On selling customer experiences

I was looking at how much of a dent an iPad will put in my wallet when I noticed the mandatory field reminder on Apple.com's shopping cart. Then I came to this realization, Apple isn't a mobile device's company, nor a computer company, its a customer experience company. So much time is spent on just tweaking and perfecting the whole cycle. From the moment you browse their online store or their mortar-and-brick store, to the point you make your purchase, including the point when you receive your product, unwrap it - perhaps even record that joyous moment - and then finally start using it and then officially become a fan boy or girl. This happened to me in 2003/2004 when I purchased my first Mac, a PPC PowerBook G4.

Sorry, I went on a tangent there. Anyway, they are a customer experience company. The developers who built this form did not have to do it the way they did. This sick tooltip reminding you of the mandatory fields could just have been a red asterisk. However, because they are a customer experience company, they didn't do what every average Jack and Jill developer would have. As simple a page it is - a personal info page - it most definitely went through multiple iterations before it reached its current state.

Another example, lets say you don't look like a pirate but have a speech impediment. I'm a nice guy. If you seem like a nice person too, I'm going to do my best to understand you. However, that doesn't apply to your website or application. Don't make your product seem like it has a speech impediment - even if it looks great. Its just going to be awkward.

Learn from Apple guys, they don't have to do their site the way they do, they don't have to finnish their products the way they do, they don't have to meticulously design the packaging inside and out. But they do. And because they do, they're in the business of selling customer experiences. That is a very profitable business, and that is why Apple's stock P/E is twice that of Microsoft's.

Here's a great TED talk on "People don't buy what you do, they buy WHY you do it":

Crash 'n' Burn: The 11th hour for Flash

Adobe's rhetoric continues after the curve ball Apple threw. The whining continues with this post: On Adobe, Flash CS5 and iPhone Applications.

Sadly, the whining doesn't change anything, and Adobe's argument would have been more valid if they didn't trying to lock developers into Flash/Flex and if it -Flash- were really open. Also, I think Adobe's Flash/Flex tools favor developing using Cold Fusion on the server side... you can use other server-side technologies however I believe the tools "play" better with Cold Fusion.

Apple's decision makes 100% business sense to me. They're advocating for their own platform, or open standards. Just like Adobe advocates for their own platforms, or open standards. What's wrong with that?

Flash filled a void in the 90s, but where is that void today? Is it even still needed? Yes its far superior technology, but its a closed technology. And to think that Android will succeed because it has Flash is just absurd. Android could be the iPhone's real challenger ONLY because it is open. The above post also seems to confuse "open" with "cross-platform". They're very different. Flash is cross-platform because its not open.

Flash needs something different right now, we don't need Flash to deliver rich content online anymore. We don't need flash to deliver sexy fonts. We don't need Flash to scroll and fade text. Soon we won't need Flash to play video - my Youtube embed below is still in Flash- . We don't need navigation built in Flash. So much stuff we needed Flash for (right or wrong) , that are just not needed today.

On to Flex, Flash's younger cousin. We - the majority - don't need that as well. Slowly but surely applications will move to the web. They may have some Flash components that could now just be as easily done in HTML5 or even HTML and some nifty JavaScript. Where I can see Flex fitting, is for these extremely specialized software, such as CAD or medical imaging. Such software is expensive and time-consuming to write, and would be a pain to translate into different operating systems. Such software also comes with heavy visualization, so its a good fit with Flash. Maybe thats where Flash will head, who knows? But there is definitely hardly any room today for Flash on the web.

This song is dedicated to Adobe Flash, I don't know who your savior will be, but you really need one right now...bad.

iPad: Same Content, Different Form

After I got past the unfortunate branding fiasco of the latest and greatest from Apple, I can't wait to first get my hands on one (like millions of others) and then maybe even owning one (like millions of others will).

There are many pros and cons of this new device, just like there were many pros and cons of the first iPhone. When the first iPhone came out, all I thought back then was "Why?!" However, soon I realized that "because its Apple", and over the years - after the old colourful clamshell laptops were discontinued and the new generation PowerBooks came out, followed by the MacBooks - we became used to the idea that the latest and greatest will come first from Apple.

Back to these iPaddies...first I think they are a completely different breed of device, different from the Kindles. As far as I know, I can't have my pictures on a Kindle, nor can I browse the Internet, listen to music, play games, send/receive e-mails and pretty much everything else you can do on your iPhone except make phone calls. Sure you may ask yourself "So what? I can do that on my laptop" but there is a difference. Laptops are much bigger, heavier, and do far more than you may want to do lying on the couch.

The Kindle is an eBook/eNewspaper/blog reader; thats about it. If you have an iPhone, can you deny spending hours just fiddling around with it, browsing, reading, tweeting, listening to music, etc. ? Probably not. Now you can do the same but on a bigger screen, so what is the reason behind this public outcry?

Here's why I think that is. We - Apple's customers - became spoiled. We always expect Apple to release the greatest and latest, and we expect that to blow our minds away. For the most part, the majority seem to be undecided and equally amazed as frustrated due to the limitations. People expected it to be a full fledged tablet/laptop, but it couldn't have been. All the tablet PCs before it have so far failed. Why should Apple attempt going down that path? On top of that history, why should Apple create a product that would cannibalize their MacBook sales? Steve's diagram clearly set the expectation, it will be better than an iPhone without being an iPhone, but it also won't be a MacBook. Its a digital content reader.

The fact is, its just a new medium for content delivery, and it may be the holy grail for the newspaper industry. People don't pay for content, you can't own the content, but you can own the medium you purchased it on. Take the Davinci Code for example. I bought the book, I watched the movie, and I bought the DVD - others may have also bought the eBook. Each form has its benefits, and each form has its 'expiry date'. After reading the book once, I probably won't read it again, but what if I wanted to refer to a chapter later, how do I do that? how do I find it? Will I have the book on me to refer to that chapter?

You have a dinner party at home, and you want to share some photos with your guests. Either you load them up on your computer, or you plug your camera into your TV and show them. The content is exactly the same, the form is different. Showing them on your big screen is more convenient, but you need to find that silly cord first - which you can never find when you need it. You can huddle around your computer or laptop, but thats less convenient, and even less convenient is passing or rotating that laptop around. Oh wait, that iPad is on your coffee table. Same content. Different form.

Now we just wait, and see what happens between now and the launch. The use cases are endless, and are not just limited to content consumption. I definitely see use cases in at least education and healthcare, collaboration, and obviously entertainment. The Kindle and any other eBook reader just don't have this reach.