| Saturday, February 13, 2010 |
06:18 - How Not to Compete
http://mattgemmell.com/2010/02/05/how-to-compete-with-ipad
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Matt Gemmell, speaking from the iPhone/iPad camp but with sincerity, has words for those companies gearing up to compete in the new iPad-defined version of the tablet space:
The greatest success will go to those who fully commit to the software. Your hardware must be good enough, but your software must be nothing short of excellent. Using an OS designed for a screen and a mouse and a keyboard, with or without a launcher or overlay as a token nod towards touch-based interaction, doesn’t count as remotely excellent. Customers want the tablet experience because they can focus on doing the things they want to do, and be free from the tyranny of computers which force an unfamiliar and abstract input mechanism on them, and software which assumes everyone is an idiosyncratic expert in the task they want to accomplish. Tablets are about people and goals, not machines and tasks.
It’s not possible to meet that expectation without designing it into the software from the ground up. Don’t sabotage your own efforts right from the outset.
That's well and good, but what he leaves unsaid is that the companies he's addressing ("Sony, HP, the JooJoo people; all of them") don't make software. At least, not OS platform software. Not software at the kind of scale that would take a serious stab at fulfilling his recommendations.
What he's saying is essentially that if you're going to make an iPad clone, you'd better make an iPad OS clone too, and an iPad App Store clone too, and a Cocoa Touch clone for your developers.
Palm's done it, and so has Google; that's great. but those are companies that have invested heavily in large-scale software projects throughout their history, and took the time—on an accelerated schedule, but nonetheless did it—to develop all the infrastructure necessary to create a whole software ecosystem for their devices completely independent of pre-existing OS platforms and all their attendant user expectations.
Sony, HP, and the rest of the guys planning to make tablets... what are they going to do? "Put Windows on it" was the traditional answer, and the reason why tablets haven't caught on since their inception a decade ago. But these guys can't exactly just write a tablet platform with all its accoutrements from scratch, especially if they're only starting now. They don't have any tradition of making products like that. They won't have any market credibility among their developers if they do.
Android and WebOS can be the answer, and probably will be. Android will likely become the Windows of the tablet world: licensable, open, and comes with a ready-made developer community and strong corporate backing from a respected player. (And I'm sure we're only weeks away from a Google announcement of a version of Android fine-tuned for larger screens.) If Sony were to make a tablet, that's what they'd do. Rather than trying to answer all of Gemmell's points on their own, they'll just partner with someone who already has. It's the same old game, just with a new set of pieces.
'Course, if Microsoft doesn't watch out, they'll be the only company in the tech sector with the resources to create an ecosystem for the phone/tablet space that hasn't created one.
Via JMH.
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Brian Tiemann
