The more I hear about the rumored Apple tablet coming later today, the more I’m convinced this isn’t going to work. Newspaper publishers and magazine publishers and book publishers are so desperate for some hope of salvation that they’ll race toward anyone who promises to throw them a life preserver, not noticing that the life preserver is made out of lead.
I could be totally wrong about this, as could everyone else who’s been posting rumors about what the Apple tablet is actually going to be and actually going to do. It could well be that the use case for the tablet is something we haven’t even imagined yet, and if so all bets are off. However, if the fundamental raison d’être for the tablet is simply to be a nice e-book/magazine/newspaper reader with network connectivity and a built-in iTunes content store, it’s DOA. Microsoft made this mistake with Blackbird, MSN, and Silverlight. AOL, Prodigy, Genie, and Compuserve all made this mistake; and it killed three of them, and is slowly killing the last. Apple made this mistake before itself with eWorld. (Remember that?)
The bottom line is that the Web wins. The Web is the content delivery platform. Paid or free, what people want is an open two-way platform based on networked hypertext. Furthermore, that platform should be as open as possible. the more DRM is imposed, the less people will use it. Even a simple registration form is enough to drive more than half of potential readers away. If the content for the iPad isn’t on the Web — if it’s in some nonstandard, closed, non-editable format like PDF that’s served only from Apple’s servers or the servers of big media over some proprietary protocol —it will fail.
Sorry Big Media. This has been tried before and failed before, many, many times. Sprinkling magic Apple pixie dust over a bad business model won’t make it profitable.
Of course, the rumors could be totally false. Use an an ePaper reader could just be one thing the tablet does, and the one that’s gotten the most ink for the same reason that half the new sitcoms in any given year are set in a TV or radio station. Media folks just love to write about themselves. The Apple tablet could have uses and abilities well beyond some sort of content distribution platform that isn’t the Web. Steve Jobs is way smarter than all the heads of the media empires put together. The Apple tablet could be an open development and distribution platform for Web content, games, portable applications, and more. It could finally give us hand writing recognition that works. It could finally give us voice-recognition that works. It could give us satellite Internet connectivity from anywhere on the planet and a pony; and if it does, I want one. I wouldn’t be too surprised if Apple manages to completely reinvent how we interact with a general purpose computer. After all, they’ve done it before. But if all the tablet offers is a slightly less locked down version of the Kindle with a color screen and a better user interface, Apple shouldn’t have bothered.
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