January 27th marks the date when I will begin to get a stack of requests for the new Apple iSlate/iTablet/iWant or whatever the Cupertino branding gurus are eventually going to call the thing. The Apple marketing machine is into silent over-drive as the world waits in awe to see what comes next from the Jobs/Ives paradigm shift dynamo. Plenty of speculation that what will be revealed in Yerba Buena Arts Center will fundamentally change the game of how people interact with the Internet (and maybe even with each other).
Apple in the past decade have re-invented the music industry (it wouldn't be completely unfair to describe them these days as a music company with some tech on the side), and the mobile phone industry. So why not another huge market- why not the whole of the World Wide Web?
Well, I wouldn't put it past Jobs, the manic control-obsessive that he his, bless him. But, a few words of caution…
Steve Jobs has been remarkably successful at taking existing but nascent-market technologies, packaging and presenting them beautifully, and then (in terms of recent successes) tying them closely into retail delivery channels for new markets.
The original Apple Lisa (which in its own right was a bit of a disaster but begat the Apple Mac) was a PC with a user experience that had been “influenced” by work Jobs and others had seen at Xerox PARC. There had been plenty of MP3 players around before the iPod, but they all looked crap and there was no way to download tunes into them other than by ripping and burning. Plenty of smartphones before the iPhone, but people mostly used them as, erm, phones, not portable computers.
I'm not sure that there really is an existing market for a large-format touch screen device. Windows Tablet has been around for ages but even with iterations on Windows 7 is still 'just' a PC with a pen or a finger-touch screen. The UI has been botched to allow for touch interaction and just doesn't really work. Other than that… Nada.
Where Jobs in the past has tried paradigm-shifting, it hasn't really worked (NeXTOS springs to mind); where he hasn't closed the content delivery channel down it's failed as well (AppleTV).
All of the news about paywalls and the Murdoch clan means that there are certainly old-media oligarchs who would love for a big splash of Jobsian control-freakery to be applied (and quickly) to the mad, free world of the Internet. But for me that feels like where the music industry was at the turn of the last decade, not yet accepting that the world was changing and that they could not continue to earn money in the way they used to. Now that that market has woken up, we have true innovation like Spotify (except if you are an Oxford student or work in my company as of yesterday. Sorry about that. Go and buy a subscription to it and use your own mobile phone if you care that much. I have.)
So will the iWant change the world? We wait to see. There are possibilities, undoubtedly, but it isn't maybe quite the sure bet that some of the (iPhone-toting) boys and girls of the press may be hyping.
mmitII 