I must say that am not a fan of Apple’s products. But I was hoping this time that Apple’s version of a tabled PC would be my first Apple product to buy. I was disappointed this morning, rather badly.
Few years ago I tried to use an iPod as my music player. For me the only reason to go to compressed music is the ability to carry all my music collection with me all the time. I have to admit that compression with 192kbs is good enough for me and I can’t hear compression artifacts – higher bitrates are indistinguishable for my ear. Naturally I purchased the iPod classic, the 160GB model.
I was thrilled to try and see what the whole buzz around the Apple user interface and usability was all about. And I was disappointed, to put it lightly. The wheel was annoying and very impractical interface for me (try to use it in your car for example). I had to be extra careful when navigating through the menus to be able to select the option or track I wanted. After fighting the interfaces for about 2 weeks, I gave up and returned the iPod.
You might say I got bad hardware. Could be. But for that price tag you would expect a quality and well designed product.
Software support. On my Vista laptop (I am sorry Steve, I am not going to buy a Mac just for the sake of having iTunes working) iTunes was crashing, loading really slowly and I was having lots of problems uploading my audio books to the iPod. It turned out the software was assuming specific file name extensions for the audio book files, which were specific to iTunes encoded files. This is simply a nightmare for someone that is busy and doesn’t have hundreds of hours on his hands just to transfer his content on Apple’s MP3 player. Obviously, I was fighting the product again, because my content didn’t come from iTunes. I rejected the idea to look around for cracks and hacks to get around the stupidity of the product managers at Apple that decided that their product should do everything possible to force me to get my content from iTunes and iTunes only.
After my rather unpleasant experience with iPod and complete waste of time, I couldn’t understand what people liked so much about this Apple product? How was it possible to forgive all its flows?! If this was a product from Samsung, SONY or any other main stream consumer electronics supplier, it would have died quickly with tons of bad reviews from people that were frustrated and simply hated the product.
That was my first and only experience with an Apple product. Mac laptops were never appealing to me - overpriced, underpowered, limited features mediocre screen resolutions and battery life.
But this is not a reason to fire Apple’s CEO, you would say. You are just one unhappy customer. Pick any product out there and you will get haters as well as people that love it.
The reason I think Apple should fire Steve Jobs is not because I had a bad experience with one of the Apple products, but because he leads Apple to certain death. The company might be able to survive another 3-5 years by putting on the market next iPod, iPad and iPhone products, but with this attitude towards the customers, the death of Apple is inevitable.
Apple used to be ‘the other’ company. It was the rebel in the computer industry dominated by Microsoft and PC manufacturers. It was the alternative creative company, that people sympathized for it's efforts and innovative products.
But Microsoft was smart enough to recognize that being ‘closed’ and ‘in control’ is not how you should do business in the new information era of Internet world. You have to open and provide platforms to developers with very low cost of entry, if not free. Create and manage abundance, eliminate scarce.
Apple now is just the opposite. It is fighting to get control over everything you want, everything you like or everything you create. I am talking about your content (consumed and created), your applications (consumed and created) and your development and ideas.
You pay for the iPhone SDK - something you should get for free. Not only that, but Apple should feel lucky you didn’t decide to go with Android or Microsoft or any other of currently available many platforms.
You can only sell your app on Apple App Store. Something unheard of before. I can’t recall a single example when Microsoft restricted application distribution to go only trough Microsoft channels. Apple controls and decides who sells and who doesn’t. Not only that, they control what sells and what doesn’t.
You have to buy content from iTunes, or it simply won’t work properly. Also, obviously Apple has never heard about an audio encoding that is called WMA. You can’t use your iPhone to get on the Internet with your laptop. You can’t have Skype. Don’t tell me this is AT&T thing, because this is Apple/AT&T thing.
The moment you buy an Apple product, you are tied up to Apple for everything. You have to pay Apple and you have no chance of choosing another provider for content, applications or development tools or libraries for any of the Apple platforms.
This is what Steve Jobs did with Apple. Created a company that is selling hardware fronts for his online stores. These hardware toys are crippled down on purpose, to make sure no other company or content provider than iTunes (or iBooks) will be able to sell you content. It sounds good, from business prospective, but the problem is that the world has changed. And the trend is toward opening and giving the control to the mighty customer. This is what Steve Jobs doesn’t see. He hangs to a business model that was good 10 years ago, when the Internet was just starting and people were only getting information from books and libraries.
Today it is all about communicating, sharing, rating, experimenting and collaborating. People are not only consumers anymore, they are authors, critics, developers, artists and love to work together. Any company that sticks to the old dogma “build it and they will come” is doomed. Any given company can’t be smarter than the collective wisdom of its customers. They are the ones that use the products 24/7/365, in real life, not in test laboratories and artificial environments.
Tell me where is the place where I can submit my ideas or complains to Apple? Where is Apple’s version of DELL’s “Idea Storm” or Starbucks’ “My Starbucks Idea”? Well, it has a discussion board, but it is nothing like the official and nicely designed DELL and Starbucks places, dedicated to collect their users‘ desires, wisdom, experience and visions. Surprisingly (or not) if you Google “Apple idea submission” your first link is this legal page -
http://www.apple.com/legal/policies/ideas.html
Like it? This is nothing else, but a slap right in your face - the customer. It says – we are so smart, we don’t want to hear back from you how to improve our products. You will take everything we give you and that is what you want, because we are perfect and we are the only ones that can think of new ideas and new products. You are stupid and we only need to deal with you because you are in the way between your bank account and our bank account. And if you ever talk to us, remember that we become owners of what you say.
This is so XX-th century.
Steve doesn’t have the vision to lead Apple to be truly opened innovative and consumer friendly company. He makes money the old way – by restricting, controlling, owning. He moves atoms in order to move bits. That wouldn’t be so bad if Apple was open to collaborate with it’s clients.
Latest Apple product - the iPad (boy aren’t they running out of names for their products?) looks like an oversized iPod and in fact it is.
It is a closed product. Again. Of course.
- It has no SD slot or any other means to plug in external memory. Of course, otherwise people might just buy the cheapest iPad and swap SD cards with their content on it.
- It has no cell radio, so you can’t make phone calls. But it has G3??
- It doesn’t have Bluetooth A2DP stack, so you can’t listen using wireless headphones. What?!
- GPS receiver is not confirmed and was not mentioned during the presentation. Some websites say it has A-GPS, but we can’t be absolutely sure. You would think Steve Jobs wouldn’t miss such an important feature, if iPad had it. If iPad has a GPS, they would probably show maps and navigation apps, but they didn’t. But they mentioned that it has a compass? Are you serious?
- 1024x768 resolution. It can’t even play 720p content (1280x720)! This is year 2010, mind to remind you! 1080p is the standard these days for devices of such a form factor. Wake up Apple!
- No Flash support? Really? How am I supposed to browse some 80% of the current web content? Suggestions?
- No multitasking. Bummer. Deal killer for me.
I was hoping the iPad will come with a full installation of some version of the OSX. No such luck. It came with iPhone OS instead. Of course. This is the only logical step Apple would make - there are 140’000 ready for sale apps and iPhone OS is closed proprietary platform. Control, remember?
I think iPhone OS with its (unbelievable) limitations, this time will blow up right in the face of Steve Jobs. He probably thinks this is just oversized iPhone (without the phone part) and everything can be the same as on the iPhone. The problem is the form factor. The iPad will make people aware of the limitations of the iPhone. When you use a specialized device, such as a phone, you tend to forgive some of its limitations, because you know it is a phone and everything else is just extra, a bonus. With the iPad, because of it’s form factor, people will look at it as a computer. And that will be a huge problem, because it will not perform as such. It will be really bad that I can’t listen to Pandora radio and read a PDF file at the same time. And this will make people also realize how crippled their iPhone OS is.
I bet Apple wishes now their laptops run iPhone OS as well. OSX becomes a burden, something like a dead weight, because it doesn't have 140'000 apps written for that platform and thay are not on the Apple App store. Here is a thought Apple - make sure all OSX developers move their apps in the App store and make sure that that is the only distribution channel for applications for OSX! That is the Apple way!
What Steve Jobs has essentially done with his position and Apple as a company was that he became Apple. Apple is Steve Jobs. This is extremely dangerous position for a public company, because all the business and its current position depend exclusively on the decisions, vision and health of a single person. No matter how ingenious that person is, the moment anything happens to that person, the company is going to crash.
I will stop here. I hope I made my point that Steve Jobs leads Apple towards certain crisis and inevitable crash. Apple needs a new CEO that is open, willing to listen, not only to talk. A person that can tap into Apple’s customers base wisdom and use it to make Apple a company of XXI-st century.