Corvus Consulting

Last week I got into a discussion on the blog for Spark, a weekly CBC radio show about technology and culture. From the comments came an interview with Dan Misener, and part of that conversation made its way into an episode that asks why computers are so hard to use. The segment starts at the 40-minute mark, and should you be disposed to listen you can do so.

As with most interviews there are parts that get cut. While I liked the parts Spark included, one part I wished would have made it on was about the importance of the iPad’s adoption of unmediated input. The following is a tidied-up crib of those thoughts.

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UPDATE

On April 12 Opera was approved for the App Store. I’m not sure if they should be happy to be in or insulted that they’re not threatening, but I’m glad to see it. Congrats, team Opera.

ORIGINAL POST

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Opera browser. I used it when it was among the only ad-supported online properties, paid for a license to support them, and evangelized it to coworkers and friends. It had mouse gestures, it was FAST, it could render as a small screen interface before anyone knew why they’d want to. Then I moved to a Mac, where Opera had yet to go, and never really went back when Opera did come to that platform.

Opera has done so much right but rarely receives the credit, much less market share, that it deserves. The company’s last major strategy shift was to position their browser as the premier choice for mobile use. But Apple, Google and RIM are eating up the mobile market and all three roll their own browsers. Opera is, once again, being left out in the cold but this time isn’t so quietly accepting of its fate.

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Just over three years ago Steve Jobs closed a keynote with notice that Apple Computer had changed its name to Apple, Inc. My first reaction was that they were taking the business more towards the iPod model and away from Macs. Later, I wrote that I saw Apple taking the direction towards digital appliances and what that meant for watching movies at home. I’m happy the Mac is still central to their strategy, but in the iPad we see more of what Apple sees: the general purpose computing paradigm is a dead end.

Lots of techies are upset, seeing the future of making software as a Facebook experience: whitewashed, right angles and the turfing out of anything not deemed to fit by corporate interests.

How did that happen? There were plenty of chances to make things easy and for everyone, like the marketing copy we keep slapping onto our product descriptions. But we blew it.

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Like many, I watched the iPad announcement on Wednesday and then went straight to discussion forums to see what people were saying. As with any disruptive product, there’s a mix of reactions ranging from lust to uncertainty to outrage. What gets missed in the excitement for or against is the comprehensive and disciplined innovation strategy that Apple has used three times now, most recently in the iPad.
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A couple weeks ago I wrote about the looming obsolescence of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader, and today Amazon has done an about face on one of the most toxic aspects of its grayscale device. From MacRumors we read:

Amazon today announced a revised royalty program for its e-book Kindle Store, significantly increasing the potential return to authors and publishers in exchange for commitments to meet certain feature requirements. The move, which takes effect on June 30th, essentially bumps the royalty payments to 70% of an e-book’s list price, up from the existing 35% rate that will remain in effect for publishers who do not wish to meet the requirements of the new program.

Firstly, a correction to my own statement that Amazon was sharing only 30% of revenue from Kindle titles with authors. But 5% doesn’t change that the pressure Amazon brought to bear on authors was threatening to reduce author returns to sweatshop wage levels, a position that could only be enjoyed from a de facto monopoly.

The timing and degree of the revenue share is particularly interesting, as Apple seems ready to spring a tablet onto the market that would likely inherit the App Store model of a 30%-70% revenue split, with App (and soon ebook) authors taking the bigger slice.

While it’s great that Amazon is making this move, it’s a sad statement that from the position of first mover their impulse was to impose such harsh terms on authors. The move also shows the threat to the Kindle that Amazon sees in an Apple table ebook reader.

While writing a long-overdue post about the failure of imagination that has been the Kindle, I found myself feeling a little left out of the Apple tablet speculation game, though yesterday’s post did have some of that.

Instead of listing a bunch of things I think the tablet will do, I wanted to step back and try to boil down the design thinking that would drive such a product to market.

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Evolution is a funny thing, and by funny I mean like religion: easily grasped in the way that suits the dispositions of the reader. We often think that evolution produces the optimal, even the perfect, but this is nowhere near the truth. Rather than travel in a straight and rational line, evolution pushes design iterations along winding roads that can double back on themselves as easily as they can curve and veer in new directions.

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