Last week, during a particularly slow day at work, I watched, along with 100,000 other people, a low budget streaming show online seemingly dedicated to the launch of the iPad. I know it was 100,000 because there was a counter at the bottom of the video window, and sometimes the show would stream Leo Laporte’s stream live from the event, where he sat in the audience and filmed the presentation, bootlegger style.
Leo Laporte has a radio show, which plays on my local radio station every Saturday afternoon, right after the lawn and garden show. And I’m listening to it, not on my radio, but on my iPod Touch, through the iheartradio app I downloaded this morning which streams my local radio stations. The icon for that app sits next to the other radio apps I use, Pandora, Slacker, and Last.fm. Leo is talking about the iPad, which means this article so far is sort of a paradoxical infinite loop.
He is a fan of the iPad, saying it is basically a big iPod Touch; it’s a great e-book reader. And while he is somewhat sympathetic to the criticisms many people have leveled against the iPad, he believes the product will be a success, if not a replacement for anything in particular. I think he is shortsighted. So are all the people (read: you) who call the iPad a “big iPhone”, which is sort of like calling a Peterbilt a big truck.
Here’s why Apple has it right, and you have it wrong.
Apps. No matter how many Apps are sold or given away in the App store, you people are perpetually underestimating both their scope and power. I have an Android phone, loaded with Apps. My iPod has a few Apps. My computer has lots of Apps, only I call them, “Programs.” My cable box has Apps, one frequently used which shows live TV and another which streams InstantWatch content. My PS3 has Apps. We are surrounded by Apps, have been for years.
The iPad, for all the hooplah, is really just a better App platform. And when the iPad finds it’s way into the hands of all those people who aren’t too embarrassed to stand outside their nearest Best Buy or Apple Store, they’ll have an enormous library of Apps to browse. The iPhone didn’t have that and look at it now. The iPad is a guaranteed success because it is one of only a few products that runs these Apps. Let me run the fantastic Facebook App on my notebook, and I’d probably never visit facebook.com again, not that I visit much anyway. And I have similar feelings for nearly all my Android and Apple Apps. The App makes the corresponding website or computer program at best redundant, and at worst, obsolete.
Just as the Macintosh and Windows programmers were 20 years ago, App programmers are the next generation, building specific operating system compatible programs which finally do what technology has promised for so long. They will make our lives a little simpler. At least, our online lives, which have until now been dominated by website addresses, usernames, and passwords… RSS feeds, Diggs, url shorteners, viruses, and forum trolls. These aren’t good things.
So let’s say you’re a company… Netflix… for example. You have a website, and that’s fine. It does online streaming and lots of people enjoy that. But while the website based service you provide is enormously popular and you’re making huge money, there is an endless barrage of mail in your inbox asking for … you guessed it… Apps. The people complaining are not asking for “Apps” specifically, but they are asking for device specific (Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Wii) programs which allow them to access their queues and stream those few streamable movies to their TV’s, which is… in itself, another big (if really old) App platform. You’ll notice that Netflix is on or will be on these platforms soon. If the PS3 Netflix App was just a little more capable, I’d visit netflix.com only a little less rarely than facebook.com.
Am I alone here? Surely not. The two major App stores (Apple and Android) have a huge variety of services. And many of them are free. Why wouldn’t I use them? And the fact that they aren’t as full featured as their corresponding websites, for most people, most of the time… simply isn’t an issue. Indeed, some web services have become so bloated with pop-up advertisements and Flash, the stripped down App version is more usable. The iPad is the Ferrari Scuderia of computers. Stripped down. Faster. Better. Sign me up. Either that… or simplify the web, which isn’t going to happen.
