It’s the Value Added Content – Stupid

Posted by Editor on Jan 15, 2010 in Apple, Tablets

The AP via MacNewsWorld ponders the viability of the Apple tablet. They point out a lot of the previous attempts to bring a tablet to market have failed, most notably:

Bill Gates, cofounder of Apple nemesis Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), predicted repeatedly during the 2000s that tablets were about to take off. He was wrong because those tablets required people to use a pen-shaped stylus to tap buttons or write on the screen, which was attractive in workplaces where employees needed to check boxes or fill out forms. For most people, though, using a stylus for regular computer tasks such as editing a spreadsheet was more cumbersome than using a mouse and keyboard.

The AP hints at a couple of points toward the end that I wanted to expand upon a bit. What you can expect from Apple as opposed to the competition is the complete package. Microsoft again sort of embarrassed itself last week with a hastily prepared demo of an HP “slate” running Windows 7 and little else of note. The problem is that no one is excited by technology or form factor alone.

It’s the content that really gets people going and in this case Apple will have plenty using the iPhone as the example. This is the ongoing approach for new product lines that has made Steve Jobs and Apple so successful recently:

Lots of anticipation. The rumor mill has been going for the tablet since as far back as possibly 2001. See this timeline for more Apple Tablet rumors. Anticipation could not be higher as of January 2010.
Keynote unveiling. As he did with the iPhone, look for Steve Jobs himself to personally stoke the masses with technology and features no one was even expecting and make it seem more like a gift than a product unveiling.
Reality kicks in as the device ships. You finally get it in your hands, show it off to friends and then wonder what exactly you’re supposed to do with it.
New and unexpected uses and content quickly become available. This is the critical step- in the case of the iPhone it wasn’t the technology that really made things take off bigtime- it was the app store. All of the uses that you could find for the iPhone and more counting every day. This is what people will expect from the tablet.

And that content will be literally everything the iPhone can do plus much more content suited to the larger screen format. Watching HD movies, reading magazines, newspapers and ebooks– and a whole bunch of stuff you’re not expecting at all. That’s exactly what the other guys cannot deliver to save their lives. Just look at the botched Google App store with open source malware as a prime example of putting tech before value added content.

Or Apple could just fail miserably but that doesn’t seem too likely, does it?