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.

In this article for Forbeshe not only discusses why Amazon’s opaque DRM standards are eventually going to be the device’s biggest hurdle, but also the subtle, but important differences that have made the iPhone work even though it’s a locked down device.

Amazon’s Kindle file format doesn’t provide support for tables or for so-called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our line of technical books. And there is a viable alternative: Epub, the open format from the International Digital Publishing Forum, is based on the Web’s native format, HTML, and provides full table and font support. This is the first “strategy tax” paid by those who embrace proprietary platforms: They can’t support the needs of every niche and must prioritize their support for mainstream needs.

The single point of purchase was also a non-starter for us, since my fundamental understanding of information marketplaces is that they grow bigger and more lucrative for everyone when there is a rich ecosystem of cooperating players.

If you’re interested in understanding why open standards work for business and growth, it’s worth a read.