What I find especially interesting is the possibility that various CIOs and IT managers are looking at opening their hardware offerings to more end-user choice, especially in mobile devices.

“If you believe demographic studies, the workforce in their 20s and 30s isn’t going to accept black corporate PCs with black corporate mobile phones and not be allowed to run Facebook or Angry Bird apps,” he said.

Loura was among many CIOs and IT managers at SNW who said they’re facing the same issue — employees want to use mobile technology at work, leaving IT with the job of ensuring that the devices and the data on them remain secure.

As a result, Loura refit Clorox’s employees with HP laptops to replace their old Windows 2k desktops and moved all mobile off of Blackberry and to the user’s choice of iOS, Android, or Windows 7 Phone. They provide these various options while maintaining the data security standards required by the enterprise.

I’ve worked in both large and small operations and my experience had always fallen in line with the stereotype: the big boys lock things down and don’t tolerate questions while small companies let their people choose their tools and keep access open when possible.

It looks like there are CIOs challenging that stereotype. What would really blow my mind is seeing full on Devops in larger enterprises.

That would be a world to live in.

What I find most interesting are the reasons she cites for tablets’ fad-dom because they tell more about the reviewer than about tablets. She approaches tablets from an old paradigm, one that fails to recognize some basic realities of why and how many people use computers.

“Limited functionality”

Tablet devices are only limited in their functionality when compared to full PCs, laptops, and some netbooks. Compared to some other devices (like smartphones) they provide richer interface options by virtue of their larger form factor and beefier hardware.

The problem with comparing tablets to PCs is that it bakes in the assumption that what everybody really wants is a traditional PC.

If we take Jef Raskin at his word and to the end user the interface really is the product, there’s room for consumers to perceive tablets as more powerful or more open despite the hardware stats or code licensing.

“Waning excitement”

Noyes founds her claim of waning excitement about tablets on claims that reviews of the iPad 2 were mixed. The false assumption here is that anything short of all positive reviews of iPad 2 means that the masses have lost interest in tablets. Though iPad dominates tablet mindshare it’s not the only device in the space. Even if all reviewers hated the iPad 2 we can’t declare tabletgeddon just yet.

Consumers tell a different story – iPad 2 launch

The assumptions that all people really want a PC and that iPad 2 is a failure are invalidated by the sales statistics for the iPad 2 launch. iPad sold out throughout the US on launch weekend with Fortune quoting a claim that 70% of iPad 2s sold to people that didn’t have a tablet device before.

In speaking with friends that are still trying to purchase the much coveted device the current technique for successfully purchasing one is to find out when the shipment of iPads arrives at the nearest Apple stores and be there when they unload the truck. Within hours of unloading the iPads are once again sold out and unavailable until the next shipment.

Underlying biases

What Noyes is really communicating is her own biases and looking to datapoints convenient to her preconceptions. Per her bio she is a proponent of free (as in freedom) software and tends to cover Linux topics.

Free software is a wonderful thing, but unfortunately free software and open source software are proving to have little place in the tablet space. Apple’s iOS defines itself by its closedness and Google’s take on “open” with Android is proving less than what we might have hoped for.

That said, writing off the currently OSS unfriendly tablet space as a fad is giving personal bias too much sway.

When I first heard that iPad would use iOS rather than OSX I was displeased. It was just gonna be a huge iPhone! This wasn’t the device for me. At launch it looked like it would be difficult at best to code on it and there were few applications available for diagramming, designing, or creating graphics. I also had my concerns about the walled garden and how that might prevent the kind of “seeing the gears turn behind the curtain” moments that inspired some of us that work in software to choose our current vocation.

Here’s what I had to face: most people aren’t interested in computers as en end in themselves.

It’s not the device, it’s what you do with it

There are many people in this world that have a computer (be it a laptop, desktop, or notebook) only because computers help them to use Facebook, go on the web, instant message, tweet, email, watch videos, listen to music, and in some cases make music and videos.

These are people who have computers not because they think computers are awesome, but that the things they want to do are awesome. Computers are only a bridge to that awesome.

These are people that care less about what operating system they work as that it doesn’t confuse them with interfaces or details of the computer’s operation that they don’t understand.

Tablets let these people do what they want to do without imposing the traditional PC baggage on them. No file system asking them where they want to put their files, no taskbar filling up with programs, no drivers to deal with.

To please these users you need to do only this: empower them to do what they want to do and get out of the way.

This is why iPad has captured the imagination of so many people. They see in it the promise of a device that will let them do what they want to do without burying them in all the traditional computer baggage.

While we want a BMW, Ferrari, or Bugati and itch to open it up on the autobahn, they’re cool with a Honda, Toyota, or Hyundai that has a cool look, a sporty feel, and gets them where they want to go.

They don’t need a “real” computer and wouldn’t make full use of one if they had it.

And if we let ourselves believe that our concept of what a “real” computer is matters to them, we do so at our own peril.

It’s not surprising that Lapin’s daughter, who’s already familiar with the iPhone, was able to make a nearly effortless switch from iPhone to iPad. By design the device interfaces are nearly identical. A win for iPad, but a predictable one.

The juicy stuff lives in Lapin’s daughter’s side comments and the areas where she gets stuck in the interaction. In these areas the responses of a young child prove just as useful as those from the most sophisticated participant in a user study.

Has videos?

Indeed it does. I’m guessing that this expectation comes out of her iPhone experience but I have no idea if she watched videos on her Dad’s iPhone or not. It would be especially interesting to hear that she hadn’t but that it was a natural expectation of something of that shape and size. Some kind of “it looks kinda like a small tv I can hold” association. Lapin would have to clarify that question on context.

I want the one with the camera

This echoes one of the most frequent criticisms I hear of iPad.

I’m still undecided on where I sit on that count. On one hand, it seems simple enough to provide. The iPhone has one, why can’t they put one in the iPad. On the other it seems to me that taking photos with iPad would be awkward given its large form factor. I’d love to edit photos I’ve taken on a touch screen that big but I’m not sure how comfortable I’d feel taking them with something so big. What I’d really like to do is connect a professional grade camera to an iPad for editing and quick previews.

Unwanted multitouch issues

Apparently this is proving a common problem. While holding the iPad people’s fingers run out of the “frame” area into the active touch area resulting in an unwanted touch on the edge of the screen. While on the Home screen this means that touches on app icons don’t do anything.

This seems simple enough to fix on the home screen. Ignore touches at the edges of the touch sensitive area. But that leaves the situation unsolved for other apps and this is a problem that asks to be solved at the OS or device level rather than in software on an app to app basis.

The trick will be how to resolve the issue to the satisfaction of multiple genres of applications. The implications of the unwanted edge touches are very different for image editing apps than they are for launchers and both of those differ from game interactions.

Touch the cat’s face

This one I find especially golden. Daughter is clearly having trouble opening the animal word game. When she first enters she touches what looks like a button to start the game. She recognizes a button as clickable more quickly than an image of a cat’s face that says “Play” under it.

It’s a reminder that there are reasons that we have button conventions. There are times to break them and times not to. It appears that for 2.5 year old users, buttons get better visual recognition than an image with an instructional caption. The designers took a gamble and for certain users it doesn’t pay off.

Usability feedback… no degree required

More than anything though I need to point to this sample when clients say that their users are too simple to provide valuable usability feedback. Providing useful feedback on usability issues or site or app structure doesn’t require subject matter expertise or knowledge of the business goals for the site or app. That knowledge often gets in the way. At its heart usability testing is about this: real people that use your site or application providing feedback as they use it.

Something so simple a child can do it.

iPad specific answers to the creation challenge are appearing. This video for iMockups places a nice face on these answers.

I feel rather silly that it didn’t occur to me earlier in the game that wireframing would be low hanging fruit for graphical applications on iPad. Fortunately Omni Group and others have. As OmniGraffle is a central tool to my work I’m especially interested to see it develop. Things seem to be progressing well. From iPad or Bust! to a Two weeks later follow up things seem to be progressing well. Hoping to see a working app close to next month’s iPad release.

Imagining how such tools could be used in quick sessions with clients and developers, let’s say I’m warming to the iPad.

There have been varied reactions to the iPad but those that most interest me are those that go beyond Apple’s marketing message of “the iPad is a new thing that will revolutionize computing” and ask “where will this revolution lead?”

An angle I find especially interesting is expressed in Alex Payne’s On the iPad.

What I find most interesting is how he speaks to the side effects that Apple’s choice to keep the iPad closed may have for future engineers. The closed system may result in the loss of that magic moment when a future engineer sees behind the curtain.

To set up the binary: iPad is for users, personal computers are for inventors.

That magic moment where you see how the machine works and the code invites you.

• Invent a better way to do something
• Invent entirely new things that haven’t been done before

These invitations are the reason that many of us became engineers. The concern is that without that moment we’ll lose some of the innovators of the future.

I remember that moment and the effect it had on me, so I’m partial to the concern. But I don’t see that concern playing out in my children’s lives nor am I entirely convinced it will in yours.

In most households, the iPad won’t be the only device. For the short term, where there’s an iPad there’s a personal computer. Where there’s a personal computer, there’s an opportunity for that magic moment. The future will show whether our digital lifestyle future will keep to the closed system or whether forces for openness will prevail.

Another valuable angle is: the binary is a false one.

• Not all invention comes from engineers
• Not everybody needs to get into how the machine works

My Dad would love to have an iPad. He likes computers but the iPad epitomizes the “just show me what I want” approach that he’s hungered for in a computer for a long time. He doesn’t care about command lines or when abstractions leak. He wants his applications to just work. Email, social networks, office documents. Having a device that lets him do that with minimal thinking about installation or configuration would make him very happy and he wouldn’t feel that he’d missed out on anything.

I have a hard time criticizing that as an experience designer. There’s a device coming that’s what he wanted. My internal dialog about “it looks like a giant iPod Touch,” “you don’t actually create anything on this yet,” “there’s no chance to see the man behind the curtain,” these things don’t matter to many people. They just want the thing to work and work as transparently as possible.

The closed system will provide that for many people.

iPad in various respects isn’t what I’d hoped for. I wanted something more open. At this point in time, the closed system is a feature. It lies on those of us who prefer the open system to provide an answer. How will we provide an open system that offers simple installation of applications that get out of users’ way as much as possible.

Pre-release expectations

Talking with friends about the iPad back when we were all still speculating on the name we came across rumors that dashed our early hopes. The tablet would most likely use iPhone OS and the App store as its sole path for software. A closed system.

From there my thinking went to how Apple would differentiate itself from humdrum tablet pc offerings already out there. iPad isn’t entering an empty category, it’s defining a category that’s been poorly executed and marketed up to now. (Remember Macintosh? Same kind of thing.)

How to do it? You focus on what iPhone OS and App store do best:

• Consume media and data
  • Music
  • Video
  • Social media
  • Web
• Small tasks of creation
  • Email
  • Social media

iPad does this and from what the marketing tells me, does it incredibly well. (Gotta love the gap between announcement and real world launch.) Reading about the product left me a bit flat. My impression seeing video of the email app I think they’ve done some very cool things in customizing the built-in apps to a tablet and leverage options that aren’t available in the smaller iPhone form factor.

Digital lifestyle device

A few years back a key piece of Apple’s marketing message was that the Mac and the iPod were products for your digital lifestyle. The Mac served as the hub for this through the iLife applications. Photo albums, home movies, and garage band recording “for the rest of us.”

iPad is by nature a digital lifestyle device. It’s not for coding. It’s not for heavy duty design or video work. It’s for stuff that I would do on my couch while watching TV. It’s for showing stuff off to my friends when we’re talking in the living room.

Given iPad’s digital lifestyle leaning I’m surprised we didn’t see adaptations of all the iLife apps at launch. I can’t help but think that Apple project teams are currently working on iPad specific versions of iMovie and Garage Band. These are use cases tailor made for something less than a laptop but more than an iPhone. (Add camera and mic to the iPad and iMovie just got even better.)

Until Apple or approved third party apps fill this space iPad will miss a key audience. The current iPad will draw people with cool factor, but as many have noted, it’s a device that’s all about consumption. Many of us want to create on our devices and share those creations off-device (and Microsoft, HP, that’s exactly where you strike back against the iPad).

The most touch-native path to letting people create on the iPad is visual. Leverage the visual and audio-focused digital lifestyle applications that have already proven themselves then expand from there. Let me sync my creations to a computer or hard drive on my wireless network without having to use MobileMe and I’ll lay down the coin right now.

I find the rumors circulating about a low-feature iPhone and an Apple netbook interesting in that I don’t understand what drives this speculation. It seems completely inconsistent with the brand experience that Apple maintains through the iPhone and Mac product lines. I also have my doubts as to whether there’s really a market for watered-down versions of Apple’s flagship products.

iPod is the only Apple product line where smaller, less feature rich items have been made available, and portable computers and palmtops/smartphones are not media players. Brand goals and buying habits in those spaces play more to Apple’s traditional brand position.

Apple has positioned itself for years as a maker of premium computing experiences. You pay more than you would for a commodity pc but you get a vertically integrated and carefully controlled experience that (in most cases) “just works.” There are conscious decisions on Apple’s part about how to structure the Mac product line that speak against creating a Mac netbook just to get into another sector of the market. I understand that the netbook market is hot, that doesn’t mean that all computer manufacturers are compelled to join the race.

As the article quotes Steve Jobs: “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.” A netbook isn’t in the plan because a competitively priced netbook wouldn’t meet Apple’s standards for the end user experience. It wouldn’t perform to the standard, so they won’t do it.

Rather than diluting the brand to enter a market where they’ll be another also ran (albeit likely a strong one) they’ll take a pass. There are other markets they’re entering with varied success from a stronger market position. (AppleTV anyone?) Just because there’s a netbook market to enter doesn’t mean they have to jump in. Apple didn’t release the iPhone or the App store until they meet the standard and they are now reaping the benefits.

As far as a low-feature iPhone… I think the idea comes out of wishful thinking. An iPhone for everyone. Even if Apple took that goal to heart I don’ think a reduced feature handset is the approach they would take. People are buying the current iPhone in huge numbers. The most common reason I’ve heard cited among people that wanted an iPhone didn’t get one is because they’d be saddled with AT&T’s cellular service or the hassle of jailbreaking.

So if Apple decides everyone should have an iPhone I think their strategy would be to open the iPhone to multiple cell carriers. Carriers would then take it upon themselves to price handsets competitively by subsidizing the iPhone price with a new or renewed service plan. This way Apple could continue to draw revenue without creating a new model of handset. They would likely make something close to the current margin (which I doubt would come in on a watered-donw iPhone) and avoid the design and manufacturing costs of a new model of iPhone.

From a brand standpoint they would also maintain the standard of quality they’ve worked so hard to establish for iPhone. (Previous models prepared for release were vetoed by Jobs because they weren’t good enough to go to market.) As the article notes, this would also extend to the experience of software engineers that are such a part of iPhone’s success. “Having different screen sizes, different input methods, and different hardware makes things difficult for developers.“

A watered-down iPhone isn’t an iPhone, and it would be counterproductive for Apple to release such a device. There are already a host of almost-iPhones available from competing cell manufacturers. Just as those looking for an almost-laptop have a host of choices from competing computer manufacturers.

Anderson brings up important points on balancing environmental protection and global costs of living. Are parts of our environmental protection effort creating unnecessary scarcity? Are countries’ economic protections driving prices up artificially?

I’d add some questions of my own. Are we pushing for or supporting government policies that are holding back the development of technologies that will free us from scarcity of energy or food? Are we selecting technologies without fully viewing their secondary effects (such as ethanol leading to scarcer food corn and driving up global food prices)? Are we allowing our preconceived notions about technologies rob us of their economic (or other) benefits?

I don’t agree with all of Anderson’s suggestions, but I agree with what I believe is the central thesis. We need to consider more carefully the decisions we’re making about what technologies we favor and which we discourage. We have to consider the secondary effects of these decisions if we’re to act wisely and achieve sustainable prosperity.

In our zeal to point at how great DOM scripting and unobtrusive JavaScript are, it’s worth remembering that one of the key differences between these practices and the DHTML of old is that (as a group) we’re doing a better job of using good programming practices in our DOM scripting/unobtrusive world of today than we did when DHTML was the buzzword du jour.

Yes, there are new technologies involved (standard DOM across browsers, XHTTPRequest, sweet open source object libraries), and yes, recent trends in JavaScript programming are something worth getting excited about. But the greatness of the methods getting so much buzz right now is in the way more of us are using the kind of programming best practices we all should have been using for years now, and some people had been back in those “evil” DHTML days.

On memes

• Memes are essentially ideas or portions of an idea that catch hold and travel from person to person.
• A proper meme is self sustaining. That is, people pass memes to one another because they find the meme or the conditions under which they encounter it so interesting that they can’t leave it alone.
• Memes live is an ecology of ideas where the interesting survive and are passed on, at times despite social pressures to the contrary.
• Memes that propogate by obligation will survive only so long as social pressures press people to propogate the meme, after which they will be hunted down with extreme, derisive prejudice.

A little experiment

And here’s my little unscientific experiment. I’m going to place a modified version of last spring’s Music baton meme on the ground here and see if…

• the meme succeeds in passing itself on (without the social pressures that come with people specifying who they’re passing it to)
• the meme proceeds beyond my own direct social network into the great out there (from which I’ll need people to kindly trackback so I can see its progress)
• social pressures against another run of the music baton smash this version of the meme (hate that music baton meme… just hate it!)

Music baton plain pick-it-up meme

Total volume of music on my computer
12.39 Gig

Last CD I bought
Get9 (import), Yoko Kanno

Song playing right now
“Clouds,” Cibo Matto

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

• “I Want to Break Free,” Queen
• “Fortunate Son,” Credence Clearwater Revival
• “Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913,” John Denver & the Muppets
• “Solsbury Hill,” Peter Gabriel
• “Super Powers,” Ookla the Mok

I picked up this meme from

[link or trackback the blog/person you got it from to help track where the meme's gone]