[Photos by Mark Serr]

I actually worked on a precursor to the iPad back in 1999 or so (I also designed the original iPhone, but that’s another story). This was for a start-up called Qubit, and it only got to prototype stage, but it was fun while it lasted. Even back then it was easy to see that a small tablet could make computing feel much less like work and much more like reading a magazine - something done in spurts and interruptible by family needs.

The intention of the Qubit tablet was actually quite similar to the iPad - casual web and email. Of course back in 1999, the web was still new for a lot of people, and email was not nearly the firehose that it is today. IM, social networking, photo sharing and music streaming were either just for teen early adopters or non-existent. Wi-fi was just starting to become more common in homes, but data usage over wireless was a foreign concept. So the use-case for it was a harder sell, especially at the high price the tablet would have to have sold for given it’s “large” 7-inch or so LCD.

High quality large capacitive touchscreens didn’t exist then, so we had to use a stylus, like a Palm. I designed this little “inkwell” on the side that held the pen either flush to the case, or tilted out for ready usage.

Because the touchscreen was limited, gestures to swipe pages was impossible. Hard buttons to easily scroll, a la Kindle, were used instead, placed where the user’s thumb would be. Because of the hassle of the stylus, we tried to make as much of the high-usage functionality as possible quickly accessible with buttons, without overloading the device with too much complexity.

Like the iPad, the Qubit was intended as a supplement to a desktop or laptop computer. At 1999 prices this was not an attractive proposition. But he question still remains today - if someone has dropped $1500+ on a MacBook, $200+ on an iPhone (plus ~$70/month for fees), will they also be up for spending another $500+ (plus perhaps $30/month in fees) for the times when they don’t feel like pulling out the laptop or the iPhone is just too small?

Only time will tell.

The launch of the iPad yesterday put an exclamation mark on an increasingly obvious point: Apple is the company that has captured the cultural zeitgeist. The massive hype leading up to the event - apparently achieved in a groundswell with very little effort on Apple’s part - shows that they really are the “It” company right now.

Not so long ago, Google claimed that position. The amount of press ink (literal or virtual) that Google has been able to create every single day for the last decade is just astonishing - it is not uncommon to see two or three articles on the same day about some aspect of Google’s business, whether it be a new product or another story about the Googleplex’s free food. No other organization, save perhaps Obama’s election campaign, can claim such a blanket of coverage on such a consistent basis.

But the honeymoon is over and we are in the midst of a mild backlash against Google, and at the same time Apple’s cultural and financial stock has been climbing. No-one sees them as just a maker of over-priced niche products for designery types anymore. They are truly a mainstream mass-culture company that, while focused mostly on consumer electronics, touches into so many other areas of our lives simply because the boundaries between computers, electronics, media, communications and social life have all blurred so thoroughly.

Looking back over the decades, we can see a string of companies that have managed to go beyond being just successful business enterprises and have captured something special in the culture. GM perhaps epitomized this in the 1950’s and 60’s, summed up by the well-known phrase “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”. GM helped shape the aesthetic and cultural agenda in a way that reached far beyond the automotive realm.

IBM arguably held this position in the 1970’s, and Microsoft in the late 80’s and early 90’s, to be superseded by Google at the turn of the millennium. But none of the tech companies besides Apple have quite been able to win hearts in the same way GM did.

But one thing that all these companies have in common is strong leaders who are not just good business thinkers but are also active in the weeds of product development. Think of Harley Earl at GM, Thomas Watson Jr. at IBM, Bill Gates at Microsoft, Sergey/Larry/Eric at Google, and of course Steve Jobs at Apple. These men all recognized that there is a clear connection between a company’s strategies and the details of the products they bring to market. Ignoring the latter is a good way to scuttle the former.

The iPad is but the latest result of the hand of Steve (with help from a huge team of people of course). The apparent ease with which hype appeared around it is in fact no accident: Apple has invested enormous amounts of work over the years to build a reputation around its products and brand, and that investment is now paying off in spades. Jobs himself is well tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, he transfers that to Apple’s products and strategies, and in turn the company comes to reflect and even steer the zeitgeist.

It’s not magic, but it is hard to do. Very hard. If history is any indication, there is room for only one such company at a time to hold this pre-eminent position, and their time in the sun is temporary. Apple’s winning streak will come to an end, but in the meantime they deserve all the credit they get.

A while back I posted some photos of the Olivetti Valentine typewriter that I’d managed to pick up, an object I’d been coveting for many years. It was in great shape, and included the hard-to-find manual. I finally got around to scanning the manual.

Here’s a picture of the “cover” - the manual is simply cardboard stock printed on both sides, and held together by a piece of string through a punched hole. Very simple. (Click here for a PDF download of the whole manual if you want it - note that it’s 3.7mb)

I love the tone of the manual, which is straightforward but also quite cheery, in keeping with the industrial design of the typewriter itself:

see how crisp and sharp your VALENTINE’s typing is? If you want it to stay like this, give the letters a cleaning every now and then, say once a month. Use the nylon brush moistened with some lighter fluid or gasoline. Another tip: when you are not using the machine, lock the carriage and keep your VALENTINE in its case

(lower case first sentence, and all-caps Valentine are in the original)

They don’t make them like this anymore.

I just saw a sleeper movie, The Invention of Lying, that poses an amusing premise: what would the world look like and behave like if there were no conception of lying? In the movie, starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner, everyone tells the absolute bald truth, all the time, even when unprompted. Biting one’s tongue and not saying the truth is not even possible. (If at this point you are recalling Jim Carrey’s Liar Liar and Yes Man, don’t worry, this is a much better and subtler - and subversive - film.)

In response to a stressful situation, Gervais’ character at one point tells The World’s First Lie, and the rest of the movie is about the consequences that come out of that act and realization that there is such a thing as non-truth (one of which is the creation of religion). It’s a new spin on the old adage “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king”, except here it’s the man who can lie who suddenly wields power over the gullable masses.

Gervais’ character works for a movie studio as a screenwriter, but all the movies in this world are simple tedious retellings (by a man sitting in a chair reading a book) of historical events. Fiction cannot exist in a world without lying.

This alternate world, which does not even have a word for truth, looks otherwise exactly like ours, complete with all the cars, gadgets and architecture that surround us. But it got me thinking: it’s a fine line between lying and innovation. Both spring from the ability to imagine an alternate reality, and then marshaling the courage of one’s convictions to carry that through to try and convert the present into the new reality.

The goals of lying and innovation are obviously very different, but at their root they have considerable similarities. Could the truth-only world of Gervais’ character exist without the ability to think imaginatively, differently, alternatively? I seriously doubt it.

This point is really driven home by a fantastic commercial in the movie for Coca-Cola, surely a company at the pinnacle of posing a nebulous value proposition in mass-culture’s mind that, when looked at dryly, has little merit. Watch the video above, and enjoy (video won’t embed, so click here or on the image to go to YouTube).

Nexus One a Test of Google’s Customer Service

Nexus One Complaints Mount, Honeymoon Over

Google Nexus One Leaves Customers Sour

And so on… Ah, schadenfreude

This is the other edge of the solutions sword: when you set yourself up as a provider of holistic solutions and ecosystems, customers want one throat to choke when something goes wrong. Their expectations go way up about how everything is going to work, and they want a real person to talk to when it doesn’t.

Having people available to talk to is not one of Google’s strengths.

John Battelle as usual hits the nail on the head:

[H]ow many real live customer service reps does the company plan to have tasked to this product? That, to me, is a Very Important Question. It’s the essential human question that drives Google. I bring it up all the time. Community. Media. People. How do you make people scale?! How does Google, a company driven by algorithms and scale, find its Voice?

If I were Google, here’s what I’d do:

• Ditch my left brain rationality and get on the empathy train as fast as possible. Customers want to know they are being heard and understood, and that someone (a real someone, not an algorithm) is paying attention). We have to have real people lighting up the forums and manning the support phone lines, and keeping frustrated customers up to date on what we’re doing to fix the problem.
• Get Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Sergey and Larry out in front of this. Get them out there apologizing, being humble, saying that they are attending to this personally. Doesn’t matter if we don’t think Google is to blame - customers don’t care, they just want the problem solved, and we put ourselves out there with the target on our back, so it’s us who they’re shooting at
• Wrangle HTC and T-Mobile so that we can all be on the same page, and provide unifeed fixes. But Google should be the front, it’s our phone, and we own the problem. We’re promising an integrated product, we need to service it in an integrated way. All for one, one for all.

I’m confident that Google will get through these teething pains. But it is a good lesson for any company that wants to set itself up as a real solutions provider, and stretch into pieces of the ecosystem that it has not engaged in before: be prepared for a whole bunch of new issues, complaints, and expectations from customers that you’ve never had to deal with before.

This requires getting all parts of one’s own company working together, as well as all partners who helped bring the ecosystem to life. Not easy, but absolutely necessary. Especially, as is Google’s case, that they are playing catch-up to a market leader.

The site includes a downloadable first chapter, and will be updated with more excerpts, news, reviews, video, and speaking events information over the coming weeks and months.

Pre-orders are available on online retailers, and the book will be on shelves by February 8.

Spread the word!

Nexus means a series of things connected together, an appropriate name for a phone where Google is taking more control of both the hardware and software, and therefore much more of the user experience.

We are at interesting inflection point with smartphones, a point where we have two competing development models playing out and a future in which probably only one will survive: Highly integrated, or highly modular.

With a few exceptions (BlackBerrys and to a lesser extent Treos), until recently most smartphones have been modular affairs: hardware from one company, OS and software from another company, wireless network from yet another. This has led to disjointed user experiences that have limited the appeal of the phones to more mass market audiences. The success of the iPhone with mass consumers showed that it was vital to integrate all these elements together seamlessly (and that integration goes beyond the phone itself to content on the PC and in the cloud).

In the early stages of a category such as smartphones, the usage experience is often rough and incomplete. Early adopters will look past this, but until a more refined experience arrives that delivers the right recipe of capabilities, ease of use, and price, then the majority of people will stay away. I refer to this as an experience gap - a mismatch between what people want to do with a product, and what the products on the market can actually deliver.

Once the recipe has been established, and clarity reached about what people want, it then becomes easier to divide up pieces of the experience to different vendors, as they now all have a common goal in mind. Following Clayton Christensen’s logic, once this happens then modular approaches will ultimately win out - they will be more technologically sophisticated, cost less, and offer more capabilities. The PC is the archetypal example of this process. Smartphones are coming up on this inflection point, though the timing of when it will tip into full-blown modular-hood is unclear. Smartphones could be like mp3 players, where the similarly integrated ecosystem of iPod/iTunes has resisted being broken into components by competitors.

Google’s leaders are excellent students of tech history, and they no doubt understand this trend. When Android premiered it was, as Christensen would say, “prematurely modular”, in that it was a system that had a very high degree of modularity and very little structure, but it was too early for other vendors building on the Android platform to know how to put together an effective recipe for user experience.

Charlie Wolf at Needham Company roundly criticizes Google for its overly loose approach to Android:

The great appeal and promise of Android is that it’s an open source operating system in the tradition of the Linux operating system. The appeal of open source lies in the freedom of software developers, smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers to modify the source code of the operating system.  And, as initial versions of Android phones demonstrate, the smartphone vendors have every incentive to do so in order to differentiate their phones from others running on the Android platform. For example, Motorola sells it customized user interface as “MotoBlur” while HTC markets its user interface as “Sense.”

Unfortunately, the freedom of smartphone manufacturers to modify the Android code has created significant hurdles for application software developers. Unlike the iPhone where a software application can be written once and run seamlessly on all versions of the iPhone [Not exactly true - AR], most software applications written for Android have to be customized for each smartphone. This limits the addressable market of an application to that of an individual smartphone rather than the Android platform itself. 

(Download the PDF of Wolf’s report here)

The lackluster success of the early Android phones has surely made Google realize that they need to take a much stronger role in order to bring all the pieces of the experience together. The catch-as-catch can approach they’ve had to far just isn’t going to cut it. Fragmentation is a death knell for a product like this at this stage of maturity. Google needs to lead the charge with an integrated platform until the experience gap is fully closed. Then it can afford to loosen the reins and let the handset manufacturers, carriers, and third party developers go do their own things independently, safe in the knowledge that they will all come together to create something interesting and valuable for customers.

With the new year I decided it was time to do a refresh on the look here at Richardsona.com world headquarters. Pretty stripped down and minimal, hope you like it. For those of you that subscribe to the blog on a reader, come check it out in the flesh.

Leaving aside the psychology of why we like watching jerks on TV, this new show is just an utter disaster. It tries to be Rachel Ray meets Celebrity Squares meets IronChef. The gimmick is that about 15 regular people on webcams try to follow Gordon through the preparation of a recipe, all visible on a giant screen where they can chat with him in real time. Then there are some celebrity participants in studio and on remote video. For this inaugural show Whoopi Goldberg joined by video (I told you it was like Celebrity Squares), along with LeeAnn Rimes and a number of others in person.

Gordon tries to do an “up with people” schtick, while bantering awkwardly with the celebrities and the regular folks. He looks incredibly uncomfortable and out of place in a giant studio - plainly he is more suited to close combat than stadium sports. His stuttering, staccato delivery doesn’t work well at this scale where we expect things to be more scripted than when we’re following him around with a Steadycam as he tries to rescue another twee English seaside bistro.

The whole thing had a Jeckyll and Hyde character - I don’t really watch Ramsay much, but his persona is solidly planted in my head. Now I was watching something so against type that it made both the old and new Ramsay look completely fake. The artifice of the brand came right up to the surface. The fourth wall was broken, and not in a good way, because the suspension of disbelief that is required to put up with such an acerbic character for multiple episodes got wiped away. He came across instead as just another TV personality with a made-up personality.

I almost puked up in my mouth. Well, if Gordon hired me to critique his show the way he critiques twee English seaside bistros, that’s what I’d tell him. I wish he would hire someone like that to give him the straight bleep.

Gordon, stick with what you do best, before you set your brand back a decade. Go back to being an f-bomb dropping a-hole. Please.