Future power in your hands

Computing technology is changing. New tablets such as Apple's iPad are making it possible for the computer to take a simpler form while allowing you to hold the Internet in your hands. The iPod changed the music industry but was simply a music player. The iPhone changed the mobile phone industry but was simply a better way to provide communications (cellular & internet) on a phone in your pocket. The iPad brings a change to the way that we think of a computer. No longer need it be a machine that you have to sit in front of at a desk or a power-hungry, over-provisioned, notebook which either requires a table like the desktop or needs to be balanced on a lap. Portable computers until now have either been shrunken versions of the desktop with all the complexity that entails (an artificial mouse or trackpad pointing device, a hierarchical file system, maintenance of applications and upgrades, etc), or underpowered netbooks (with all the same complexity).

Now there is a new form of computer, which puts power directly and immersively into the users' hands. It abstracts away many of the artificial metaphors that were devised for personal computers. It puts the content that users are really interested in (webpages, email, photos, video, music etc.) centre-stage, and lets the computer seemingly disappear.

In the future, the computer will disappear further ... it will become pervasive and integrated amongst us. The human-machine interfaces we use will become more natural and immersive. Some will be integrated with the human being. Until then, lets welcome the chance to take the power of the Internet into our hands and off the desktop.

The slow death of the floppy

Well, the floppy disk may be finally coming to its full demise ... Sony are to stop making them as of March 2011. It has been a long slow death. Apple quit including them in their desktop computers way back in 1998. It took a further 5 years before Dell did the same with its PCs. However it has been another eight years before this halt in production. They are finally following the five and a quarter and eight inch floppies which preceded them.

In general, it seems as if the more innovative companies not only introduce more new ideas but are also pre-disposed to phase out older technologies sooner. As the speed of technology change speeds up, future technologies will die more quickly than older ones did.

In the case of long term storage technologies, it is worth people considering the safety and future accessibility of backed up or other potentially valuable data. Not all storage media is as long lasting as some mistakenly believe, and even if the data is still stored, one needs to ensure that the technology to read it is still available and compatible with new computing devices.

The Politician's idea of Future

And so those of us in the United Kingdom are now in the midst of a general election campaign, with all the politician's trying to woo the public to vote for them. The present incumbent of 10 Downing Street, Gordon Brown, has chosen as a main strapline, that he and his party are for the future! But a politician's idea of future is rather different to mine. They have a very short time horizon, corresponding to the next 5 year term of office. This is a pity, given that many of the big issues that they need to face for the good of the country and deal with are much longer term ones.

None of the candidates have very much to say about the pensions crisis which is simmering. On economics they talk about the current huge deficit but only chip away with token suggestions of how to save a few billion here and a few billion there, when the problem is at least an order of magnitude bigger and will take more than the next few years to deal with. On health, they acknowledge new drugs and treatments but again there is no long term strategy for dealing with what these issues together with the demographic trends are telling us. Financing care of the elderly features in manifestos but in debate is usually left as something important that needs attention ... yes but what? The information technology strategy is also piecemeal whoever you listen to, and rather lacking in ambition when it comes to the penetration of a super fast broadband infrastructure. Energy security and the environment is yet another long term issue that could do with better answers and ideas. In fact most areas featuring in the manifestos of the parties would benefit from consideration beyond the parliamentary timeframe and perhaps some consensus between parties, leaving philosophical and ideological differences clearer and real choices to the electorate more apparent.

My clients, whatever their industrial or commercial sectors, almost always have some foresight to want to explore the possible disruptive futures over the longer term of decades... it's not at all obvious that our political parties either do the same or when they do, make use of it.

Computing for the rest

So this weekend, the public in the USA finally get their hands on Apple's new iPad, announced amid the usual frenzy back in January. At the time, I blogged about how I saw this as a computer for other people ... like my parents, and others who don't really want a computer... they just want email, the web, photos, and access to the modern media that computer owners have.

They don't want a mouse and keyboard, or lots of cables connecting everything together, nor do they want a computer taking up space on a desk in the lounge, which they have to go and sit at to make something happen. They don't want to have to bother about viruses, trojans and other malware that they've heard about from computer-owning friends and family. They don't want a steep learning curve for the new technology either, and many no longer have a tech wizard of a child at home with them to fix it or help when unexpected things happen.

Instead they want a simple, pleasant and responsive experience. They want to access content without being concerned with file systems and folders and installing programs. They want to share content worthy of mention by passing it around or holding it up, like they would if they saw something of note in a newspaper or magazine. They want to be able to access the content without consciously 'logging-in', or supplying PIN codes or passwords.

Apple are, as of this weekend, providing exactly this type of experience via the iPad. As content providers and app developers understand the new audience they have, and if Apple can manage to market the device to this new potential audience successfully, then a mini revolution will take place. Yes, I have had people continue to tell me since February that the iPad is simply a larger iPod Touch, and yes I have continued to read criticism about no Flash compatible browser, no camera and no third-party app multi-tasking. I still believe these people are all missing the point. The technical spec will not matter to the people the iPad is most suited for.

And now the first reviewers to get their hands on a real iPad are starting to say the same ... this is a new concept in computing, so-called 'computing for the rest of us'. It is revolutionary, not in terms of the tech spec, or even in the things it allows users to do, but rather in the way that people will think of a computer. It puts the Internet in your hands and throws away the paradigm of mouse directed computing that was spawned in the 1980s. It is the very embryonic stage of new computers that look very different and are literally much more engaging and individually immersive for the humans that use them. Ten years from now, we will be in much more intimate touch with our computers; this is only the start.

Delaying the inevitable...

Oh dear! Here's another example of how the BBC are being held back so that the Internet revolution doesn't kill off lower quality information providers quite as quickly. But it will eventually and the public will have simply been denied a quality offering unnecessarily. The BBC should be allowed to provide whatever Apps they want for iPhone or any other significant platform so that users can decide what to use to access the information. It will be a shame if people are denied the opportunity to follow content from the World Cup soccer tournament in June from the BBC on their phones, while Sky and others who are part of the old guard newspaper/publishing industry face no such restrictions.

And apps are important, because they make the experience simple. And that is important. iPhone owners check the weather using the Weather widget on their phones, rather than going to the BBC site on the web using Safari on the iPhone - hence they get the Yahoo weather view rather than the provider who has a public information role in the UK. The apps that the BBC were planning to launch were simply making their existing content (news, weather, sport) available via the most successful smartphone platform, not straying into new areas of content.

Organisations would do better to work out how to innovate and be the best in the new media world, instead of trying dirty tactics to unfairly regulate and campaign against those who have already embraced the technology, and therefore skewing the market. They will fail, albeit slightly later than they might have done! It's almost as futile as the world's remaining dictatorships who still think that they can survive in an open, free and Internet connected world. They may take longer to die by holding out, but die they will.

Design innovation vs Standards

One of the obvious aspects of Apple innovation, which I have tended not to blog much about in the past, is the Design work that applies to their products, led by Jonathan Ive. The attention to detail is not just applied to the products themselves, such as computers, iPods and mobile phones, but also to the accessories that ship with those products such as power adaptors. Compare below the Apple power adaptor for iPhone which is built into a UK 13A mains plug (left) with a normal but fatter and bigger ordinary mains plug (right)!




Last year I recall a campaign followed by a fanfare announcement that mobile phone manufacturers had finally agreed a new standard power adaptor that would be interchangeable for many models and makes, instead of requiring a different one for each. This seemed a bit odd to me, given that most people only have one phone and therefore still only need one charger when they travel around. Taking into account the above Apple example, isn't it better to aim for a well designed pocketable adaptor which provides a standard USB power level output, rather than a new additional standard, which everyone again will implement in horrible ugly ways?

Organisations setting expectation

Have just returned from a short vacation trip on the Orient Express, hence the relatively quiet period on this blog ... not much reasonably priced internet access on there! Back now and raring to put fingers to keyboard.

I often mention experience here in this blog, as a differentiator in customer service. And I put it much higher than technical specification for the success of gadgets. My recent trip on one of the most luxurious trains in the world has provided me with another example of a great customer experience, with parallels to the more familiar Apple examples. In the same way that delivery times for Apple products have often been bettered by actual delivery dates, the Orient Express organisation mirrored this by setting expectations of a very reasonable level of customer service and then still exceeding it. This is actually a very simple thing to think about and execute but it's amazing how many organisations just don't get it.

People love to believe that they are getting extras or something better than what is promised. Achieving this when your standards are already good is an example of how to make customers feel great about products and services.