(via One Thing Well.)

Growing up as a gadget nerd in the 1990s, there was no brand as exciting as Sony. Yes, Apple made great computers, and that’s what we used. But almost everything else, I wanted from Sony.

I wasn’t even an Apple nerd in the 90s, so for me it was all Sony, all the way. The mighty have indeed fallen.

Jim Dalrymple is also not a smart phone analyst. He is also not a technology analyst. He is a professional blogger, focusing on Apple. I think he does a good job when he writes about Apple but he shows his ignorance in this post about what RIM did wrong.

Dalrymple suggests that RIM’s problem was that they didn’t ‘innovate’. This is wrong. RIM’s problem was that their product was dependent on a network for its value and they didn’t control the network. I had a BlackBerry and it was great. It was particularly great at email. You know who really cares about email? Business people. Business people live and breathe email. The BlackBerry cleaned up in that market.

You know who else really loves email? Everybody. The problem for RIM is that while business people could get BlackBerries, safe in the knowledge that the office was going to cover that data charge, consumers couldn’t. Consumers were left to fret over how much it would cost (surely too much) and what the pay off would be in additional convenience (surely not enough).

RIM tried to create consumer phones but they couldn’t get the interest of a public that had been taught to fear data charges. The original iPhone didn’t have this problem because: a) Apple negotiated a sweet deal for customers with AT&T; and b) even if you had just used your iPhone like your Nokia 6100, it at least got rid of needing to carry around an iPod and a phone.

So RIM’s problem wasn’t innovation. RIM’s problem was that it didn’t control the part of its business where the value came from.

As it is, we now live in a world where this is the reality. RIM has to beat not only that but Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Google and Microsoft. They have no hope.

Calderón said he agreed to a search after being told the police could return with a warrant, though the search turned up nothing. Apparently members of Apple’s security team also went through Calderón’s computer to look for evidence that the device had been plugged in. Those same Apple investigators—one of which was later identified as retired San Jose Police sergeant Anthony Colon—offered money for the device and even made veiled threats about contacting the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) when the search turned up nothing. “One of the officers is like, ‘Is everyone in this house an American citizen?’ They said we were all going to get into trouble,’” Calderón said.

This is an atrocious story if true.

It sounds as if Apple security and the San Francisco Police Department may have acted within the letter of the law but certainly not the spirit. Police officers should not accompany private investigators searching someone’s house unless they make clear that the persons conducting the search are not police officers.

In order to answer these questions it seems to me we need to first understand why people want these devices in the first place. It’s when we understand the tasks that someone is trying to achieve that we’re able to understand which device (or devices) is likely to fit the bill.

Let’s consider the original iPod. What do (or did) people want to do with a portable music device? It’s tempting to reply just ‘Listen to music.’ But listening to music is a deceptively simple response that masks the fact a number of different tasks need to be accomplished. I’d argue there are actually three different task people want to do when they say ‘Listen to music’:

1. manage music (both on the central repository and on the portable device);
2. transfer music between the central repository and the portable device; and
3. play music (both on the central repository and the portable device).

It’s not uncommon to refer to Apple’s products in an almost derogatory way as ‘fashionable’. But Apple’s products are first and foremost ‘usable’.¹ What made the iPod so universally popular is that (together with iTunes) it was the first, and for most of its run about the only, portable music player that did all three of the aforementioned tasks well.²

Turn now to the iPhone. What do people want to do with a smartphone? I’d argue they want to do at least seven things:

1. make and receive phone calls;
2. send and receive text messages;
3. access email;
4. use mapping software;
5. access the web;
6. play media (including photos); and
7. run apps.

When laid out like this isn’t not hard to see why Android is able to be successful in the phone space. Android is arguably as good as the iPhone (if not better in some cases)³ at the first five of those tasks. The fact that it’s not very good for media playback⁴ or running apps⁵ is not a problem for a number of Android users because it does basically what they want.⁶

So let’s turn to the iPad. What do people want to do with a tablet? I think there are four tasks:

1. access email;
2. access the web;
3. play media; and
4. run apps.

The problem is that Android tablets are good at only two of these four tasks. But the problem is worse than it may at first appear. On a phone, the importance which people attach to the tasks they’re trying to accomplish is far more pronounced. Being able to make and receive calls is not a little bit more important than being able to run apps; it is critical. On a tablet, the ability to access email is important, but it’s not that much more important than being able to play media or run apps.⁷

This is why Android can be successful as a phone but not as a tablet. It’s also why, for a serious tablet competitor to emerge, companies have to start making tablets that either do all of these tasks at least as well as the iPad or do one of these tasks so much better that it redefines the importance which people attach to that task.

Surveying the tablet landscape, it doesn’t appear as if anything that’s out there really meets that criteria. It’s also why a tablet from Amazon is the biggest threat to the iPad. Of all the companies making (or, in Amazon’s case, suspected of making) tablets, Amazon seems the one most likely to be able to produce a tablet that can play media and run apps as well as the iPad.

The core of his criticism is encapsulated in the title of the piece. Gruber believes that Microsoft fundamentally misunderstands the success of the iPad (thinking that it’s about the fact you can touch the screen when, in reality, the success comes from the fact that the OS is built from the ground up around the concept of touch). So long as Microsoft misunderstand the reason for the iPad’s success, goes the argument, it will never be able to build a worthy iPad competitor (or at least the OS for one) because any attempt will be fundamentally flawed.

I agree that Microsoft will have a problem building a worthy iPad competitor for some time to come but not because I believe Microsoft doesn’t understand what makes the iPad a success.

Microsoft’s problem is that it is the servant of two masters.

The first master is business. Business has been Microsoft’s master since the beginning. It made Microsoft rich by essentially adopting Windows and Office as de facto standards and it has stayed with it through thick and Windows Vista. Microsoft is not about to abandon it any time son

The second master is the consumer and it is new. For a long time, Microsoft was the master of the consumer. Microsoft’s dominance in the business world, ensured that PCs running Windows were all but required by most people for home use and the purchase of Microsoft software by the consumer (particularly during the Windows 95 – Windows XP era) made Microsoft a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut in the technology world.

Times have changed. Consumers now wield more power, demanding better user experiences from their software. Microsoft has responded, with varying degrees of success with the Xbox, the Zune, Windows 7 and Windows Phone. It is clearly continuing down that path with Windows 8.

The first 3 minutes of the video present an operating system that would arguably be the greatest consumer OS ever released. It looks gorgeous, inviting and usable. Not adjectives that have always been associated with Microsoft. It looks like the type of software an ordinary person could use to easily do the types of things ordinary people want to do (browse the Internet, watch movies, listen to music and sort through photos).

Everything looks great. And then Excel comes in and there’s a task bar. And then a file manager.

It is hard to believe that the same people who created the software featured in the first 3 minutes of the video don’t realise how badly these two interfaces gel together. It is obvious to anyone with two eyes pointed at the screen. So why is it there?

I believe it’s there because Microsoft knows that business needs it to be there. You can have all the live-tile-apps-sliding-in-from-the-side-flick-to-multitask gravy you want, but if the OS doesn’t run Office then forget about it. And not some touch-optimised cut-down version of Office that Gruber suggests. No, sir. Real Office.

And to be fair to Microsoft, they’re right. Business does need it to be there. Business has, well, a business built around Windows and Office. The computers its people use are tools. They don’t need to be gorgeous, inviting or usable; they need to get the job done. If you have to fight to learn how to realign margins in Word, that’s not a problem — you’re being paid to do that. And by golly, you better be able to realign those margins. There’s a suite of macros that depend on it.

It’s not just Office. While Windows might look like a barren wasteland when it comes to consumer software (with the exception of games), the number of business software titles for Windows is seemingly never-ending. It’s seemingly never-ending because there are people out there buying it and those people expect it to work; not just today, not just tomorrow, but on the computer they buy 5 − 10 years from now.

Now at this point one could just dust off one’s hands and pronounce Microsoft dead in the water. They’re no hopers, led by an embattled CEO who doesn’t understand that the landscape has moved beneath his feet.

This seems premature for two reasons. First, there are a lot of smart people at Microsoft and they should not be dismissed so quickly. Second, there is a solution to this problem and it is simple.

Establish two operating systems.

Gruber implies that Microsoft should follow Apple’s lead. It needs a touch-based OS and it needs a desktop OS. I think he’s wrong. I believe in the argument that says that the same things that tablet OSs do so well can (and will) be brought to desktop OSs. Indeed, Apple seems to believe this, too. See: Lion.

What Microsoft needs is a consumer OS and a business OS. I don’t mean the way that Windows XP came in a Professional Edition and a Home Edition that didn’t have faxing capability. I mean two fundamentally different operating systems. They can share underpinnings in the way that iOS and Mac OS X do but they would have different interfaces and be targeted at different use cases.

Whoa there, cowboy, you say. A new OS? One that’s incompatible with previous versions of Windows? Ha! It’ll never happen. People need to run all their old programs.

Do they? Do they really? You know what else doesn’t run Windows programs? Macs. Oh, sure, you can run virtual machines and have dual partitions but these are not features required by ordinary people. These are features that Apple includes to encourage businesses to switch to Macs. Ordinary people don’t care. You know why? Because they a) don’t like most of that software and wouldn’t miss it if it were gone; and b) didn’t buy most of that software and aren’t going to feel ripped off if it no longer works.

But who is going to make software for this new OS? I agree this might have been a problem in the old days. I don’t believe it is any longer. Microsoft is more than capable of making software for a new OS and if it offered a secure and simple digital distribution platform, it might finally see a vibrant home software market emerge.

Taking one OS and making it two would definitely create problems. I am minimising them but I recognise they exist. The problem for Microsoft is that if it doesn’t do that, the alternative is far worse. An operating system divided against itself cannot stand.

Ben Brooks:

You really have nothing to complain about if you regularly check-in on social services or geo-locate your tweets.

You do have something to complain about regardless of whether you check-in on social services or geo-locate your tweets. This isn’t an issue about a person voluntarily checking into a service. This is about a compulsory system that records your location and that wasn’t clearly brought to your attention by Apple.

Brooks then links to this paper saying that it’s troublesome. It’s not either-or; both can be bad.

What if HP applied this technology [Synergy] to music applications? What if your Rdio, MOG, Pandora, and even Amazon’s Cloud Player (hey, Jon’s on the board!) could interface with the native music player in webOS, giving you a familiar, understandable hub to deal with the variety of sources in your life? If HP could allow raw streams coupled with common sets of data to flow through its app (and servers), the utility to an end user would be immediately obvious.

This is probably the clearest gap that Apple has left competitors and, given Apple’s less than stellar forays into online services, possibly the only one that they would not be able to immediately match. A problem Topolsky doesn’t address is the fact that such a device would have almost zero utility outside of the United States but that’s never stopped anyone before.

Also: Love the name and the design of This Is My Next (the name Topolosky and the Engadget Refugees are using for their blog). I hope they stick with it.

Me: I want an iPad.

Them: Are you insane?

Me: No, I’m serious. I keep thinking of situations in which I’d love to use something like that.

Them: Are you insane?

Am I insane? What are the ‘situations’ I claim to want to use the iPad? Well, I’ve stopped and thought about it and, you know, I think there really is only one situation¹. It’s the situation where I want to read the Internet.

It seems meaningful to me that when we talk about the Internet we rarely talk about reading. You ‘surf’ the net, ‘visit’ a website, ‘follow’ somebody’s Twitter account and ‘friend’ a friend on Facebook. But for a medium that is, for the most part, incredibly text heavy, why not any talk of ‘reading’ a site²?

The reason we don’t use the word ‘read’ very much is because, quite frankly, the Internet sucks to read. Reading a website is typically a terrible experience. Partly this is because of the content. Most websites have nothing to say. Rather, they’re about advertising. Even when a site does have something to say (eg. newspaper), the design of the website is very much built around the idea of making you leave as quickly as possible by clicking on an ad.

Of course, it’s not entirely the fault of the sites. Our Internet reading devices, or ‘computers’, frequently let us down, too. Consider how many people read newspapers or books at a desk. Yet that’s where we expect people to read something on the Internet. With a book or a magazine or a newspaper you sit in a chair, lie down in bed or recline on a couch. But with a computer, even when that computer is a netbook, this is all but impossible. A computer is too heavy to be comfortably snuggled up with and if you’ve ever tried to read something on the web when you’re in bed, you know not to.

Which is what has me excited about the iPad. I feel like with it, the web as a platform for reading is primed to take off. And with the appropriate device, I have high hopes that we’ll see websites designed to work on it. Of course, they’ll work on your regular computer, too, but increasingly I’ll think you wonder why you would want to bother.

The only impediment I can see to this grant strategy is that we’re talking about reading. And reading’s kind of dead. Which leaves me to wonder: can Apple make reading cool?