How to compete with iPad » Matt Legend Gemmell (via Neven Mrgan’s tumbl)
This nails one particular thing I hate about all the yammering on the internet, and not just about the iPad. “It doesn’t do X [which is important to me out of proportion to all other things] and therefore it sucks.” One: your opinion doesn’t matter to anybody but you (neither, for that matter, does mine, which is why I tend not to write things like this). Two: your opinion isn’t universal, and while you may think you speak for legions of potential customers, you really only speak for yourself. Three: get a sense of proportion (and maybe a life). Four: just shut up already.
The rest of the piece is quite good too. It’s all about developing a product as the best version of itself, not merely as the cobbled-together facsimile you can make from the parts you have lying around. Other companies can make hardware that would rival the iPad as an electronic device, but no other companies go to the extent Apple does in allowing form and function to shape each other. For a while there Nokia was pretty good at developing new phone products this way, but I think they’ve gotten off in the weeds of late.
I don’t know that there are any companies besides Apple that would both allow such a project to get anywhere internally and subsequently take it to market. Lots of skunkworks projects never see the light of day, and many companies are so invested in the culture of their own product lines that they’d never consider releasing a product that doesn’t look and function just like all their other products. Apple takes risks, and those risks pay off almost every time.
