January 2010
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There’s much to like of course. The physical beauty and classy build quality, as in anything designed by Jonathan Ive. The shockingly low price — $499 for the basic model. The contract-free, unlocked nature of the 3G version. But there are two chief reasons for its guaranteed success.
1. It is SO SIMPLE. It is basically a highly responsive capacitative piece of glass with solid state memory and an IPS display. Just as a book is basically paper bound together in a portable form factor. The simplicity is what allows everyone, us, software developers, content providers and accessory manufacturers to pour themselves into it, to remake it according to the limits of their imagination. I’ll stop before I get too Disney.
2. It is made by Apple. I’m not being cute here. If it was made by Hewlett Packard, they wouldn’t have global control over the OS or the online retail outlets. If it was made by Google, they would have tendered out the hardware manufacture to HTC. Apple — and it is one of the reasons some people distrust or dislike them — control it all. They’ve designed the silicon, the A4 chip that runs it all, they’ve designed the batteries, they’ve overseen every detail of the commercial, technological, design and software elements. No other company on earth does that. And being Apple it hasn’t been released without (you can be sure) Steve Jobs being wholly convinced that it was ready. “Not good enough, start again. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough.” How many other CEOs say until their employees want to murder them? That’s the difference.
” —A great piece by Stephen Fry on the iPad comments. I have to agree about the simplicity. Just look at the uptake of mobile data usage & users through the launch on the iPhone. iPad About « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry
“The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I’m smoking crack. They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.”
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I really agree with this. It’s potentially an even bigger problem for digital agencies than it is for pure-play product companies - in an agency the developers are often so many layers of account service and client management away from the end customer that they can very easily lose touch with their users’ needs and problems.
The Way I Work: Paul English of Kayak (via soxiam, via superamit, via joshmohrer, via arigreenberg, via mikehudack)
(via alexjcampbell)
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Interesting take on the modern day advertising organizational structure from Mother NY:
The agency’s account people-less structure (a key Mother London trait that was passed down), Karlsson says empowers creatives, who end up getting more involved in clients’ businesses. “(Account management) is a discipline that everyone in that group shares,” says Karlsson. “It’s one little thing but it forces everyone, including creatives, to not just be in their own world.” And along with dedicated account managers, Mother eschews a top-down management style. “We think that no one else should represent anyone else’s point of view. If you have a question about something that was written you talk to the person who wrote it. That engages the people who work on an account.”
” —Creativity Agency of the Year 2009: Mother New York - Agency of the Year 2009 - Creativity Online (via seij, connerhuber, dennisdemori) (via alexjcampbell)
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