Slightly odd article from the BBC, with Rory Cellan-Jones asking if Apple is now winning too often in the tech industry. It’s safe to say Apple’s doing rather well of late, but it’s easy to forget that it is a marginal player in desktop and notebook computers (even if its savvy business methods ensure high profitability) and has a scrap on its hands regarding smartphones; only in tablets does Apple look to have an iPod-style lead as its rivals flounder and find it nigh-on impossible to beat so-called ‘rip-off Apple’ on pricing.
Nonetheless, Cellan-Jones asks if Apple’s success is now destroying the industry. He notes Google’s patent land-grab and suggests Apple won’t be worried about that; he mentions HP’s tablet fire-sale and PC spin-off, and offers this:
Apple executives – like the England cricket team – must be asking themselves “where did it all go so right?”
Strange quote there. It’s not like success has come as a surprise to Apple in the spaces it’s doing well in.
It’s only 18 months since Steve Jobs told us that the iPad was part of a revolution that would take us beyond the PC – and now HP is not only agreeing, it’s throwing in the towel.
In particular, the axing of its Touchpad tablet computer, just weeks after a hugely hyped launch, is not only a humiliating and expensive setback for HP, it threatens to sap the confidence of consumers in all rivals to Apple’s device.
I’m not sure most casual buyers will distinguish between WebOS or Blackberry or Android tablets, seeing them all as just potential iPad alternatives.
This neatly sums up the problem with Apple’s rivals—they don’t offer anything new. None of Apple’s rivals has sought to be like Apple and be truly disruptive. With the iPad, Apple didn’t look at what existed and rip off the leading product; instead, it created an entirely new market.
So if a product like the Touchpad can die within weeks who’s going to want to invest in any of the other iPad killers?
Here’s where Cellan-Jones starts to slide into the gravel trap. No-one has yet invested in any kind of ‘iPad killer’, because no-one has done anything other than look at Apple’s product and try to create some kind of facsimile. Every tablet on the market right now tries as much as possible to look like an iPad and then offers some feature or other that Apple deemed unnecessary in the tablet space. Thus, you have the ‘iPad with Flash’ and the ‘iPad with a USB port’; what you don’t have is any real innovation, nor anything that will do to the iPad what the iPad did to desktop and notebook computing.
In short: you don’t create an iPad killer by ripping off the iPad; you create an iPad killer by doing something totally amazing that Apple itself hasn’t thought of yet but that makes the iPad look as archaic as the iPad made most notebooks look.
Cellan-Jones then says the one tablet that could give the iPad a scrap is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, but there’s a problem:
Apple is in the middle of a legal battle in a German court over the alleged similarities between the Tab and the iPad, which saw Samsung’s device temporarily banned from most European countries.
The ban has been lifted, outside Germany at least, but the whole affair has not helped market the tablet.
Who will go out and buy an iPad rival if all they are hearing is that it’s a copy of the original, and no cheaper?
Well, quite. And here’s the thing: it more or less is a copy of the original, and no cheaper.
Whatever the merits of Apple’s case may be, patent and intellectual property disputes now appear to be harming the interests of consumers and innovators in the computing industry.
SCREEEEE! THUNK! And there’s Cellan-Jones, in the wall, with a crumpled bumper. I fail to see how Apple is harming the interests of consumers by blocking a device that wholeheartedly ripped it off, allegedly to the point of intentional confusion. As for harming the interests of innovators… really? Let’s take a look at that, courtesy of SockRolid at MacRumors:
Yeah, just feel the innovation. (Additional handy images: Daring Fireball’s shot of a pre-iPhone Android device, which didn’t at all look like a BlackBerry, and @Dooderoo’s ‘before and after’ of Samsung tablets.)
Steve Jobs and his company have enjoyed win after win over the last couple of years.
But many consumers – as well as rivals – may be hoping that on Thursday when the German court rules again on the copycat case, Apple suffers a rare defeat.
Not me. I’m sick of companies just riffing off other companies and it needs to stop. Microsoft of all companies has shown that you can innovate in the touchscreen space (although, sadly, Ballmer’s ‘Windows everywhere’ idiocy has stopped Windows Phone already appearing on tablet devices; instead, we’re told to wait for the Frankenstein’s monster that will be Windows 8—neither optimised touchscreen environment nor traditional desktop computing OS, despite trying to be both).
I don’t believe the Apple device designs were ‘obvious’, otherwise someone else would have got there around the same time, not many months later; and I also believe that if you’re going to copy rather than innovate, you’ve only yourself to blame if you, like Samsung, go as far as to rip off the bloody icons of your rival’s system.
