Spectacularly Well
A couple days ago Jon Stokes wrote an article for Ars Technica in which he argued that the Palm Pre is a Blackberry killer, not an iPhone killer. I like this argument; he’s really on to something with that. The implication is that the Pre will be pretty successful, but at RIM’s expense, not Apple’s.
But what’s with this idea:
The key to the success of both the iPhone and the BlackBerry is that both of these devices do one thing spectacularly well, and they also do a few other things passably enough to get by. For the iPhone, that one thing is media playback and digital commerce (via the iTunes store); for BlackBerry, the focus is on e-mail (though calendering is a close second).
Am I wrong, or is this concept based almost entirely on the pre-iPhone situation? Before the iPhone, Apple didn’t have a phone at all, and the closest thing to it was the iPod which was known for media playback and (through iTunes) online digital sales. And also before the iPhone, Blackberry was known primarily for its exceptional handling of e-mail and text messages.
But is any of that relevant now? Now that the iPhone exists?
I’ve seen lots of claims that the Blackberry is better than the iPhone for e-mail and texting, but (aside from personal preference for a pushbutton keyboard) I haven’t heard anyone clearly explain how it’s better. Admittedly I’ve never used a Blackberry, but my iPhone seems to do messages and e-mails just great. I’m hard-pressed to imagine what could be better — and not just a tiny bit better, but quite a bit better — on a Blackberry.
And the iPhone excels at one thing? Media playback and sales? Huh? What about all those tens of thousands of apps for the iPhone, that just keep growing exponentially? If even a tiny fraction of them are really good, then the iPhone excels at a lot more than media playback and sales. And forget the river of apps — what about mobile Safari? The first really decent web experience on a phone! It wasn’t “passable” — it was fan-freakin’-tastic.
I could just recite most of Jobs’s January ’07 keynote speech, but why bother. The iPhone is 2.5 years old now, and I haven’t been sleeping under a rock during that time. The iPhone does just about everything “spectacularly well.” The Storm is RIM’s only serious attempt to market the same product, and we all know how well that worked.
Update 2009.06.25 — Stokes continues and expands on this same line of thought in “Ars reviews the Palm Pre, part 2: the webOS experience”:
“[T]he iPhone is a widescreen, networked media player that also does a bunch of other stuff, telephony and Internet included.
The Pre, in contrast, was introduced by Rubenstein as a cloud messaging device that also does a bunch of other stuff, media playback included.”
Then he takes it to a new, much more audacious level:
“The first of these paradigms is exemplified by the early Yahoo! directory, and I’ll call it the structure-and-browse paradigm. The idea here is that with a small enough data flow, you can manage incoming information by structuring it yourself, the way that Yahoo! used humans to sort newly created webpages into categories ...
There’s a threshold, though, beyond which the volume of data is so high that structure-and-browse becomes a losing battle. It’s at this point that the second paradigm, which I’ll call collect-and-query, becomes the best way to deal with the mass of unstructured data. This latter paradigm is exemplified by Google’s approach to information discovery ...”
“[T]he iPhone — and, indeed, the entire Apple ecosystem — presumes that your contacts exist as an information repository, the canonical copy of which exists either on your Mac or on the company’s MobileMe servers ...
Palm’s webOS, in contrast, is built around the collect-and-query paradigm.”
“[I]f you’re like me and you felt that the iPhone, even in its post-MobileMe incarnation, never quite made sense as an Internet- and cloud-centric messaging device, then the Pre may be the answer to your prayers.”
The whole thrust of the article is that time marches on, and just as Yahoo was eclipsed by Google, so is iPhone likely to be eclipsed by Pre. He’s not always positive on the Pre — in fact he criticizes it pretty harshly in parts of this article — but when he compares it to the iPhone, he casts the iPhone as yesteryear’s junk (e.g. “Windows 3.1”!) and the Pre as the modern, better system.
Let’s all keep an eye on this, and see how it plays out, shall we?
Here are a couple quotations to enjoy while we wait:
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. —Larry Ellison
The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: “Can you imagine a [peer-to-peer] program like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?” Then they’ll build applications like Groove that they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it — the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn’t peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular. —Joel Spolsky
Update 2010.07.04 — It’s been just over a year, and let’s see: The Pre flopped. HP bought Palm and says they’re going to use it to make a webOS tablet — which, when it comes out, will be competing with the already hot-selling iPad. And the latest iPhone sold 1.7 million units on its opening weekend. So tell me again, who’s fighting a “losing battle?”
© 2010 Darel Rex Finley | design by