| Tuesday, March 29, 2005 |
16:40 - When you're right 51% of the time...
http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1037197,00.html
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Big long Business 2.0 article (via JMH) that attempts to figure out where Apple's headed next. It comes complete with five renderings of projected future Apple products, lavishly (if not defensively) described as having been created by an "award-winning" design firm headed by an ex-Apple guy.
The funny thing is that all the "products" presented are just extensions of the iPod. An iPod watch. A video-playing iPod. An iPod phone. Wheeee.
It wasn't so very long ago, was it, that everyone was fantasizing about a candy-colored iMac future? Yet two years after the iMac G4 was released, the only company not making candy-colored iMac-like gear... was Apple.
It seems that Apple inspires every pundit to imagine himself a great prognosticator of the future (right down to sure-footed descriptions of the "likelihood" of each of these projected products), perhaps because nobody wants to have to keep thinking some big company is more imaginative than they are. Surely there's something Apple hasn't thought of yet! I know—a tablet Mac! Or, wait! An Apple PDA! It can't miss!
Thing is, Apple has been developing stuff like this in their labs all along. I had lunch today with someone who said he was desperate for Apple to bring out a tablet Mac; as an artist, he said, the day they made one, he'd switch. And yet there have been tablet Macs—based on iBooks, and before that, Duos—in the R&D labs since the mid-90s. The reason why Apple hasn't yet brought them to market is not that they simply haven't thought of it, or figured out how to create the product. They just don't think there's a business case. And vociferously as this guy might rail, one sale does not a business case make.
It seems like a no-brainer to all of us for Apple's Next Little Things to be iPod-derived geek toys. ...But that pretty much guarantees that that won't be what they bring out. What's obvious to us is virtually certain to have already been thought of and rejected within Apple's own boardrooms. What they come out with next will be something nobody can predict. They won't do the expected. For Steve, it's got to be revolutionary, and it's got to be unexpected, and it's got to make people smack their foreheads and exclaim, "Why didn't I think of that?" ...or it may as well not exist. That's what makes him Steve, for better or for worse.
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Brian Tiemann
