Brilliant
January 12th, 2007
Set the scene: It’s a corporate boardroom, four or five years ago. The newly hired CEO is holding his first strategic meeting, and everyone’s just a little on edge. None of them know what to expect, and some of them were worried. Were there going to be cuts? Downsizings? The company performance had been utterly dismal- their major competitor had beaten them out of every market segment over the last few years, and the only thing left was a niche segment of crazy loyalists that never blinked at the exorbitant pricetags and substandard performance of their product line.
The following question is asked: “What does the computer of the future look like?” Discussion follows. Things are moving online, so the need for the desktop will dwindle. But then there are games, right? They’ll always need more hardware, but even there that hardware is becoming so specialized, with expensive graphics cards and embedded physics, that sooner or later that niche is going to specialize itself out of the desktop computing market. Developers will still need power, yes, as will those that deal with graphics and video processing, but in the end that’s a pretty small market, yes? Everyone else will simply need some kind of a portal device to online applications. There may be voice recognition, there may be contact management, who knows. In the end, the home computer of the future will no longer require processing power.
So if power is not a requirement, what else will happen? Well, mobile computing is brought up. If customers are going to rely on their computers even more in the future, they’re going to want rapid access to said information. Will the home computer be portable? It very well may be, constantly connected so that the web applications will always be available at a touch. But the need for a larger screen will never dissapear, so perhaps it’s a two-piece device. Regardless, sooner or later the room comes to a consensus that the computer of the future will be a screen, and a portable CPU/Memory unit, and the key selling point of the device is simplicity and interoperability.
“What will this portable unit do?” The answer is “Everything anyone can do on their desktops today”: Email, browsing, games, office applications, movies, music… you name it.
“Which of those can we do now?” Games require too much hardware, unless we want to make Gameboys. Email and browsing… well, the networks arent’ well established enough. No-one’s got a battery good enough for music, office applications require a large interface and screens aren’t large enough… so the only real thing remaining is …. Music. And once technology catches up, we can start adding the other ones, right?
Apple started with the iPod the same time that they started working on OSX. The seed of portable computing and an operating system built on a scaleable kernel. Since then we have seen the advent of larger portable storage, a move to safer flash memory, better batteries, larger screens, enough processing power to do video. Driven by sales and technology improvements in cellphones, we’ve seen a continued convergence of technology. This convergence has brought the mobile market ever closer to the desktop market, but not on the playing field of processing power, but rather on the playing field of actual customer useage. More features do not matter to the everyday consumer- simplicity does. We are not all technowhizzes who can dissasemble a computer and install our own RAM- people like us are in the minority, regardless of what you might think. Make the interface intuitive, the functionality what-I-need and no more, and you’ll have a customer for life.
And now, with the release of the iPhone, the plan suddenly becomes clear. While wireless providers have pushed the limites of what our phones are capable of, desktop hardware and software producers have mostly abandoned developing the functionality of the common user to really push into the niche of power applications. Who really uses more than the basic features of Word, after all? Games are moving more and more to the world of consoles. In the meantime, Apple has moved off into left field with its iPod and with clever advertising and a seeded and loyal userbase has overrun that market, and now- flush with an absurdly strong brand message and five years of tenure as a leader in technology, interface, innovation and simplicity is revealing its hand to the world.
Lets be honest: The iPhone appears to be one step away from the holy grail of mobile computing. It performs all basic communication options that other cell phones can, and the entire product has been designed to scale: It runs a kernel that’s a scaled down version of what’s running Macs right now, proving that as mobile hardware capabilities increase, they can easily add to the feature set to bridge the gap between the mobile and the desktop. It’s an excellent test platform for the large questions that remain on mobile UI (How do you format a word document on a PDA, for instance). Memory, screen resolution, battery life… all these things will only improve over time- hardware presents the only limitation, and that’s only temporary. Really, the only thing we’re lacking is a screen to plug it into… and we’ve all seen the iMac.
And I wouldn’t be surprised that the strategic vision for this was hatched five years ago. Brilliant.
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