Walled Garden
Apple released the second iteration of the iPad last week and buyers, again, formed lines. It follows the steps of the first generation, which was dubbed the most successful launch of an electronic product. Over 15 million units were sold in 9 months and analysts believe that in 2011 another 40 million units will be shipped. Why this success?
Apple is leading the pack of the so called post PC era; and what a pack it is! Everybody is rushing to this new market, from computer makers to phone builders. RIM, HP, Motorola, Samsung, Google and Microsoft are drooling for a slice of the big juicy pie. They tried entering this niche with netbooks, they tried with tablets and now they are trying by mimicking the iPad.
All was started by Apple’s might alone. It sounds flattering but it isn’t; this type of devices are so successful because Apple did something so unique that it seemed almost counterintuitive. I am talking about their walled garden called iOS and the App Store.
It is not the thinness or the battery life or the interface and certainly not the RAM or the whatever-core processor that made this product the hit it is. It is the way it removed the tech phobia.
In one of Seth Godin’s talks, he mentions why he thinks Google became one of the most used search engines:
What happend was, geeks and nerds and early adopters and people like me, the ones who are already getting, always getting bugged by their friend on how the use the internet, like what’s that E-thing with the planet circling around mean? We sent our friends to google because we knew they weren’t going to come back and bother us later. Because if you send someone to Google, they knew what to do.
We shouted and scorned our friends and family for installing apps and not taking proper care of their computers. We found technology fun and we loved it too much. While we’re exercising our fetish, our victims started to be afraid to use their machines at full potential and, slowly, dismissed them. This is what the iPad is right now: an escape from and for us geeks.
In Apple’s garden there is no malware, crapware or administrative hell. Our friends, our children and our grandparents can install, uninstall applications without worrying about hundreds of browser invading toolbars, task managers, registry keys and 7 options to close the machine. For them, this is magic.