My iPad arrived two days ago turning me into a four-year old boy on Xmas eve. Yesterday, a queue of cooing colleagues snaked around my desk. Everyone wants one.

So two days into ownership, this is what I think it means.

1. It WON’T replace laptops … Not yet anyway.

iPad is a device for consuming media, not for creating it.  It’s hideous to type on.  But lovely to browse with.

It’s much nicer to swipe and tap with your finger than to point and click with a mouse.  So whether tablets get physical keyboards or laptops get natural user interfaces, this will change device design.

2. It’s ALREADY the device I want to use for casual surfing.

How did I ever manage without something that’s always on, weighs nothing and doesn’t burn my thighs?  Enough said.

3. It WILL change the way I consume newspapers and magazines.

WIRED magazine on iPad is highly readable and wow-inducing.  It pushes the boundary of what’s magazine and what’s interactive media and for the first time ever I would RATHER have a magazine in electronic than print format.

Talking of formats, I’d much rather read the Financial Times on my little iPad than wrestle with a print broadsheet on the train.

Coincidently, my WIRED magazine subscription got delivered on the same day as my iPad.  I still haven’t opened the paper version.

4. It MIGHT change the way I buy books.

Integrated search, in-line dictionaries and the ability to carry half the British Library in my hand are nice.

But I wrestle with this.  You see, my Mother was a teacher.  My maternal grandfather was a Cambridge academic.  I’m co-author of a book (here … thank you for asking).  Books are in my blood; almost religiously.  I love the novelty and utility of eBooks.  But they don’t take me back to when I was six years old and my Mum read poems to me.  There’s almost something sacrilegious about them.

Maybe that’s just generational change-resistance.

5. It WILL make me pay more for media.

Hello iPad.  Goodbye free content?

I know several entrepreneurs whose attempts to charge for online content succeeded about as well as King Canute’s wave management.  iPad apps might possible turn the tide against free content because the experience is so good.

Pricing models for iPad media content are a little Darwinian right now.  They range from The Times £9.99 per month subscription to Men’s Health’s $2.99  per issue to Wired’s free content.  Which pricing model proves the fittest for the iPad environment remains to be seen.  But I personally think it will be disruptive of the free content model.

In summary

Is the iPad useful?  Definitely.  Is it compelling?  Hmm … kind of.  Is it a disruptive innovation?  Possibly.  Is it the end of the laptop?  No.

Now, repeat after me:

I must not blog about Apple.  I must not blog about Apple. I must not blog about Apple …

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But I thought this was such a great presentation about why “online” continues to be a disruptive technology.

It encompasses beautifully why putting “eLipstick” on the pig of a fragmented legacy organisation doesn’t meet customers’ service and experience expectations.

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As gadgets get smaller, Britain has the largest plug in the world.  A problem, brought to life in this video:

The traditional British plug was invented in 1946.  Why did it take 64 years to invent a better one?  More importantly, why didn’t any of the rest of us have that idea?

Listen to what nobody says

I think the reason is that it’s so hard to find unvoiced customer needs.  No British customer has ever said to a product designer “I’d like a more portable electric plug.”  Not even to the inventor.  Instead the designer, Min Kyu-Choi, had an experience; he scratched his new laptop on its plug.

Their are so many ways to trigger the inductive leaps that create innovative new products.  But for me, the best one is to have direct experiences.  The easy part of that is that we all of us have experiences continuously.  When my alarm goes off, that’s a customer experience.  When I get on the train, it’s a customer experience.  Buying my morning coffee – an experience.  They all come bundled up with  satisfaction and frustration.

The hard part is noticing the response rather than accepting the “how things are-ness” of it.  One of the best ways is to keep a record of what happens – mark up every experience on a timeline and plot your emotional response.

Not taking problems for granted is the first step towards great product design.

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“By means of this remarkable instrument, a man can have the Italian opera, the Federal Congress, and his favorite preacher laid on his own house.” (New York Times, 22nd March 1876, see here)

Facebook overtakes Google, the social web wins

Almost exactly 134 years later (13th March 2010 to be precise) Facebook became the most visited website in the USA, pulling in more visitors than Google.  Last week’s data from Hitwise (an online competitive intelligence agency) shows a quiet, creeping discontinuity:

The graph says  that once we used the web mostly for information; now we’re primarily social users.  So what does that have to do with the New York Times and its prediction of telephone-based home entertainment?

What disruptive technology is really for

It takes twenty years to work out what any disruptive new technology is for.  Disruptive technology has a lifecycle. It’s invented.  A thousand flowers bloom as entrepreneurs and visionaries vie to make their fortunes.  Some businesses fail.  Others succeed.  After twenty years or so the dust clears on a new consensus about what that particular technology was for.

The year 1881 was a good one for French inventor Clément Ader.  At the Paris International Electrical Exhibition, he demonstrated how his théâtrophone system would open up the vast opportunity of a French home entertainment system based on a stereo telephone line.

He wasn’t the only person thinking that way.   In 1893 Telefon Hírmondó was launched by a colleague of Alexander Bell to 60 subscribers.  It’s opening message declared:

“We greet the inhabitants of Budapest. We greet them in an unusual way from which telephone broadcasting all over the world will start its victorious journey.”

By 1907, its subscriber base was 15,000 and it only stopped broadcasting with the Second World War.

Just as we eventually found out what the telephone is really for, last week’s Hitwise data shows that we’re discovering what the web is mostly for.  If the web really is primarily social, that  has big implications for online proposition development.

Things we may need to do more of include:

1. Design based on the needs of communities, not just individuals.
2. Emphasising social functionality as much as content and transactions.
3. Building content that can travel on social networks, rather than driving traffic to your own site.

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