When Multi Isn’t Multi

I received a detailed crit­i­cism of my post, Sim­plify Sim­plify, from a for­mer col­league, Emery. After his response, iOS 4 (pre­vi­ously iPhone OS 4) was demon­strated at an Apple Press event. “Mul­ti­task­ing” was intro­duced which I will dis­cuss fur­ther. Before I do so, here is Emery’s Face­book post in its entirety:

I just read an excel­lent blog post which posited that the link below is some­how a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for why we don’t need the abil­ity to mul­ti­task on a phone. Those of you who know me well know that I’m a fan of a cer­tain smart­phone OS which trum­pets mul­ti­task­ing as a cen­tral capa­bil­ity. There is no way that I can be neu­tral in this, so I’m not going to try.

I think the blog­ger is miss­ing the point. He sug­gests (and I’ll com­ment the link below so that you can read it your­self) that mul­ti­task­ing is actu­ally not what the aver­age con­sumer wants — that a phone should force us to pay atten­tion to one thing at a time — and he ref­er­ences the arti­cle below, which makes the point (well) that humans do not actu­ally have an abil­ity to multitask.

I think the issue at hand here is being con­fused. It’s a seman­tic one. On the one hand, we have the human inabil­ity to mul­ti­task (to per­form two or more tasks simul­ta­ne­ously with­out delay, which I’ll agree is a myth). On the other hand, we have a device’s abil­ity to mul­ti­task (open more than one appli­ca­tion simul­ta­ne­ously). Humans are not devices. The blog­ger is mak­ing the argu­ment that because humans can­not process two actions at once, a device’s abil­ity to do so is some­how irrel­e­vant to us.

Wait a minute — isn’t that why we have duo-core proces­sors? I mean, I get that it’s not really the same thing… But in a way it kind of is. Any­one who’s used a Pre knows that the abil­ity to flip back and forth between your web browser and your text appli­ca­tion is an amaz­ing thing. A rev­o­lu­tion­ary thing. It’s not help­ing you (the human) con­duct two actions simul­ta­ne­ously, it’s giv­ing you the abil­ity to close the gap between how fast your brain can switch between tasks and how fast your device can switch between func­tions. That is COMPLETELY dif­fer­ent (to me) than cre­at­ing a device which specif­i­cally allows you to text and browse the web at the same time (which is impos­si­ble for a human to do, though tech­ni­cally pos­si­ble for the Pre to do).

The rea­son­ing that humans “can’t mul­ti­task” is at best a weak excuse for Apple’s fail­ure to explore a func­tion­al­ity that should have been high up their list, just as Apple’s late attempt to intro­duce “mul­ti­task­ing” (and if you know how their new OS accom­plishes it, you’ll under­stand the air quotes) is a weak excuse for truly allow­ing their users to engage mul­ti­ple func­tions to accom­plish a task.

———-

Emery sum­ma­rizes my post with this statement:

He sug­gests that mul­ti­task­ing is actu­ally not what the aver­age con­sumer wants — that a phone should force us to pay atten­tion to one thing at a time — and he ref­er­ences the arti­cle below, which makes the point (well) that humans do not actu­ally have an abil­ity to multitask.

I would sug­gest that I am not mak­ing this argu­ment. I would frame my argu­ment in one sen­tence as this:

A device should direct our atten­tion to the task at hand, help­ing us to accom­plish our goal at any given time, whether that be to enter­tain, dis­cover, cre­ate, or edit.

There are many exam­ples of the iPhone multi-tasking today. To say that any OS is “inca­pable of multi-tasking” is folly. An oper­at­ing sys­tem is a com­plex sys­tem built in lev­els. At the very top level, a user inter­acts with the sys­tem. The ques­tion is whether iOS allows third-party apps to run in the back­ground while other Apps, both third-party and Apple-provided, run in the fore­ground. Mr. Jobs and his team intro­duced a new par­a­digm for this work. I’ll call them the Seven Dwarfs of multi-tasking.

The Seven Dwarfs bal­ance two com­pet­ing fac­tors: con­sumer demand and device secu­rity. They are the following:

• back­ground audio
• VoIP
• Loca­tion Services
• Push Noti­fi­ca­tions
• Local Noti­fi­ca­tions
• Task Com­ple­tion
• Fast App Switching

These will sat­isfy a very large per­cent­age of people’s demands for mul­ti­task­ing apps. I am cer­tain that addi­tional APIs of this nature will be intro­duced in the future.

Secu­rity is truly the ele­phant in the room. The fact that so few blog­gers and jour­nal­ists have dis­cussed it in rela­tion to Apple’s multi-tasking frame­work is incred­i­ble. Viruses and mal­ware run in the back­ground of an OS. By sand-boxing Apps and lim­it­ing mul­ti­task­ing to spe­cific chan­nels, Apple is keep­ing the weeds out of the gar­den before they sprout. Does this mean that the iPhone is com­pletely impen­e­tra­ble to attack? No. It just means that the iPhone App Store is a ster­il­ized hos­pi­tal and the Android Mar­ket­place is a Refugee Camp’s med­ical tent. Where would you like to be operated on?

There is two ways of look­ing at every prob­lem. With this ques­tion of the Seven Dwarfs, one could say, “think of all the other kinds of things a back­ground app could do?” I would say, “think of all the kinds of things that I never have to worry about again!”

In the past week, I have expe­ri­enced two legit­i­mate back­ground app processes on my iMac I would have pre­ferred to avoid. The first was Steam, a sort of “vir­tual game play­ing con­sole” that after instal­la­tion decided it needed to run at startup with­out ask­ing. The sec­ond was a a lit­tle Sys­tem bar app that decided it needed to run all the time in case I ever plugged in my Jaw­bone Blue­tooth Head­set for another update in the next year. I had to go and hunt them down and tell them to stop. “Leave me alone,” I had to say. And these were legit­i­mate apps. I can imag­ine try­ing to explain the process of shut­ting down these apps to a clue­less rel­a­tive (sorry to all my clue­less rel­a­tives, and my only readers…)

Emery also writes, “wait a minute — isn’t that why we have duo-core proces­sors?” I would def­i­nitely argue that duo-core proces­sors are unre­lated to mul­ti­task­ing from the con­sumer side. The intro­duc­tion of multi-core proces­sors is all about the lim­its of sil­i­con tran­sis­tors. Basi­cally, you can only make a core run so fast before the power con­sump­tion and cool­ing needed is beyond prac­ti­cal­ity. Adding more cores builds a wider base to run processes. There is much work to be done to rewrite soft­ware to take advan­tage of addi­tional cores and I would argue it is not being done fast enough. This is why we have a ceil­ing hov­er­ing around the 3 GHz mark for proces­sors today but we now have dual-quad core CPUs. The tech­ni­cal aspects of sil­i­con design is beyond the scope of this post, but the fact remains that tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tions forced chip mak­ers to expand the num­ber of cores in their prod­ucts and not a demand from soft­ware mak­ers to increase mul­ti­task­ing capability.

Finally, Emery writes,

The rea­son­ing that humans ‘can’t mul­ti­task’ is at best a weak excuse for Apple’s fail­ure to explore a func­tion­al­ity that should have been high up their list….

Emery’s state­ment sums up the crux of Apple’s critic’s argu­ments. The refrain to their song is “why are they not fol­low­ing the rules?” The idea that because some­thing can be done it should be done. Apple def­i­nitely does not think this way. The choices they make about fea­tures to bring are based on adding func­tion­al­ity only when its form has matured. Copy-and-Paste on the iPhone is bet­ter than on any com­puter. Is it faster than a key­board short­cut? No. Is it as quick and pre­cise as select­ing text with a mouse? No. Is it com­pletely nat­ural and obvi­ous to the user? Yes. And at Apple, nat­ural always trumps pow­er­ful. That’s what they meant by “The Com­puter for the rest of us.”

Recently, I read a post by Joe Wilcox ask­ing for mercy from Apple fan­boys after being wrong about the iPad. He described the advan­tage of the iPad to be its “immer­sive” expe­ri­ence. This is an excel­lent adjec­tive to sum­ma­rize the iPad design­ers’ pri­or­i­ties. Mul­ti­task­ing, with its win­dows and processes, noti­fi­ca­tions and alarms, updates and warn­ings, and dis­trac­tions after dis­trac­tions, is not immer­sive. Being immersed in any­thing is a rare expe­ri­ence today. I’ve paid to see movies in the­aters that I could have eas­ily watched at home. I cham­pion the Kin­dle for its sin­gu­lar­ity of pur­pose. And I find the iOS’s “lim­i­ta­tions” to be a fair call for restraint in a world of excess. Bring on the immersion.

Supply & Demand

Soul­ver. A Cal­cu­la­tor and a Spread­sheet rolled into one. But Easier.

• Soul­ver for Mac: $24.99
• Soul­ver for iPhone: $2.99
• Soul­ver for iPad: $5.99

I would argue that the App Store may reject Apps base on Apple’s con­tent dis­cre­tion, but I reject Mac appli­ca­tions based on my mon­e­tary discretion.

Living with the iPad

I finally got my hands on one this past Sat­ur­day around noon. My first expe­ri­ence was a bit of a dis­ap­point­ment from two dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives. Allow me to elaborate.

The Apple “genius” offered to help me setup the iPad “for my email and mobileme.” I politely declined, know­ing I could accom­plish this myself. What I did not real­ize was that the iPad needs to sync to iTunes before it will even launch. This meant I could not play with it for sev­eral hours while I returned to my par­ents house from Cincin­nati. It also meant that Apple still views the iPad as a sup­ple­men­tal device, and not a full fledged computer.

The iPad is every­thing that every­one has been writ­ing about it. It is pure soft­ware and right now there are a hand­ful of incred­i­ble soft­ware expe­ri­ences and a boat load of mediocre ones. This will con­tinue to change, and rapidly. Future iPads will get even thin­ner, have more bat­tery life (though this first gen­er­a­tion is already extremely impres­sive), and per­haps some new hard­ware fea­tures. But over­all, this is it. This is the new par­a­digm for com­put­ing. Tab­ula Rosa for devel­op­ers and design­ers. It is time to sketch out the future.

“Elevators not Airplanes”

Many blog­gers have been search­ing for the right metaphor to explain why the iPad will be transformative.

Ed Funka­tron writes in his post, “We’re the Stu­pid Ones” (via John Gru­ber at dar​ing​fire​ball​.net):

When folks need an ele­va­tor, we should give them an ele­va­tor, not an air­plane. We’ve been giv­ing them air­planes for 30 years, and then laugh­ing at them for being too stu­pid to fly them right.

What I love about this metaphor (espe­cially com­pared with the manual/automatic car metaphor) is the sep­a­ra­tion of tasks. Both ele­va­tors and air­planes are nec­es­sary. We need planes for the big leaps (trav­el­ing cross coun­try) just like we need com­put­ers for the long tasks (pro­gram­ming appli­ca­tions). But unless you are George Clooney in Up in the Air, you need an ele­va­tor far more often than an air­plane. How often do you only need to check email, browse the web, or con­sume media? Still feel like main­tain­ing that air­plane just for those tasks?

Dur­ing a recent dis­cus­sion of the iPad my friend asked why the device does not con­tain a USB port or an SD card slot. Inter­est­ingly, Apple recently added an SD card slot to their iMacs and Mac­book Pros. I do not think this is coin­ci­den­tal. Steve Jobs has resisted addi­tional ports for a long time. Jobs even opposed a front acces­si­ble USB port on the Mac Pro, a machine designed for pro­fes­sion­als. I believe that Apple has come around to the fact that com­put­ers are already too com­pli­cated. The dif­fer­ence between adding one extra SD slot or front USB port to a machine rid­dled with ports is miniscule.

Com­pare this with adding a USB port or SD card slot to an iPad. That’s a big increase. Sud­denly, a user is faced with triple the pos­si­bil­i­ties when plug­ging some­thing into the device. Instead of cer­tainty (“the iPad goes into this cra­dle”) they face deci­sions (“I think the iPad uses his slot for cam­eras and this one for key­boards”). To many of us, this seems rea­son­able. But to those who find com­put­ers need­lessly con­fus­ing, we are only con­tin­u­ing to insist on unnec­es­sary com­plex­ity. Why not just give them an elevator?

I Hate (Today’s) Video Chat

The crit­i­cism of the iPad’s lack of a front-facing cam­era for video chat­ting is wide­spread. A sim­i­lar level of dis­ap­point­ment was felt last sum­mer when the iPhone 3GS debuted with­out a front-facing cam­era as well, even though rumors and “leaked” adver­tise­ments sug­gested the oppo­site. These are sur­pris­ing since Apple was the first com­pany to stan­dard­ize Video Chat­ting cam­eras across their prod­uct line with no option to opt-out. Apple did a sim­i­lar move on their lat­est iMac update by includ­ing a wire­less mouse and key­board on all mod­els with­out an option of sav­ing money by going back to a wired version.

The next iPhone may very well come with a front-facing cam­era, but I hope it does not. Instead, my dreams lie with an exper­i­men­tal tech­nol­ogy never before included in a con­sumer product.

This patent from 2007 sug­gests a way of embed­ding a cam­era between the pix­els of an LCD such that the whole screen looks back at you. On one level this may appear dis­turb­ing, rem­i­nis­cent of the Niet­zsche quote, “If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” Apple would need to coun­ter­act this with clear indi­ca­tions that the screen is cur­rently in cam­era mode, such as a hard­wired light-ring sur­round­ing the bezel that would be on when­ever the cam­era was pow­ered. Apple hard­wired the green light in the iMac and Mac­book cam­eras so there is no way to hack the cam­era to keep the light off while record­ing (though one could poten­tially cover the LED phys­i­cally). The trade-off to such a “Big Brother” tech­nol­ogy would be the ful­fill­ment of Video Chatting’s ini­tal goal: recre­at­ing face-to-face conversation.

The over­whelm­ing dif­fer­ence between speak­ing to some­one in per­son and speak­ing to them on cam­era is the abil­ity to look directly into their eyes while con­vers­ing. This is how all ani­mals com­mu­ni­cate, though it can be viewed as a threat if main­tained. Some­times, depend­ing on the loca­tion of the video win­dow and cam­era, the illu­sion of eye-to-eye con­tact can be cre­ated, but it is only an illu­sion. Iron­i­cally, this would be more likely to occur on a small device such as an iPhone since the rel­a­tive dis­tance between the image of the speaker and the cam­era would be smaller than on a larger device such as an iMac or future iPad. Yet, another prob­lem lingers…

The deci­sion to have a mir­rored video within iChat and Skype Video Chat­ting win­dows by default is a mis­take. It is only nec­es­sary to ensure you head is within the line of sight of the cam­era. Instead, it is a con­stant dis­trac­tion dur­ing con­ver­sa­tion. Imag­ine hold­ing up a mir­ror when speak­ing to a per­son face-to-face in order to view your own facial expres­sions through­out the con­ver­sa­tion. This is anal­o­gous to the mir­ror win­dow. I pro­pose a sys­tem where visual cues would let you know when you are drift­ing out of frame. Per­haps a sil­hou­ette that would appear super­im­posed over the video win­dow once more than 25% of your face left the frame. Other ideas include arrows or audio cues. Unfor­tu­nately, remov­ing the mir­ror win­dow can­not be done with­out a rad­i­cal new Video Chat­ting frame­work, such as a “See­ing Screen.” With these changes Video Chat­ting could achieve its great ini­tial promise.

Windows Phone 7 — Where to Begin?

Microsoft has rad­i­cally shifted direc­tions of their mobile OS with Win­dows Phone 7. Live “Tiles” dis­play infor­ma­tion that lead to dynamic menus. To see what this means in action, try out the demo. How many ways can this go wrong?

First, every time I see “Win­dows Live” sta­tus mes­sages through­out the OS I remem­ber that no one uses Win­dows Live, espe­cially for Social Net­work­ing. Microsoft addresses some of the prob­lems of this bla­tant push to their own plat­form by also includ­ing built-in Face­book inte­gra­tion. This means the face­book icon lives on the same screen as the Out­look tile. That’s like see­ing your boss in a Hawai­ian shirt on casual Fri­day. It just doesn’t feel right…

Sec­ond, the Win­dows Mobile 6 had one thing going for it. That thing was cus­tomiza­tion. Phone man­u­fac­tur­ers could cre­ate their own look with min­i­mal effort and help to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves among the com­pe­ti­tion. Win­dows Phone 7 (will that name ever sound right?) has zero cus­tomiza­tion options. All Win­dows Phone 7 Phones (see what I mean?) will have the same odd blue tiles against a black back­ground. As a friend told me years ago, wear­ing black and blue makes one look like a bruise. Microsoft’s last mobile OS sure got beat up the last three years (hardy, har har…), but is the solu­tion leav­ing all aes­thetic deci­sions to Microsoft? Just like Play­For­Sure, Microsoft will move from pro­vid­ing a prod­uct for other OEMs to build­ing their own hard­ware, all as a reac­tionary move against Apple’s suc­cess. And how well did that work against the iPod? (Zune mar­ket share)

I am not only inter­ested in bash­ing Microsoft. They fell vic­tim to what all suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies fall vic­tim t0—avoiding risk. After watch­ing their mar­ket share decline with the rise of the Black­berry, the iPhone, and even Palm (who had for­merly been con­vert­ing to Win­dows Mobile on their Treo line), MSFT is mak­ing the rash move of switch­ing busi­ness mod­els to fol­low Apple, switch­ing OS con­cepts to fol­low Palm’s webOS, and mod­el­ing their phone on a prod­uct with such a bad his­tory it is already a punch­line, the Zune.

Oh, and they’re not rolling out until Octo­ber. Let’s see if any­one else has updates before then…

The iPad is Cheap

Apple’s deci­sion to begin pric­ing the iPad at $499 for the basic model at launch is the most impor­tant “fea­ture” of this new prod­uct cat­e­gory. Phil Schiller even says so in their intro­duc­tory video.

Apple has never priced their prod­ucts so low at intro­duc­tion since their rabid fan base has been will­ing to spend more than the aver­age con­sumer at launch for the priv­i­lege of being the “first to own.” The iPhone launched at $599 in 2007 for the basic model. Just 68 days later, Apple dropped the price to $399 and in response to wide­spread crit­i­cism gave their ini­tial cus­tomers a $100 gift cer­tifi­cate for Apple prod­ucts.

Today, a con­sumer can pur­chase an “iPhone” (3G model instead of 3GS) for just $99 with con­tract. This is as low a price they can rea­son­ably offer with­out devalu­ing their own prod­uct. An iPod Touch begins at just $199 and includes the lat­est iPhone-level proces­sor and 8 gigs of mem­ory; though the iPod Touch is mem­o­rably still miss­ing a camera.

Apple is also offer­ing the addi­tion of a 3G chipset for an extra $130 for any given iPad model. This strikes me as unusual—why such an odd amount? I esti­mate that the hard­ware itself makes up $30 of the price. The extra $100 may be a sub­sidy to Apple or even to AT&T for offer­ing contract-free data plans. Though these data plans have now intro­duced tiered-pricing, a first for Apple.

The pub­lic seems to be ignor­ing what an excel­lent price this is for such a capa­ble prod­uct. First, we have the story that the esti­mated com­po­nent cost (which may be grossly inac­cu­rate) is only $219.35. This ignores the point of the entire prod­uct: soft­ware and design. The costs of Apple’s R&D and soft­ware writ­ing can never be fully cal­cu­lated. Addi­tion­ally, as I have com­mented, this is a prod­uct that very well may start replac­ing note­book pur­chases. Apple is essen­tially attempt­ing to largely replace one prod­uct line with a cheaper one in an effort to sim­plify and improve com­put­ing. Some of been annoyed by Apple’s increased pric­ing for more mem­ory. It costs the same $100 to dou­ble the mem­ory from 16 gigs to 32 gigs and then to dou­ble again to 64 gigs. This essen­tially means that the higher priced mod­els are help­ing to sub­si­dize the cost of the low­est priced model. In this sense, the $499 model is the best value.

Stop com­par­ing the iPad’s price to the Kin­dle ($259) or some net­books. It is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent prod­uct. The ques­tion is are you will­ing to spend $499 to have another Inter­net surf­ing and Media con­sum­ing device around the house. The value of the prod­uct will only go up as devel­op­ers come up with new and inno­v­a­tive ways to use that giant multi-touch screen. Just as Kin­dle users enjoy dis­counted prices on ebooks (though this is fad­ing, see my post “eBook Price Wars”), iPad users will start to receive dis­counts on mag­a­zines and peri­od­i­cals. This is why Apple went from deny­ing iPhone users third-party apps for over a year after its intro­duc­tion to high­light­ing the var­ied uses of iPhone apps in their ubiq­ui­tous mar­ket­ing cam­paign “There’s an App for That.” Value-Adding Apps keep expand­ing the cus­tomer base. Maybe you will not pay $499 for a web surf­ing screen, but you will pay for the best cook­book, home remote, board game sim­u­la­tor, and dig­i­tal pic­ture frame on the mar­ket. The App Store per­son­al­izes the device until its value exceeds its cost. I sus­pect this will hap­pen much more quickly than any­one is cur­rently predicting.

Google Buzz is Bust

Com­pany cul­ture is a tricky ani­mal to tame. Some­times a ten­ant of an organization’s phi­los­o­phy is so fun­da­men­tal to its very exis­tence that non-believers need not apply. For exam­ple, all Teach For Amer­ica corps mem­ber believe that edu­ca­tional inequal­ity is solv­able. Their stren­u­ous inter­view process ensures this fact. In tech­nol­ogy, Apple employ­ees must adhere to the belief that com­put­ers work best when one com­pany con­trols the design of both hard­ware and soft­ware. And for some­one at Google, the core con­vic­tion is infor­ma­tion should be open and accessible.

Unfor­tu­nately, a whole bunch of peo­ple disagree.

When I talk about Google I alway com­ment on their ambi­tion. They were not just inter­ested in mak­ing a great search engine (some­thing that did not exist back in the days of Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, etc). They are obsessed with mak­ing all infor­ma­tion avail­able to all peo­ple, all the time. Their adop­tion of the motto, “Don’t be Evil,” has gone from a cutesy joke to a legit­i­mate con­cern. And because of their com­pany cul­ture, no one seems to be fight­ing in the inter­est of pri­vacy. This is a com­pany of nearly 20,000 peo­ple. And yet, no one seemed to real­ize that mov­ing 176 mil­lion gmail users to a new social net­work­ing plat­form with­out per­mis­sion would be a bad idea.

Google always saw gmail as an open email sys­tem. Emails are read, by com­puter, to tar­get adver­tise­ment. Inside the Google­plex, pri­vacy never existed.

Gmail users are over­whelm­ing igno­rant of this. Another large per­cent­age chooses not to think about it. And a small num­ber are legit­i­mately con­cerned, but believe the advan­tages out­weigh the lack of privacy.

Well this week, that small per­cent­age is going way up. The emperor has no clothes. With Google Buzz, Google may intro­duce your mis­tress to your wife, your friends to your employer, or your jour­nal­is­tic sources to the world. Of course, Google is now work­ing to cor­rect this with addi­tional pri­vacy con­trols and the rev­o­lu­tion­ary option to turn the whole thing off. This mis­take may be par­tially cor­rected, but Google has clearly demon­strated that they do not take pri­vacy seri­ously. And in many ways, this should not come as a sur­prise. The ques­tion remains, how far are we will­ing to go? And what options remain for those who think we have already gone too far? We may be left with none except Google’s Opt-Out Vil­lage.

eBook Price Wars

I read with sad­ness this piece in the New York Times: “The Cost of eBooks Will Be Going Up.”

With the intro­duc­tion of the iPad, Steve Jobs has bro­ken the near-monopoly Ama­zon had on the ebook indus­try with the Kin­dle. When Walt Moss­berg, one of the most major tech jour­nal­ist in the coun­try at the Wall Street Jour­nal (though gen­er­ally clue­less), asked him about prices of ebooks in the iBook store, Jobs replied they would be on par with Amazon’s Kin­dle Store. What he neglected to men­tion was that Amazon’s ubiq­ui­tous $9.99 ebook price had begun to col­lapse. Yes, Apple will offer the same price—$14.99.

This all comes down to fear. The pub­lish­ing indus­try is fright­ened to death that they will see mas­sive profit defla­tion as eRead­ers take off. And unlike the fear prop­a­gated by Fox News, they should be.

As Upton Sin­clair said, “It is dif­fi­cult to get a man to under­stand some­thing when his job depends on not understanding it.”

Let’s take a quote from the New York Times piece:

“There are peo­ple who don’t always under­stand what goes into an author writ­ing and an edi­tor edit­ing and a pub­lish­ing house with hun­dreds of men and women work­ing on these books,” said Mark Gom­pertz, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing at Simon & Schus­ter. “If you want some­thing that has no qual­ity to it, fine, but we’re out to bring out things of qual­ity, regard­less of what type of book it is.”

Notice the first part of that list? An author, an edi­tor, oh, and sev­eral hun­dred oth­ers to bring a book to mar­ket. This is no longer the case with ebooks. An author and an edi­tor can bring a man­u­script to Ama­zon or Apple and have it pub­lished imme­di­ately, keep­ing 70% of the prof­its. Of course, there are many legit­i­mate parts of a pub­lish­ing com­pany such as mar­ket­ing, that would still be ben­e­fi­cial in this sce­nario, but the major­ity of those other hun­dreds of peo­ple are sim­ply no longer nec­es­sary. It’s like try­ing to find work for the monks after the print­ing press was invented.…

I believe the pub­lish­ing indus­try will be squeezed from two oppos­ing fronts. First, main­stream authors who com­plete their con­tracts will move to direct dis­tri­b­u­tion with Apple and Ama­zon. They will make far more money per title sell­ing directly, even at $9.99. On the oppo­site end of the spec­trum, new authors who can­not find a home among the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers (espe­cially as they become more con­ser­v­a­tive in their risk-taking which will inevitably hap­pen with declin­ing prof­its) will self-publish to ebook stores as well. Imag­ine if Stephanie Mey­ers, the author of the Twi­light nov­els, had lived in a world with this as an option? I read she received many rejec­tion notices before being offered a book deal. Why fight the power when you can make your own path?

iPad: Simplify, Simplify

Our life is frit­tered away by detail. Sim­plify, simplify.

Henry David Thoreau — US Tran­scen­den­tal­ist Author (1817 — 1862)

Since the intro­duc­tion of the iPad I have been engaged in con­stant debates on what it will mean for the com­puter indus­try, Apple, and the aver­age per­son. I pre­dict the iPad will dra­mat­i­cally change the for­tunes of all three. In response, I have received nearly uni­ver­sal skep­ti­cism and cyn­i­cism. “Every­thing is Amaz­ing and No One is Happy.”

My core belief is that com­put­ers need to get much more intu­itive in the future. Not just in the ways we have made Win­dows and OS X “more intu­itive” over time, but an order of mag­ni­tude sim­pler. I desire a future where we do not inter­act with com­put­ers in mixed metaphors and hobbled-together solutions—a future where we find a way of inter­act­ing that is as nat­ural as manip­u­lat­ing the phys­i­cal world. Did the tools in your kitchen come with instruc­tions? Is your fur­ni­ture end­lessly cus­tomiz­able? Or do they just work with­out mod­i­fi­ca­tion and tutorials?

Think of how com­put­ers work in your vision of the future, or Hollywood’s vision for that mat­ter. Is any­one con­sult­ing help menus in the movies? Is an IT guy called in so Luke Sky­walker can see a com­puter model of the Death Star? (And I know Star Wars is set a Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away)

A mod­ern com­puter has much more power than the aver­age user needs. And with that power we have added unnec­es­sary com­plex­ity. For exam­ple, com­pare installing soft­ware on a com­puter with installing soft­ware on an iPad.

A quick descrip­tion of the process on a Mac:

First, search the web for a soft­ware solu­tion to your needs. Con­sult reviews and friends. Pur­chase soft­ware by enter­ing credit card infor­ma­tion in unknown web­site and then pay exor­bi­tant prices because of low unit sales. Down­load disk image of soft­ware. Retrieve ser­ial num­ber from email sent to per­sonal email address (now stored by the devel­oper). Copy app file from disk image to App folder. Eject disk image. Delete disk image. Enter ser­ial from email. Use soft­ware. Open soft­ware occa­sion­ally to search for updates and often repeat down­load pro­ce­dure to keep up-to-date. Repeat.

Com­pare this to pur­chas­ing through iPhone/iPad App Store:

Browse through the App Store. Read stan­dard­ized reviews and descrip­tions. Buy with sin­gle stored credit card by click­ing “Pur­chase” and enter­ing iTunes password.

Which model is the future? Why should we force every­one to adapt to their tools? These devices have been main­stream for over two decades and yet the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion is still extremely con­fused by them.  They want some­thing dif­fer­ent. They hope­fully are will­ing to give up all the options and con­trol of a com­puter for some­thing that just works. Stop think­ing of the lim­i­ta­tions of the iPad as a loss. They are a trade-off. And a very delib­er­ate one at that.

I was dis­cussing the iPad with a friend and I said I wanted a com­puter that stops ask­ing for so much atten­tion. One that I do not need to fid­dle with and cus­tomize and clean and sort and pro­cras­ti­nate and mul­ti­task. He responded, “but you love that stuff.” I would say that a car guy loves to tin­ker but he also loves to just drive without worry.

My father gave up on the Mac after a cou­ple months. He won’t let me upgrade his machine to Win­dows 7 so he suf­fers with Vista and a tro­jan just because he doesn’t want to backup and man­age his stuff. Yet, he is a pas­sion­ate iPhone user. He loves that thing. Maybe he can also love an iPad.

The press seems so con­fused by the iPad. They ask, “why does it not do Flash?” “Where is mul­ti­task­ing?” “Why did Apple develop iWork for it?” “Why would any­one buy this thing?”

It does not do Flash because Flash needs to be removed in favor of open source stream­ing meth­ods. It does not mul­ti­task because mul­ti­task­ing is a myth. Apple devel­oped iWork for the iPad to demon­strate that creation-based soft­ware was pos­si­ble on the device and not just media con­sump­tion. And peo­ple will buy it because Apple has designed the most sophis­ti­cated and stream­lined computer ever.

Peo­ple are still con­fused because when Steve Jobs demoed the iPhone, he acted like these design deci­sions were based solely on power-consumption and CPU cycles. “Flash and mul­ti­task­ing don’t make sense on a mobile device.” “The screen is too small for mul­ti­task­ing.” “We can­not man­age the bat­tery with back­ground apps.”

This was all lies.

Steve Jobs is feed­ing us our med­i­cine with a spoon­ful of sugar. Remem­ber, this is the com­pany that dropped inter­nal floppy disk dri­ves in 1998, a half-decade before Dell. Com­pared to that rel­a­tively minor sac­ri­fice for the greater good, the iPad is ask­ing for a reli­gious conversion.

The whole device is pred­i­cated on rad­i­cal beliefs about how we should har­ness tech­nol­ogy. I once read about a Bud­dhist monk’s take on med­i­ta­tion in every­day life. He said, “when sweep­ing the floor, sweep the floor.” This is how one will be forced to inter­act with the iPad. You get one screen with­out dis­trac­tion. Writ­ing Apps have sprung up for Mac promis­ing to remove dis­trac­tion such as Write­Room and OmmWriter. On the iPad, every App will demand your full atten­tion and in return you will receive its full potential.

Steve Jobs had a vision for com­put­ers in 1984. It failed. He found him­self in the stun­ning sit­u­a­tion of hav­ing a sec­ond chance. This is his attempt. I hope it works.