Apple has, in the past, always built their consumer products around a need that has either been unaddressed, or closes an obvious “hole” in the marketplace, even if most people didn’t realize how obvious it was until someone built a shiny-white plastic a bridge across it.

CLOSING A GAP

Before the iPod released there were dozens of different mp3 players appearing on the marketplace. With wonky interfaces and minute amounts of *expensive* flash-ram (16-64mb) these overpriced music players had terrible interfaces, and integrated with your computer in often bizarre ways.

The release of Apple’s music device that all changed in a moment. With a hard drive and a clear, visual interface, it let people play music they way they wanted, but they hadn’t realized it until Steve Jobs held it up for them to see.

The gap in utility before the iPhone was wide and deep. After spending years struggling through a variety of poor interfaces and hacked together half-assed features, the average phone user was ready for a “smart phone” that actually worked. They also wanted something that could act asa a replacement for the growing forest of devices that had been cluttering up the average nerd’s pockets, backpacks, and man-purses. While it took a while for the full feature set to come into place, it was clear from the get-go that Apple had seen the problem, and the Phone satisfied it.

THE KILLER APP

When the iPod launched everyone had been so focused on complaining about piracy, nobody had bothered to offer look at the user’s experience of pirated music and offer a viable digital alternative for legally owning songs in a way that actually came close to giving the customer the kind of utility and flexibility that made having a digital music collection so much fun. That was, until Apple launched iTunes. While it wasn’t the perfect program, it was slick, smooth, useful, and fun.

The App Store, while not quite as gee-whiz as the music store was, realized that if you could develop a way for customers to customize the experience of the device in their pocket they would love you for it. Instead of being a single swiss-army knife for everybody, you could choose the different blades you need, creating a device that fit your style perfectly.

WHAT ABOUT THE iPAD?

You can see in this first slide from the presentation that the iPad is basically about answering a question that nobody had really asked: What would you get if you hacked and iPhone together with a laptop? While the answer is kind of cool, it doesn’t tug at our desires. There is no hole.

And that’s why I think the iPad is kind of a dud. I doubt it will be a failure, but as far as I can tell the iPad doesn’t really solve a problem, or offer a killer App. Instead it relies on a maneuver I’ll call the “iPod Shuffle”: flowing out on a river of hype, it promises to build a bridge to nowhere, satisfying nothing more than a vague need to be a part of the world of Apple, and give us an echo of that oh-so-satisfying response we get when Apple has closed an actual loop.

The good stuff starts at about 3 minutes in.

The first generation of digitized media tends to closely relate to our analog experiences, but quickly takes advantage of the flexibility of the virtual medium. Early word processors were much more like a typewriter, for instance, then the advanced editors we have today.

She does an excellent job of breaking down the economics.

All I have to do is consider that I already spend most of my time gaming on a PC. Partly that’s because I’m an old man with a fetish for humming boxes that I built myself, and partly it’s because I want all the other features that a PC offers: instant access to my email, Twitter, screen-grab software, and my own music to replace generic rock track X on racing game Y.

If the 360 does start to support all these things (there’s no confirmation as to whether Last.FM will be able to run in the background as a soundtrack to your games), it’ll become the kind of gaming machine that I want to spend my time with for more reasons than just because it has some games that my PC doesn’t.

It will become a device that has more of the networked infrastructure, and more of the media tweaks and toys that I take for granted as part of my desktop computer.

I think that there’s way more to it than just this. With the Natal Microsoft is planning to re-launch the XBox. And if I’m reading between the lines correctly, they’re essentially going to do what Nintendo did with the Wii, except they won’t even bother to beef up the hardware. They’ll simply bundle the new motion technology in and go on a media blitz. And I think that could work. After all the box will basically be able to do everything from downloading games to playing movies and music off of your home network.

It’s taken a while, but the 360 may finally be the “everything box”.

“Through the VolleeX engine, we can take full PC games, MMOs or even virtual worlds and stream them to any 3G enabled handsets, “says Vollee’s head of business development, Julian Corbertt in an interview with Pocket Gamer. “This means that you can now access games or full persistent online worlds right from your mobile handset. It’s a real step forward for mobile games as you can now have meaningful connected experiences on your handset.”

But maybe they’re just aiming too high. Streaming games will never really deliver core game experiences to the degree that twitch players are going to find acceptable, at least not until we fix the speed of light. Still the idea of doing it with something like WOW makes infinite sense, and allows you to deliver relatively high end graphical experiences to relatively low-end platforms.

Applications on Facebook are already becoming more server driven, so why not pull the whole thing over and deliver rich, immersive experiences one click at a a time to audience that will be perfectly happy with lag and a low frame rate?

The animation industry was taken by surprise when Hanna Barbera starting delivering cartoons for television using less than a quarter of the frame-rate of features. Could history be about to repeat itself?

And that makes sense. It’s a relatively "hot" medium for the Internet, demanding that you pay attention to an ongoing conversation where anyone you’re chatting with can demand as much of your time as they like. And there’s no real filters.  The person demanding a response can be anyone from your best friend to that "so h0t grl with sexxxxy pics" that would very much like you to click on the link to her site, please.

But spam or no, before the rise social media IM was the primary way to hang out with people online. These days, between Twitter, Facebook and SMS messages I almost never open up my chat client at all. And the times I do end up in a messaging session it’s usually inside of another website, like Google Mail, Skype orin Facebook.

But if the old-fashioned one to one style of IM is dying, or at least evolving beyond recognition, it’s doing it quietly, with no one even bothering to report on the disappearance of what was once a major method of communication on the web.