The Atalanta Principle

So, I had an old and valued customer sign off an email to me today with the line: 

Bet you have already tested the new iPad with a fully formed opinion?

And so I dashed off the following:

iPad is certainly good looking but the recklessly wild speculation means that for many it does not live up to the hype. I am worried about the lack of the ability to run background apps (as with the iPhone) as this limits its use as a computer replacement for long periods. On the flip, the $499 min price is shockingly good - how they managed to get there is an industry phenomenon. It will, more likely than not, change the industry because of the apps that are made for it & its penetration rather than for anything that was demo'd yesterday.

Also, I believe that this is very much a question of Apple's Rev A product and it will be iterated aggressively with more features over the next 2 years - by most accounts Steve J has been working on the Tablet concept for 4 years and it was getting later and later as they tried to ship something that was "Apple-phenomenal". They had to shut down the spec and ship it or they'd miss the boat. They even had to design and build their own silicone, the Apple A4 chip! That is radical and is testament to just how much frustration they must have felt with all the options that were open to them from all the other mobile computing component vendors (which tellingly are all that their competitors are stuck using). And don't forget they have in the past had industry kingpins like Intel custom-make silicone for them (in the MacBook Air) - so if they couldn't even get Intel to make what they wanted then you can bet that what the rest of the world is using (or even will be using for some time to come) is not nearly as good. And the proof is in the pudding - I hear that the iPad is very, very quick in the hands.

But, here is a worry. The nature of the tech industry is white-hot innovation. It is very hard for any one company to stay at the fore-front of technological change... some, like Intel, manage it by being in very niche sectors and investing hugely. But what you have here is a company working to be the best innovator across some VAST sectors: operating system development, mobile OS development, hardware, industrial design and now silicone too. That is a very, very big challenge and one that is probably unsustainable over the long term. However, one thing can be said for them: they are very practical and if they start to lose their advantage in one area they may well be radical in changing it out (see the complete dumping of the Classic OS for OS X, the dumping of Motorola PowerPC for Intel etc).

And on re-reading this it pretty much encapsulates my entire take on it... so no need to write an official iPad response post ;-)