Steve Jobs descended Mount Cupertino today to deliver Apple’s iPad to the faithful on Wednesday. And no one was praying harder for a miracle than the publishing industry.
Apple did not build the iPad for media companies but for consumers. We’re not going to buy them; they are. The device and its ilk will succeed or fail because hundreds of thousands of everyday people find it fits nicely into their lifestyles, or not.
So looking at the iPad from a consumer’s perspective, one has to wonder whether it will indeed work for more than the usual suspects – early adopters and anything-Apple folks. Dedicated as those lots are, they do not number enough. There needs to be wider acceptance, making three aspects of the original model iPad tough sells:
- No Flash support. The iPhone and iPod suffer the same handicap. Apple’s rationale is almost certainly support for iTunes video sales, denying users access to the same content on Hulu, CBS.com and similar Flash-based program sources. The collateral damage is that iPad users are also denied access to parts or all of countless other Web sites and services, making the device less than a satisfactory replacement for laptops or netbooks.
- No webcam. That means no Skype, AIM or iChat video messaging but, more importantly, no video authoring in the vein of YouTube submissions. That positions the iPad as more a consumption-oriented device than a participation device. That is a severe limitation in today’s world.
- No multitasking. I can’t explain the significance of this weakness any better than the Gizmodo piece referenced in The Wrap’s article: “Are you saying I can’t listen to Pandora while writing a document? I can’t have my Twitter app open at the same time as my browser? I can’t have AIM open at the same time as my email? Are you kidding me?”
I’d love for the iPad to succeed because I do think it has the potential to rejuvenate news media – not by providing a platform for their existing business models but by giving them something very viable to develop new business models around. That might finally get them off their duffs and lead them to also more firmly embrace mobile and other channels that they still consider only ancillary rather than mainstream.
Maybe in Version Two.