140,499 Reasons why the iPad will be a hit

I wanted to give it a few days before commenting about the iPad in order to let the effects of Steve's Reality Distortion Field to abate. Now that it has, here's my take on it.

Most of the tech journoblogs were underwhelmed by the device - and it's hard to argue against the technical critiques of the device. The iPad does have some serious technical deficiencies including, but not limited to:

- no front camera
- no flash support
- no multitasking

Ultimately I believe that none of this will matter and the iPad will be another big hit for Apple. Why? The following numbers are crucial:

- 140,000 - the genius of this device is that pretty much all iPhone Apps will run out of the box on the iPad. The iPhone and iPad SDK's are complementary meaning that anyone who has invested in building iPhone Apps can easily convert to building iPad Apps.

- 499 - the low price point is crucial especially when establishing a new category of device. Would you spend a grand on an iPad when you can get a netbook for half that. Probably not. Reduce the entry point to $499 and the answer will probably be different. I know where I'd be putting my cash.

As to the technical criticisms of the device I'm mainly in agreement with the tech press about their nature, but don't think that this will seriously dampen demand.

- No Front Camera - This is a curious one because I can see no good reason for the omission. There also seem to be some hooks in the iPad SDK to a camera indicating that if not present now a camera will be included in a future update. Maybe its a cost thing or maybe the software wasn't up to scratch. I suspect however that the lack of inclusion may be that the Apple A4 chip just might not have had enough grunt for something like Skype video. I know that my MacBook Pro runs pretty hot when running Skype so that may be a factor.

- Multitasking - Not an issue on the iPhone this may become a real bugbear for the iPad. Time will tell. I suspect that at the heart of this is a philosophical debate about how we will use mobile devices in the future and where we as humans need to multitask in the same way we do with a PC.

- No Flash Player - There seems to be a real spat between Apple and Adobe at the heart of this. Essentially the lack of flash hasn't detracted from the iPhone internet experience. Does anyone imagine that consumers will balk at the point of purchase because there's no Flash support?

Other observations, and what I find most curious about the iPad launch, are the following in no particular order:

- Lacklustre - For me it was one of the lest effective Apple product launches of late. At times they were almost apologetic "you have to hold the device in your hands to understand". Maybe Apple are correct that the real effect won't be understood till people are holding these things for real but compared to the iPhone launch I though this one lacked punch. However the free marketing and hype machine has been in overdrive and for many consumers the soundbyte and image of an iPad in Steve's hands is enough to guarantee sucess.

- To consume or create? That is the question. The PC has always suceeded because it is a flexible creation device. The Walkman, Gameboy and iPod likewise worked because they are great consumption devices. To look at the iPad specs you'd probably think it's more a consumption device (a big iPod Touch) and that would be fine. However then Apple throw in iWork at $10 a module but also leave out iLife. This is interesting because iLife (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand) has always been bundled free with Macs. It's obvious that Apple cannot bundle iLife into the iPad and keep the price point low so why develop iWork for the iPad and sell it for a few bucks? My thoughts here are that Apple has big ambitions for the iPad in the workplace but won't agressively market it as such. They will let private individuals champion the device in the way the iPhone is in the workplace today. In a year or two from now I can see iPads cropping up on desks next to PC's and being used for calendar, email, internet together with the usual office suspects (word processing, speadsheets and presentations). They won't instantly replace the desktop or Microsoft Office but over the next decade I believe we will start to see the use of PC's diminish as they are replaced by tablet computers.

- Limitations? Remember the original iPhone? It was panned by the critics for being 2G. People were suspicious about touchscreen phones and the lack of a tactile keyboard. I suspect that we will look back at the first generation iPad in the same way. It's a placeholder for the main event if you like.

- MultiTouch - There was nothing new here really on the UI front, but again the beauty of the software keyboard and touchsceen means that any new developments can be introduced over time.

- The new Goldrush - What's interesting that Apple used the term "goldrush" in their hype when describing the iPad AppStore. If I remember from North American Goldrushes of the 1800's it was the merchants and traders selling pick axes that got rich and not the prospectors.

To summ up - Is the iPad all it could have been - probably not, but has Apple done enough to establish a new type of device. Definately.

Open Source meets Closed Minds

Maybe I've learned a few things over the years. Then again maybe I haven't. In the previous post I've tried to highlight how I bought into the concept of Open Systems, especially the aspect of portability and how twenty years later we've somehow failed to fully exploit all the potential benefits.

The second Open concept that came along was that of Open Source. Basically, this is the idea that a bunch of sad geeks sitting in their bedrooms with nothing better to do with their time will develop a bunch of software for free that will be as good, if not better, that commercially available software.

There are thousand of Open Source software products out there (Linux, MySQL, Apache, Firefox, Open Office are just a few) and the best part is that they're absolutely free. You'd have thought that this would have turned the IT world upside down - but no. Somehow we, and by that I mean corporate IT, have failed to embrace Open Source as perhaps we should have.

I'm sure there are lots of reasons for this but fundamentally I suspect that we just don't trust something we don't pay for. Here's a quote I heard the other day from the Enterprise Architect I'm currently working with. "I don't trust Linux or Apache. I'd much rather have something (in this case from Microsoft) that is properly supported".

The guy is delusional if he believes that because he pays liscence fees and maintenance he will somehow get better service. I know - I've worked in a couple of software houses. This just shows that no matter how Open the software it that it will fail when it meets with closed minds.

Where did my Open Systems go?

Early in my career I bought into the concept of 'Open Systems' in a big way. I'd been working on proprietary mainframe systems for a couple of years and figured that 'Open' had to be the way to go.

For those unitiated in the world of Open Sytsems it effectively was a euphamism for UNIX and RDBMS technology. The 'Open' basically mean that systems could be developed on one platform (say Sun) and ported to another (i.e HP or IBM) without much effort. Portability was the key to keeping your vendors sweet and it was also ensure that cross skilling your staff was easier. The same was theoretically possible with SQL based databases.

So did this happen? Not really. I used to work in a software porting team for a UNIX/RDBMS based product and because we applied strict standards to keep our code open we managed the transition without too much effort. This was not typical though. Most IT guys out there will tell you that porting from one server or database to another is a major undertaking.

That has resulted in the vast majority of IT shops out there often selecting a particular flavour of UNIX or RDBMS as its system of choice and that kind of defeats the whole argument of Open Systems if you think about it.

Wag the Dog

Here at the Department of Hopes and Dreams we never used to support iPhone as a corporate platform. That was until the CFO got one and demanded access to his pdf reports on his handset. For two weeks our support desk has trotted out the offical line "best efforts but not officially supported" whilst scrathing thir heads and wondering why anyone would even want to view an A4 PDF on a 3.5" screen. Well the CFO has got his way and it has been mandated from on high that iPhone is now a supported platform.

I just wonder in how many companies similar discussions are being had right now. A friend of mine works for a large government organisation and they have officially supported Blackberry for a number of years. Anecdotally, he's told me that many of his peers are replacing these with iPhone's, even though they are not yet offically supported.

In our case supporting the iPhone was a fairly straghtforward technical exercise that consisted of configuring VPN on the handset to connect to the server hosting the PDF's. Case closed, asccording to my bosses. We'll not quite as I think they still haven't grasped the full ramifications of this. The problem we have is that the quick and dirty fix that keeps our CFO happy bypasses all the security models that we currently have in place for our data warehouse (normally controlled through Business Objects). What my bosses haven't yet grasped is that if we really wanted to service the customer properly then we should be developing an iPhone App dashboard for our data warehouse.

In all my years of IT I've never seen the likes of what is happening today. Private individuals buying mobile devices and then demanding IT support is unheard of. I can only imagine that it will get worse with the arrival of the Apple's Tablet Computer later this month because that's a device that will actually be worth viewing a PDF on.

Welcome to the Social .... (Social Security that is!)

When I started in IT the dominant player was IBM. It's mainframes were just starting to be challenged by the likes of AS/400's, also from IBM, Dec VAX machines and the UNIX upstarts from the likes of Sun, HP and, you guessed it, IBM.

Big Blue dominated the IT landscape in a way that is unimaginable in today's market. PC's were referred to as genuine IBM's or inferior clones. Disk was often called DASD (Direct Access Serial Device), Errors were referred to as Abends. Job ads like "COBOL retrain to RPG/400 or PL/1" were commonplace. All IBM speak.

So what happended? Well nobody came along and built a better mainframe so IBM's fall from the top perch wasn't through like for like competition. It dominance was eroded on all fronts by the arrival of client server computing whose winners were the likes of Microsoft, HP, Sun, Oracle, Ingres, etc. For the record IBM didn't die, it adapted and is still a very successful IT company - but it doesn't dominate IT like it used to.

Many portray Microsoft as the natural successor to IBM and to my eyes Microsoft has started is downward decent from Top Dog to Also Ran. It still dominates the desktop OS and office productivity suites but apart from this its hits are thin on the ground. It does well with its RDBMS offering, SQL Server and the Xbox has made them a few quid. Where it has failed spectacularly was its inability to leverage its market dominance in the internet and now mobile internet. Bing, Zune and Windows Mobile are hardly destined for greatness, are they? Microsoft's great cash cow has always been Windows and Office software, mostly sold by default on the back of new PC and Laptop sales.

My question is that if we accept my previous assertion that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm of mobile computing driven by smartphones and especially tablet computers then what happens to the PC. If it goes out of fashion, initially in the home and laterly in the workplace, then what will become of Microsoft once its cash cow is slain? I suspect this is the question is keeping the lights burning in Redmond right now. And Cupertino and Mountain View

Avatar, FingerWorks and MultiTouch

Judging by its massive box office takings I wasn't alone in viewing James Cameron's Avatar movie over the festive holiday. I'm happy to confess that I was blown away by it, even on second viewing. What I'm still not quite sure about is why?

The story and script are fairly predictable and whilst performances are good the characters are a little cliched. However, none of that really matters because the movie engaged me in a way that few others have. Part of this may be down to Cameron's attention to detail in creating the alien flora, fauna and language etc. and the way they've improved the facial expressions capture technology.

However, what I suspect is that on some level the 3D effect (or is it really 2D steroescopic?) has had a large part to play in the level of engagement I felt. Has James Cameron pulled off a mass delusion and transformed a good film into a real gamechanger? Certainly the movie industry is buzzing at the prospect with news of 3D re-releases of LOTR, Star Wars, etc. I also just read that the new Bond movie will be in 3D.

What I'm more interested in though is the fact that prior to Avatar's launch 3D had been doing the rounds for years without gaining any traction outside of a novely IMAX movie. Before Avatar the idea that audiences would wear some dodgy 3D goggles for more than two hours in your local multiplex was almost unthinkable. In the space of a month Avatar has changed all that. It is a real paradigm shift for the movie industry and its director has been rightly been hailed a visionary.

So what has this to do with IT. Well if we move from a visionary director to the visionary CEO of the tech world, namely Steve Jobs, what can we expect with his next release? If the tech blogs are correct it's all but certain that Apple will launch a new tablet computer at their press event later this month. Beyond the tech specs of the device there has been much speculation about what the focus for the device will be and what will be its killer app? So far none of the predicted features of the new tablet (e-Reader, Web browsing, Media Player, Video conferencing, VOIP calls, etc.) aren't already available on your average notebook. So what we're talking about here is a new form factor but the same old applications. If that the case why do I believe that the Apple tablet will succeed where Bill Gates tablet computing strategy failed.

For me the only answer can be that what will make the Apple Tablet a huge success isn't a killer app as such but it will be how the device engages the user. What I'm saying is that I think the killer app of the Apple tablet will be the the way we interact with it. It's no secret that Apple have been beavering away for years and filing patents related to multitouch technology that go far in advance to what we see today in the iPhone or MultiTouch mousepads on our Macbooks.

The recent withdrawal of the FingerWorks domain that Apple owns may provide some clues, together with speculation that iWorks, Apple's office productivity suite, has been rewritten for multitouch. Let's also consider what may be waiting around the corner for iPhone OS 4.0. If Apple get it right and somehow come up with a vocabulary of getsures then this could be the biggest breakthrough in user interaction since the arrival of the mouse.

Why? We becuase for over a hundred years the western world has interacted with keyboards adopting the QWERTY key layout. The QWERTY layout was chosen because it helped prevent mechanical typewriter keys from jamming, something I think we will have little need for today. The challenges I can think of that the QWERTY keyboard has faced in its life are:

1) the adoption of the mouse, which was a complementary not replacement technology
2) Palm's Graffiti script language for its PDA's because QWERTY was deemed unsuitable for handhelds until Blackberry came along
3) Interesting technologies like the Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe which to date are let down by poor handwriting recognition software
4) Graphics pens and tablets, which have a limited niche market
5) Voice recognition software, which to date people are reluctant to adopt as they feel self conscious talking to machines

I think we can agree that none of the above have seriously challenged the dominance of QWERTY.

So here's my big prediction for the new decade. I believe we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift that will see the way in which we interact with devices and I believe that we will get our first glimpse of this new world when Steve takes to the stage on the 26th. Whether the multitouch vocabulary announced them will kill QWERTY or complement it remains to be seen but I think the world will look a little different after the 26th. Just like the movie world does now thanks to James Cameron.

In, out and shake it all about

I read the following article with some amusement especially given that an insurance company I used to work for has recently decided to outsource its IT development function to Accenture. Some good friends I know, many with long service to the company, are being made redundant in February.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2010/01/11/239898/Barclays-takes-application-development-back-in-house.htm

There are a couple of juicy quotes from the article that I just cannot resist:

Bringing development back inhouse was "the most efficient model that supports our business" according to a Barclays spokesman.

"Over time you have many services added to original contracts and the total bill rises so much it is better to do it in-house." Claude Roeltgen, CIO at Luxembourg bank BayernLB.

So here we are on at the start of a new decade (technically 2011 not 2010 but lets not be pedentic) and after six years a leading global bank is effectively conceding defeat on its outsourcing model.

For those new to IT this might come as something of a shock. Not to me. Outsourcing is not a new phenomenon. Back in the early 90's it was called Facilities Management. It didn't work then and if you're to believe Barclays it isn't working now.