Even while Apple’s stock hit an all-time high of $700 on Monday and the iPhone 5 is heralded as the fastest selling iPhone ever with over 2m ordered in the first 24 hours, criticism of a kind never seen before has been sweeping the web driven by the new Apple maps app.
Apple made the decision to replace Google maps because of the growing and fierce competition between the two companies for the future of mobile development. However, normally loyal iPhone users have been highly critical of the decision, with features such as street view and transport times particularly lamented.
Apple was quick to say it was responding to criticism and would improve the application, but the fact remains this is looking like quite a misstep.
Coupled with this are the on-going issues with Siri, the iPhone’s “personal assistant”, which is being given a run for its money by both Google Voice and S Voice, the new voice assistant from Samsung.
The big question to my mind is who is best equipped to deal with a world in which consumers value easy to use (but very hard to do) services like maps or artificial intelligence, more than features inherent in the devices themselves. In other words; who is better in the cloud?
When we look back on this period in five or 10 years time I wonder if we will be saying that this was the historical moment when the world’s largest tech company peaked?
Will Apple be smart enough to capitalise on the next big opportunity in personal computing – turning the smart phone into the CPU for computing anywhere?
I remember back to the time when there was a huge debate about “convergence” – the big question about whether consumers would accept one multi-functional mobile device (the Swiss Army Knife approach) or would want a series of specialized devices such as a phone, camera, GPS. MP3 player and so on. The iPhone settled that debate completely with hardware and software (apps) which cater for just about every need. It now seems incredible that anyone even argued the point.
Well, we are fast approaching a re-run of that debate. Why have a computer and a smartphone when you could use a phone as your CPU, operating system and file store and simply link via Bluetooth to a screen, keyboard and mouse? Any why not make that screen your TV?
Apple is actually very well placed to make this move. It is already converging its operating systems – OS X looks increasingly like IOS especially after Mountain Lion. And they produce a superb range of Bluetooth-enabled peripherals and brilliant screens.
But this is a big leap for a company which makes so much money from computer hardware – $6.3bn in the last quarter of 2011. Risking that is a big bet for any company, let alone one that is riding the wave with its iconic highly designed and desirable computers.
If not Apple, then maybe Android? Already there have been Android phones launched with full versions of Ubuntu Linux loaded on them. And Android’s makers Google doesn’t have a hardware business to cannibalise. In fact, it would make massive sense for Google to back a move like this – it is trying to push an alternative to Microsoft’s Office Suite (Google Apps) and what better Trojan Horse than consumers determined to carry their computing device with them wherever they go?
Even Microsoft may be better placed to capitalise on this trend than Apple. Microsoft doesn’t actually make computers (although their OEM partners clearly do) so although there would be much painful disruption if Windows 8 became the operating system on choice on the mobile portable computing device of the future, the company could but only profit in the long run.
I may be wrong, but I bet we will see this trend play out; it remains to be seen who will ride the wave.
Community trumps functionality every time. I’ve just finished reading Steven Levy’s book In the Plex which is a brilliant portrait of the rise of Google. It is staggering just how much change that one company has wrought in the world. But the book ends with Google facing the fact that the new “Google” is Facebook – young, iconoclastic and, crucially, in tune with social instincts.
One in every seven minutes online are spent on Facebook, a phenomenon which has convinced Google, belatedly, that it needs to be in this race – hence Google +.
The fact that community trumps functionality every time was brought home to me last Christmas. All three of my (nearly grown up) children wanted new mobile phones. The two boys were set on a new Android phone – the Samsung Galaxy S2 (actually they wanted the S3 but it isn’t out yet) – but my daughter was adamant that she wanted a Blackberry.
This was painful to me as I have been a long-time Blackberry user who gave up when the iPhone demonstrated what a smartphone should really be like. I tried to talk her into getting another smart phone – an Android or even and iPhone – but she wasn’t having it. So I bought what they each wanted.
On Christmas day the boys were delighted with their S2s – and I have to say they were impressive devices – large, clear screens and masses of power and functionality.
But my daughter was ecstatic with her Blackberry Bold. It wasn’t as expensive as the boys’ phones (and in my view it certainly wasn’t as good) but she loved it. And the reason? Blackberry’s messenger app BBM. This is the killer app for her and her circle. Everyone, it seems, uses it and the volume of messages she now sends and receives has gone through the roof. I’m not sure this is entirely a good thing, but it has certainly proved a point to me.
It’s that time of year again when the faithful make the pilgrimage to Brighton to the dConstruct conference. This year there were a fewer people attending and sponsorship seemed a bit thinner on the ground, but otherwise the event was as thought-provoking and enjoyable as ever. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, and not all the talks hit the right notes all of the time, but taken as a group I thought the conference was a great success.
The theme was designing for tomorrow and there was plenty to think about, even if a lot was quite abstract and had a distinctly US flavour.
I’m not going to give a blow by blow account (you can check out the Flickr stream which will give you an impressionistic sense of the event….
…or the Twitter stream if you want the real-time experience as see through the eyes of some of the participants (obviously in sound-bites of varying literary quality).
Here, though, are a few random take-aways from the talks.
Everything gets networked, including physical things and that leads to a new trend: from ownership to services – early examples are here already in Spotify (subscription, on-demand music) and Streetcar (pay as you go cars). More will follow. Is this the beginning of post-capitalism?
Visualisation is a very powerful way of exploring very large and dynamic data set. Some of the examples given were the Digg swarm (visualising interest as it builds), crime maps (great controls – particularly “commute” and “day and night” as more useful time filters), and live hurricane activity for MSNBC (great time-based interface). Think about the elegant design to help answer questions people actually want to pose.
Context is key. Design the best possible experience and degrade gracefully, making the best experience possible of each device. Maybe, we’ll now start with designing for the mobile and migrate to the desktop, not the other way round (or not at all!). Example: Tweetie – starts on the iPhone and migrates to the Mac.
Sci-fi borrows from interfaces already invented (Buck Rogers and the video phone which tunes in like a television) and real life borrows from sci-fi – the StarTAC phone which looks like a communicator from early Star Trek.
In may ways the most difficult talk as the central notion of “juiciness” was a bit too Californian for the sceptical British audience. However, in many ways I thought the idea of designing in “magic” into the interface to create the kind of emotional connection which games designers seek is a really powerful learning for web design. Why shouldn’t b2b website have some of that magic? The power of the Mac and particularly the iPhone comes from the magic of the interface. If we could design some of that into our b2b web sites the results might be amazing – and commercially rewarding.
Moving past digital infatuation and analogue nostalgia: “From representing the world on the web to embedding the web in the world”. He gives the example of printing newspapers of curated blog content. “There are magnificent bits of infrastructure just lying around” – underused printing presses, a postal system, DVD and CD production facilities and so on. Why not use them to add a dimension to the things that started out on the web? And the best quote of the conference with reference to the newspaper industry: “We’ve broken your business, now give us your machines”.
So, that’s it. Some thoughts about the day – not very coherent but hopefully of some use/interest.