Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 47

I have written here, here and here about Apple’s inevitable assault on the Tablet market. What I hadn’t factored until recently is how symbiotic such a device would be for Baby Boomers.

Why Baby Boomers? Well, for the same two reasons that this demographic is unlikely to embrace the palm-sized iPhone en masse.

One, such a bookish-sized tablet device – I’ll call it the Boomer Tablet – would be tailor-made for home Wi-Fi setups, thereby obviating the mobile access costs associated with iPhone, a significant barrier for a generation that is programmed to keep mobile bills within a tight spending range.

Two, because a larger-form factor device would offer Boomers a bigger viewing screen and “lifestyle” settings, like fatter keys and a more forgiving keyboard to ease input, and wizard-like shortcuts to simplify recurring tasks.

This is key, because with the onset of age, Boomers’ motor skills have become less precise; their vision has become poorer; and their eyes get tired easier.

As such, the premise of them plugging away on tiny keys and peering into the tiny screen of a mobile device like iPhone/iPod touch is a non-starter.

By contrast, the Boomer Tablet offers a superior input, viewing and playback environment for accessing your iTunes library, personal media, syndicated content services, iPhone Apps and presumably, Mac Apps; something that the 70M+ Baby Boomers in the US who are aged 53-73 would likely find compelling.

Moreover, if Apple put a video camera in the device – not a stretch since they are doing it in the iPhone GS – it could make video conferencing and VOIP ubiquitous in a relatively short time (Skype already has a client for the iPhone/iPod touch). What better way to stay connected to distant loved ones?

As alluded to above, it seems logical that the Boomer Tablet would either run legacy Macintosh applications in an unmodified fashion, or perhaps support a new kind of ‘port-able’ Mac App built around the Cocoa programming framework and powered by Apple’s forthcoming OS X upgrade, Snow Leopard.

What I am envisioning is a runtime layer designed to offer formal convergence and partitioning paths between iPhone and Mac systems, enabling application builders to make runtime design tradeoffs relative to a coming Hardware Matrix of Apple device form-factors, a topic which I will get to in a bit.

Contenders to the Boomer Tablet Throne

Before I ponder the Hardware Matrix, let's first look at the contenders to the Boomer Tablet market segment. It really underscores the richness and fertile nature of this market, while providing a window into the strategies of three really great companies (if interested, check out my post ‘Built to Thrive - The Standard Bearers’ on Google, Apple and Amazon):

Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device: Amazon has built a physical device that is focused on doing one job really well – reading e-books. Moreover, Kindle leverages their strong position with print publishers, and of note, Amazon has shown device-neutrality by coming out with a software-only version of the Kindle. (I am currently reading ‘Married to the Mouse’ on my iPod touch. It delivers a solid user experience.)

This Switzerland-like positioning suggests that in the long run, the hardware version of Kindle may be more about Amazon jump-starting the e-book market than aspiring to be a hardware player.

That said, Amazon certainly has the assets (Marketplace, Media Relationships, Cloud Services, Associates) and market credibility if they ever wanted to position themselves as the more open alternative to the iPhone Platform.

Google Android Netbook: In Android, Google has built an open source OS, Middleware stack and SDK for building next-generation mobile devices.

Moreover, Google has a decent track record of cultivating ecosystems through open APIs, product evolution and stick-to-itiveness.

While a primary thrust of Android is outflanking the iPhone gauntlet, a logical fork is the high volume, low-margin Netbook segment, where Google assets like Search, Maps, Apps, Analytics and the forthcoming Wave unified messaging platform could leverage their Chrome browser to collapse the boundaries between desktop, web and mobile realms.

Moreover, as an open platform, Android has the potential to nurture a hobbyist device market around robotics, information devices and kit builders (see my post on Maker Faire for more detail on this topic).

iPhone/iPod touch: The numbers speak for themselves (40M devices, 1B downloads, 50K apps). But, beyond the numbers, iPhone Platform is a game-changing system from a development, distribution, monetization and user perspective, a conclusion supported by my own direct experience – having written 20+ articles on the iPhone Platform; owning an iPod touch; talking to a ton of iPhone App developers; building an iPhone optimized web application (Twiddeo.com) and working with another iPhone based startup (SquareConnect).

As noted earlier, the main downside to the current iPhone/iPod touch, relative to the Boomer segment is the relatively small form-factor.

Needless to say, a bigger form-factor would obviate these limitations, while having the built in leverage of the iPhone Ecosystem.

The Hardware Matrix: LCD v. HCD

Take this one to the bank: the Hardware Matrix is coming.

What is the Matrix? Envision a world where the Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, Boomer Tablet and iPhone Nano (rumored), respectively, all leverage a common SDK, plug into the App Store and integrate with Mobile Me (in addition to iTunes), and you understand that this implies all sorts of hardware abstraction decisions.

No less, this implies Apple partitioning the platform that supports these form-factors between device-specific functions, open Mac-like layers (i.e., download apps from anywhere, build any kind of apps), and managed/closed iPhone-like runtime layers (App Store is THE marketplace with a singular SDK, formal APIs, and Apple GOVERNANCE policies).

Simply put, the Matrix presents a potential hornet's nest of technical, user experience and ecosystem decision, and as such this is Apple’s biggest Achilles heel in the next few quarters; namely, how they execute forking (and no less important, de-forking) between form-factors.

Connecting the dots, I believe that Snow Leopard is the conduit OS where these things converge, but that's a total guess, based on the assumption that derivative form-factors are a given; that App Store and iPhone SDK are the best practices approach with the biggest developer ecosystem; and that Apple's best way to win in the Mobile Broadband Era is by making their products work together in a more than the sum of the parts fashion around a common Mac OS X.

And as Cocoa has won out as the programming and human interface model for Apple going forward, they have to already be preparing for this fork.

Why not then grease the skids for all of those iPhone App developers to suddenly wake up one morning and realize that they can sell into the Mac market with very little extra work? Wouldn’t that be a nice upside surprise?

At the same time, you can see how realization of this path brings with it all sorts of lowest common denominator vs. highest common divisor trade-offs, which is why it’s such an Achilles Heel; albeit one with tremendous upside.

Case in point, a recent post by The Silicon Alley Insider looks at how hardware differences between 3G and 3GS will potentially splinter the App Store.

This is why I would say to anyone who wonders why Apple hasn’t jumped into the Tablet/Netbook market yet that it’s because there is a LOT of work to get it right in terms of navigating the Matrix, let alone getting the user experience right.

As to the end game, John Gruber of Daring Fireball described it best in his 'WWDC 2009 Wrap-Up':

The technical keynote has for as long as I can remember been titled "Mac OS X State of the Union." This year the title changed to "Core OS State of the Union."

Hence the symbiosis: Apple now has two full-fledged developer platforms, Mac OS X and iPhone OS, derived from one core system…But look at their vectors — their relative rates of growth — and ponder how much longer until WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track. My answer: next year.

With Apple, once exclusively the Mac Company, the only constant is change.

Related Posts

1. Start in the Middle: The "Jobs,""Outcomes" and "Constraints" Innovation Model
2. Apple, TV and the Smart Connected Living Room
3. iPhones, App Stores and Ecosystems
4. Is the iPhone Platform Destined to Disrupt the Packaged Software Industry?
5. Analysis: Apple WWDC Keynote - Punishing the Wizard, Part Two

Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 54

There's a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, there's no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there's Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.)

But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning. As I've said for years, that's a lot like pointing a camera at a stage play, and calling it a movie. Yes, that's pretty much what they did in many early movies, but eventually, the tools of production and consumption actually changed the format of what was produced and consumed. Camera angles, pacing, editing techniques, lighting, location shooting, special effects: all these innovations make the movies (and television) of today very different from the earliest movies. YouTube is pushing the envelope even further. Why should books be any different? (Aside: Bruce Sterling just published an amazing rant on this topic - how the context of pulp magazines shaped the content of early science-fiction.)

In our work at O'Reilly as authors and publishers, we've long been interested in exploring how the online medium changes the presentation, narrative and structure of the book, not just its price or format.

A sample from my latest experiment, The Twitter Book, can be seen below.

Now, you might ask, how is a book authored in powerpoint a web publishing experiment? It boggles the mind!

The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we've used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task. Because the basics are so easy, there's no need to repeat them, as so many technical books do. Instead, we can rely on the reader to provide (much of) the implicit narrative framework, and jump right to points that they might not have thought about.

Perhaps the biggest driver, though, was the need for speed. We couldn't imagine writing a book about twitter that wouldn't be immediately out of date, because there are so many new applications appearing daily, and the zeitgeist of twitter best practices is evolving equally quickly. So we needed a format that would be really easy to update. (Again, modular structure helps, since new pages can be inserted without any need to reflow the entire document.) We plan to update The Twitter Book with each new printing.

The idea to write the book in powerpoint came to me while I was thinking about how quickly I write a new talk: I generally use pictures as visual bullets, to remind me about the order of my main points; I know what I want to talk about when I see each picture. And pictures are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story. All I needed to do, I realized, was to write down some notes equivalent to what I'd be saying if I were giving this as a talk. (And in fact, I will be using portions of the book as the basis for my talk later today at the Inbound Marketing Summit, and a few weeks later at the Twitter Boot Camp.)

Of course, having the amazing Sarah Milstein as a co-author really helped. She immediately grasped the concept, and because she knows just about everything there is to know about the twitter app ecosystem, tools, and techniques, she actually provided much of the meat of the book. This allowed me to spend time on giving my perspectives on points that particularly matter to me, or that demonstrate my approach to twitter.

But even there, we saw real benefit in the format of the book. As wikipedia has demonstrated, collaboration is easiest when documents are constructed using a modular architecture. It's hard to coordinate a complex narrative (even single authors sometimes lose track of their plot details); much easier to work on things in standalone units that share a common, "interoperable" format.

I first explored this modular approach to the book in Unix Power Tools, a book I wrote in 1993 with the explicit goal of emulating the hypertext style of the web in a print book. The book consists of a thousand inter-linked articles. In the print book, the "hyperlinks" were in the form of cross references to individually numbered articles. In online versions such as the one at Safari books online, the cross references are expressed as real hyperlinks.

Similarly, our "Cookbook" series of technical books (whose format was originated by Nat Torkington in 1998 with the first edition of the Perl Cookbook), effectively creates a database of answers to common problems.

In 2003, Dale Dougherty and Rael Dornfest developed the Hacks series, another approach to books as collections of loosely-related pages. The Hacks books provide a collection of tips, tricks, and documentation on the problem-solving approaches of cutting edge users.

Of course, modularity isn't the only thing that publishers can learn from new media. The web itself, full of links to sources, opposing or supporting points of view, multimedia, and reader commentary, provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online. Crowdsourcing likewise.

But I like to remind publishers that they are experts in both linking and in crowdsourcing. After all, any substantial non-fiction work is a masterwork of curated links. It's just that when we turn to ebooks, we haven't realized that we need to turn footnotes and bibliographies into live links. And how many publishers write their own books? Instead, publishers for years have built effective business processes to discover and promote the talents of those they discover in the wider world! (Reminder: Bloomsbury didn't write Harry Potter; it was the work of a welfare mom.) But again, we've failed to update these processes for the 21st century. How do we use the net to find new talent, and once we find it, help to amplify it?

I don't exempt O'Reilly from that criticism. While we've done many pioneering projects, we haven't fully lived up to our own vision of the ebook of the future. For example, Safari Books Online, our online library, recognizes that the reference work of the future is far larger than a single book. But we've done a poor job of updating the works in that library to be more "web like" in the way I've just outlined. It is still primarily a collection of books online. (We're adding video, more web content, and working to update books to be more link-rich, but we're not as far along as I'd like.)

Take a look at any ebook, and ask yourself how it could be richer, more accessible, more powerful, if it approached the job it was trying to do with fresh eyes, and a fresh approach.

Many of the products that result won't look like books at all. After all, Google Earth is the new Rand McNally, Wikipedia is the new Brittanica, Google itself is the new competitor to many reference works, YouTube is becoming a vehicle for just-in-time learning, and World of Warcraft is the new immersive fantasy novel. What job do publishers do? And how can new media help us do it better?