Calling iPad a Fad Smells like Desperation
I can appreciate people being upset by haters. When the Netbook fad ramped up I was poo-pooing the devices even as friends were hacking Dell Mini9’s to run OS X. No one wants to hear someone tell you that thing you love is a piece of crap. But there is a fundamental difference between the iPad and a Netbook: ecosystem. Net books were nothing more than crappy, crippled laptops with practically unusable keyboards running existing desktop operating systems. The iPad knows what it is and plays to its disadvantages. Apple knew better than to try to stuff Mac OS X into something with a slow processor, limited battery and very little RAM. Instead, they stripped away everything and slowly added back things that made sense for the limitations of the device.
The iPad’s success is no accident. People forget, or are unaware that Apple started the iPad project as a mobile Safari project back in 2001. They worked slowly and methodically on making it great and some genius had the brilliant idea to release it as a phone first, recognizing that they could better get away with the severe limitations on a phone, avoiding the expectation of a “complete” computer experience on a tablet. This allowed time for progressive enhancement, a huge user testing base and preparing an even bigger audience to be ready to experience, with very little friction, an entirely new concept in personal computing.
The fact that Microsoft’s chief research officer can come out calling iPad a fad should be all the reason in the world to fire him and anyone working closely to him. Microsoft should be throwing billions at making a viable competitor to iPad using Windows Phone 7 (which is quite good) as its core, or they stand to become irrelevant in the personal computing space. The future is here, and it ain’t beige boxes.
