Microsoft is a bit like Tiger Woods at the moment - industry darling that became too dominant, then had a fall accompanied by a thick layer of schadenfreude, and now is trying a come-back. Microsoft is being replaced in the big-bad-wolf department by Google and Apple and finds itself in the odd position of being an underdog, and people love to root for underdogs. In fact I'd say that Microsoft is further ahead on the come-back trail than Tiger is if you look at some of its recent announcements: Bing, Windows Phone 7, the Courier journal concept, and the just-announced IE9. Something interesting is brewing in Redmond.
The notion of a casual computer (as my colleague Mark Rolston described the iPad to the Wall Street Journal) is actually not a new one. Companies of all shapes and sizes have been trying to figure it out for quite a long time (including Steve Jobs and Apple...since 1983).
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.
The announcement of the Apple iPad elicited passionate responses at frog design, the innovation firm that created a prototype tablet for Steve Jobs and Apple…in 1983. The retro designs didn’t quite make it to market (though they did come close), but the design language that frog Founder Hartmut Esslinger created for the company — known as the Snow White computer language — was used for Apple’s groundbreaking Apple II computer series from ‘83 and ’84. Now, it seems, Jobs is responsible for yet another game changer with the iPad, and Esslinger and frog were eager to weigh in on the design, technology, and strategy behind the device soon after the announcement.
“I love it,” said Esslinger from Vienna, where he teaches “convergent industrial design” at the University of Applied Arts. “The iPad is the beginning of a new category — one that is hyper-convergent and humanistic.”
After throwing off the mediocre display of 3-D technologies and e-books at CES, the industry is eagerly awaiting the main event on Wednesday. There truly is no spectacle that compares to the launch of a new Apple product. The formula is well-established. Everyone is hungry for the next iPhone moment and Apple's bid to squash the Kindle and reinvent the publishing business with the iPad or the iSlate tablet computer. But that is a mere sideshow. The real road kill this time will not be the Kindle. It will be handheld video gaming devices like Sony's PSP and the Nintendo DS, as Apple establishes a lock on the economics of casual gaming with its newest device.
Reading the business section of the New York Times today, you can’t help but notice the juxtaposition of two seemingly different companies, which, at second glance, have more in common that you might think. One is Bloomberg, the financial data juggernaut that has enough cash to aspire to become “the world’s most influential news organization.” The company has placed its bets on the acquisition of the venerable BusinessWeek, trusting that it will broaden its reach into a mainstream business audience. A few pages later, Digital Domain columnist Randall Stross reveals Apple’s pending patent application for a new advertising pop-up technology that forces users of devices and web sites to acknowledge the reception of the commercial message.
If you only see one slide show about the State of the Internet in 2009, "Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)" by David Gillespie, an Account Director at Maclaren McCann, Toronto, is a good choice: a mesmerizing 256 slide manifesto on the Intention Economy with Data (as the bank) and Meaning (as the currency).
Some thoughts on the challenges faced by the three cross-platform OS makers -- Apple, Google and Microsoft -- on the disruption to their businesses caused by Netbooks.
