iPad at your peril.

Additionally - and just as importantly - the iPad, like all portable computing devices from smartphones to netbooks, will drive our "stuff" further "into the cloud" (or various clouds, depending on your view of cloud computing). More devices in your life means more of your "stuff" must exist as continuously updated, immediately accessible, online "stuff" that all your devices can access and synchronize with. (This, by the way, is an interpretation of "cloud" that's different from what enterprise architects and IT professionals talk about "cloud computing." So pardon the ambiguity, but please don't blame me for it.)

Lastly, the iPad, like the iPhone, will give a kick to the rest of the e-Readers, tablet netbooks, and god-knows-what-else that's coming down the pike with a screen, a chip and an antenna. Sure, the iPad is beating them all up now, but in time there will be alternatives that - for various reasons - will appeal to some folks more than the iPad (or in addition to it). No matter how good the iPad is, there will be other successful devices, and that's a Good Thing.

Having said all that, I'm also on board with the iPad's critics. As an end user, I hate the idea of giving up rights that I currently enjoy with my "old" media. Why can't I loan an item of "my" content to a friend? Oh, I see, because it's not really mine. It's Apple's. Or somebody's. Just not mine, that's for sure. Developers of content for the device have it even harder. Yes, Steve Jobs tells us that the vast majority of applications are approved, and the ones that aren't approved are almost all due to a violation of one of three very clear rules. But the Apple developer ecosystem will always have a tinge of frustration. That's not going away.

Remember when Kindle owners suddenly found "their" books had disappeared from their devices last year, and it gave everybody pause? It's one thing for HBO to end "The Sopranos" and not run it in syndication. It's entirely another thing for HBO executives to come into your house and take the Sopranos DVD collection that you bought at Costco last year. Apple knows - and you do too - that the iPad experience only works if you feel like the "owner" of the stuff on your iPad, just as you are the owner of your books, magazines and CDs. But fundamentally that's just not the case.

While Professor McAfee rightly points out that the very unhackable iPad violates a kind of "Geek Ethos" there are two other non-geeky reasons to dislike the iPad.

First, the iPad is a one-way device. It does a pretty good job of delivering the stuff we like to do on the computer that involves consumption of content. But it's worse in a number of ways when it comes to producing and sharing. Obviously the lack of a keyboard, camera, etc. are a part of the problem, but the bias toward consumption is very fundamental to the whole iPad concept. The iPad is designed for Internet couch potatoes.

This is ironic and frustrating at the same time, because Apple's first home-run technology - the Mac - is the opposite in so many ways. For non-technical users, Apple really created the first personal computer for people that wanted to just plug it in, switch it on, and start using it to organize and edit photos and video, compile digital music libraries, build Web sites and even create music. Apple's free, built-in applications on the Mac literally delight average people and incite them to engage in creative activity, with little things like Photo Booth. Have you ever put a child in front of a Mac with Photo Booth running? Better than a video game.

You might prefer tools other than the ones Apple gives you (for free) on your Mac, and you're in luck there too. Because creative professionals have used Macs since the beginning, the high-powered creative tools - and the simply nifty little things - are all available on the Mac. On the Web, the Mac is the quintessential two-way machine. We use it for consuming, sure, but also creating and sharing.

And that brings us to the second problem with the iPad. If only it sucked. But it doesn't. Microsoft's latest phone (the Kin) sucks, but nobody is angry at Microsoft for making a bad phone. But Apple, oh Apple. They brought their game to the iPad. The industrial design is awesome. The user interaction is elegant. The process of finding and acquiring apps and content is seamless. And that's the truly infuriating thing about the iPad - it's the amazingly beautiful woman (or handsome guy) that wants to go back to your place, but later you find your wallet's gone.

The iPad is so beautiful and well made, you can only hate it for intellectual reasons, because the device itself gives gadget-lust to everybody who picks it up. If you really have problems with Apple's vice grip on the content, or you resent a device that could have inspired creativity but instead encourages passivity, the iPad makes you feel like you stumbled across the best steak restaurant in town the day after you became a vegetarian. And that frustration is the emotion that drives the anti-iPad brouhaha.

In Praise of Disposable Mobile Apps

It used to be that when you flew on shuttle from Boston to New York (or vice versa) you'd see a bunch of magazines laid out for you to pick up at the gate - all for free. That's the only place in the US where I've seen that. When you fly from California to Chicago or Denver or Boston or New York, there are no free magazines. And you never see free magazines at the gate for flights between Northern California (SFO, OAK, SJC) and Southern California (LAX, SAN, BUR, SNA). But on that shuttle flight between BOS and EWR, there they were. So you pick one up, and half the time you end up not even reading it.

If that seems like strange behavior for distribution and consumption of a magazine, consider the fact that we behave the same way in downloading apps for our iPhones. If you have more than three screens' worth of apps, I bet there's at least one that you downloaded but haven't even tried yet.

People who don't have an iPhone find it crazy that people will download a good number of iPhone apps that they use for a couple of weeks before abandoning, or they end up not using them at all. The odd thing is that a surprising set of applications that seemed trivial at first have stayed on our phones as regular stand-by apps.

First of all, by calling these things "applications" we're already confusing ourselves. Because of the mobile device context, these apps must be extremely simple, intuitive and useful. So we expect to be able to pick them up without any need for a "user's manual" or even a "getting started guide." While we call them applications, they bear no resemblance to the things that we used to install by inserting multiple floppy disks into a personal computer. They're more intuitive than most websites.

Secondly, we can acquire and dispose of these apps as easily as a song. People with years of experience in the "mobile industry" like to kvetch that there have been "mobile application stores" for years. But the fact that the iPhone app store put them all to shame so quickly indicates that these mobile app mavens didn't know what they didn't know.

Lastly, we - the phone owners - are changing. For years we have consumed entertainment - especially music - and gladly discarded last year's hits in favor of new sensations. But that was content that required little conscious attention. Games are actually more interactive, so we have a more conscious, interactive engagement with them, as well as a more conscious decision when we dropped one in favor of another. But mobile applications are a step beyond games. Like games, apps are interactive, but more significantly, they play a critical role in our "real lives."

The iPhone apps we choose to keep become our companions in our daily lives, and the ones we choose to discard (no hard feelings, right?) are dropped after days and weeks of trying to fit them into our lives. I'm not kidding about this. People actively debate which weather app makes the better call on the hour-by-hour forecast, or which shopping app finds the best prices. And let's not even start with Gowalla versus FourSquare.

Forget about "augmented reality" that requires heads-up-displays and real-time 24x7 cameras. Millions of people are augmenting their realities every day through their iPhones. Grok that, and you see the seismic shift that Apple created that everybody else has to keep up with.

We arrived at this point not by careful planning and strategic selection of the best applications for mobile users, but by the establishment of a big, imperfect marketplace for mobile applications. Nothing in the future is guaranteed. But the lesson is there for us to see: the future of the mobile experience will be characterized by hundreds of thousands of options, and consequently, individuals trying out hundreds or even thousands of application experiences, most of which will be abandoned.

So here's to the disposable mobile app. It's a sign that we're going in the right direction.

Three Types of Expertise

It's commonly accepted that there are two types of knowledge - "knowledge about" and "experience doing." The former can be acquired by studying, but the other kind of understanding comes through hands-on experience. Both are necessary. Conventional wisdom favors real world experience over book learning. But the ability to step back from a situation and objectively examine all your options requires both kinds of knowledge.

I'm a big fan of my kids' pediatrician, Dr. Joe. A good while back, before my oldest could speak, she suddenly stopped eating. She would literally burst into tears whenever she put anything in her mouth. Even a sip of juice would spark a painful outburst. As new parents, my wife and I were confused and worried. But when we brought her in to Dr. Joe, he identified the problem with one glance inside her mouth. She had stomatitis on the back of her tongue - a painful infection that went away in a couple of days.

That experience got me thinking - you might know enough about stomatitis to pass exams medical school, maybe even do well in a pediatric internship, but with the average doctor seeing scores of patients a day, can you catch it and diagnose it correctly within seconds on the first visit? That's the difference that practical experience makes. Dr. Joe knew that the infection is most common in one and two-year-old children (all that drooling gives a lot of opportunities for oral infection). What's more, Dr. Joe's protocol for a pediatric exam led directly to the tell-tale symptoms on the tongue.

I'm not saying that a younger, less experienced doctor would have missed the call. But this is just an example of the difference made by decades of practical experience.

Here's another example: when our second child was a newborn, he was feeding irregularly so he lost more weight than he should have. Dr. Joe put us on a strict feeding schedule, which we followed precisely for the next four days. At our next visit, the nurse weighed the baby and entered his weight on the chart. According to the chart, it seemed that our baby was continuing to lose weight. Dr. Joe interviewed us in detail. Had we stuck to the feeding regimen? We assured him that we had. Well, he said, there's only one explanation. He went over to the infant scale, calibrated it carefully to zero (which the nurse had forgotten to do), and weighed the baby again. Much to our relief, the baby had in fact gained weight.

In our most recent visit to Dr. Joe, I encountered a third kind of expertise. Our younger child had developed a respiratory infection, and Dr. Joe prescribed the appropriate antibiotics to treat the infection, as well as medicine to reduce the swelling of the airway, to facilitate breathing. He was adamant that we monitor the boy's health very carefully (you don't mess around with respiratory infections, he advised us) and come back for a follow-up visit in two days. The follow-up visit was with one of Dr. Joe's colleagues, and I was impressed by how much her protocols and treatment were in synch with Dr. Joe's. What's more, she told us that this respiratory bug had been going around for more than a month and it was a tough one. It might take two rounds of antibiotics, but with consistent treatment we would clear it up.

That led me to think about the third kind of expertise - an awareness of what's currently happening in your field. In a larger practice, with a team of doctors that communicate well, there's a collective intelligence that's aware of the most currently relevant information. Later, as the current bugs and drugs and research are displaced by newer issues, the "currently relevant information" becomes "experience" - which might be summed up as "previously relevant information that is now possibly future-relevant experience."

We take this transformation for granted - it's captured in the heads of doctors in a practice. But if you were to look for it in the practice's records - those enormous shelves of patient charts, you wouldn't find it.

In the business world, one of the key benefits of the new "Enterprise 2.0" technologies is that they give knowledge workers an effective means to complement their "book knowledge" and official reports with the other two kinds of knowledge. People can communicate their first-hand experience in a timely manner, so relevant expertise is both shared and discovered more easily. In addition, communication is more current and timely than it could be in tradition systems that were designed to archive documents. Inevitably, a system that works this way will seem more conversational in nature, which might give the impression that it's less "professional." But to dismiss conversational communication as less professional is to mistake form for substance.

The Tayloristic mind-set sees a water cooler conversation happening in a social network and thinks "those people should get back to work." But in fact, knowing each other - and what each of us is currently working on or seeing in our work - that is our work. Perhaps by thinking about the three types of expertise we might help people to understand this idea better. What do you think?

Being On Time

Jeffery Zeldman has posted a wonderful article about being on time. The message is obvious:

"If you plan to arrive early, then you are covered when circumstances beyond your control conspire to make you late.

"This is simple and obvious but many otherwise brilliant professionals clearly don’t think about it. The result is that they often arrive late. It’s never their fault, and yet it’s always the same people who are late."

The post is compelling because Zeldman places the reader not in the shoes of the person is perpetually late, but the others, who made major and minor sacrifices to be on time, and are left waiting.

Punctuality has always been one of my pet peeves, especially in business, and it's hard to reconcile with people who just don't make it a priority. The thing is, if I arrive early, I don't feel like I've wasted the time I could have put to better use by leaving later. Rather, I put those extra minutes to some good use - checking a to-do list, reading a book or a magazine, or simply relaxing and mentally preparing for my appointment.

On the other hand, if I spend my journey rushing in nervous anticipation of arriving late, even if I arrive on time, I still feel edgy from the trip. If a meeting isn't worth an early arrival, maybe it's not worth having at all.

Does your Alma Mater help you find job opportunities?

I had an interesting experience today. At work, we're recruiting for a specialized position, the kind that you have to have a certain kind of advanced degree for. There are a good number of graduate programs whose alumni would be ideal for this job, and given the current unemployment situation in the US, I thought that approaching these schools' alumni networks would be worth a try.

What made my quest particularly interesting was the mixed results that I had. Before I say more, I should say that we are gladly paying both generic job sites and specialist industry associations to list the position. But I wanted to reach out through alumni networks as well, because graduate programs' alumni networks tend to be a good resource for job-seekers, even years after graduating.

Some of the best programs (Carnegie Mellon and University of Texas stand out in my mind) make it dead simple for employers to post job listings. Best of all, their programs have a very straightforward navigation to an "Employers" button that led to an e-mail link or a web form to submit a job description. You'd think that this would be pretty obvious - after all, these are professional programs whose graduates expect to go on to successful careers. But surprisingly less than half of the sites I viewed made it clear how an employer could list positions for interns, new graduates or alumni. One of the worst offenders in this regard had an absolutely beautiful site - as long as you are a prospective student who wants to learn about the program's courses and faculty (which are top-tier). But if you're an employer wondering how to reach those students, good luck.

Most sites had an e-mail address for an actual human being - an important feature. But a surprising number of programs had links for employers that led to complicated registrations. What's more, in many of these programs, once past the complicated registration process, the site required payment to post the job. As I said, we have gladly paid job sites and specialist associations to carry our job posting. But it's just impractical to fork over several hundred dollars to every academic program in the country.

My question is - if you're a graduate that spent thousands of dollars and years of your life to earn your advanced degree, and you give what you can as a loyal alumnus of your university's graduate program, are you being shortchanged if they drive prospective employers away? In times like these, shouldn't your alma mater be one of your best sources of opportunity, rather than a gatekeeper that charges prospective employers for the privilege of communicating to its students and alumni?