Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, suggested in a recent NYT interview that the iPad signals the end of the PC era. In 1984 Apple released the Macintosh, which first popularized the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) interface design pattern. Now, 26 years later the release of the iPad “signals that cheap sensors are ushering in an era of user interface innovation.” O’Reilly also points out an insightful weakness to the present iPad/iPod/iPhone ecosystem. That is, the fact that “media and application syncing across iPhone and iPad is poorly thought out.”
MobileMe, which should be Apple’s gateway drug for lock-in to Apple services, is instead sold as an add-on to a small fraction of Apple’s customer base. If Apple wants to win, they need to understand the power of network effects in Internet services. They need to sacrifice revenue for reach, taking the opportunity of their early lead to tie users ever more closely to Apple services.
While the iPad is a revolutionary product, “media and application syncing” need significant innovations to truly end the PC era. In considering my circle of friends and family a surprising number could actually use the iPad as their sole computing device. That is, all their computing needs are limited to email, web-based things, and causal gaming. For these sort of uses the iPad is a great (an inexpensive) product. However, at this point this category of user will still need a computer to use the iPad. So, imagine if they could buy an iPad, connect it wirelessly to a network and never have to actually have a computer. I imagine this is the vision for how competing Android “Pad” devices will likely work. That is, all one’s data (or at least a backup) will be in the Google cloud. And for those of us who have a whole collection of iDevices (iPhone, iPods, iMac) it would also make it much simpler to keep all of one’s data in perfect sync (and backed-up).