Meditations on the Death of the Mouse

# 1 Apple’s good — but not that good. It’s just that the competition is so bad. Nokia, Microsoft , Samsung, Palm : From smartphones to Internet tablets to computers, it’s hard to believe so many big companies have blown it so badly. And they’ve committed mainly unforced errors, such as terrible user interfaces….As long as the competition acts like this, Apple will keep winning. But its success owes less to the genius of Apple than the incompetence of everyone else.

#4 Steve Jobs’s ego. I don’t care how much of a genius he is: Nobody is perfect….If and when he makes mistakes, who is going to stop him? A small but telling example: One thing keeping Apple from lots of extra iPhone sales to business users is that Mr. Jobs, for some reason, has a thing against keyboards. There’s no business reason for it. It’s a silly, unforced error.  (From: 7 Reasons Apple Shareholders Should Be Cautious, WSJ April 23rd)

Brett Arends, the author quoted above, is obviously not reading my blog.  If he had, he would not have committed such a “silly unforced error.”

Yes, Mr Job’s hates keyboards and rightly so. (I was thinking of changing my blog from “Death of the Mouse” to “Death of the Keyboard”.) What Mr Arends has failed to understand is that Apple has tapped into a latent consumer demand for a keyboard-free, mouse-free, remote-free way to interact with smart-devices. Steve  Jobs is not alone. Shigeru Miyamoto had  a similar inspiration when he created Wii (See Resistance is Futile, NYT.)

So Apple is not winning, as Mr Arends, hypothesizes, because of the incompetence of everyone else. Apple is winning because the competition is looking for its vision in the rear view mirror. They  are stuck in the keyboard-, mouse-, hyperlink-centric world of the past and present. Apple is designing for the voice centric, multi-touch, gesture-driven future.

And Brett, I think Apple’s vision extends past e-books straight into your living room.

Prediction:  Within five years, Apple SmartTVs dominate the living room much like the iPhone dominates the smartphone space today  (See The Next Big Thing).

MediaTek’s chips were a boon to shanzhai manufacturers—the hundreds of small producers that sell an eclectic mix of handsets, including knockoff Nokia Corp. models with built-in electric razors, to palm-sized “mini iPhones” that mimic the Apple Inc. best seller, to phones that look like cigarette packs. ….[and] models with louder speakers so Indian farmers can hear them ring, or others for Islamic markets with electronic compasses that point toward Mecca (WSJ 4/19)

In Galapagos and the Next Big Thing, I wrote that Steve Jobs is building his own ecosystem and has rejected the entire personal-computer-centric paradigm that has dominated the information technology industry for the past two-dozen years. At the heart of this new ecosystem is the idea that the cell phone, not the computer, is the winner for the battle for the next generation converged device (see The convergence struggle is over). This is certainly true on a global scale. As the author of Two Billion Laptops? It May Not Be Enough (NYT 4/16) points out, there are many structural issues that prevent the widespread adoption of laptops, even when you try to give them away. The cell phone on the other hand is spreading like wildfire. In one admission of defeat, even Microsoft abandoned the PC as the primary device for staying connected in rural India:

Among the infrastructure problems that the Microsoft research team saw in rural India was unreliable electrical power. It spurred another Microsoft research project that provided farmers in one district with cellphones that supplied the same information via text messaging that the farmers had obtained from PC centers. (NYT, 4/16)

So how is the competitive landscape here in the developing world reacting to this global paradigm shift. Well, the competitors are behaving as if there is no paradigm shift at all. Read between the lines of the NYT April 12th article, After iPad, Rivals Offer Variations on a Theme. Yes, they are all offering variations on a theme. The problem is that they are varying the same old theme: let’s make a lighter, smaller, thinner, more mobile computer…maybe even one that you can write on…Or, let’s make a new special purpose electronic device like an e-reader. Here is the new theme: all access to information and entertainment will get more and more cell-phone like. Your NextGen communication/entertainment/information center will be much more like a cell phone than like current-state TVs, stereos, and computers.

I think this is great news for our two-handed species (see, If we only had three hands). The keyboard, mouse, monitor were adequate for editing lines of program code (much better than card punch machines [go ahead click on the link; it's worth it]) and were a big leg up on the typewriter. But it’s the wrong paradigm for NextGen technology, and rearranging a few deck chairs is not going to cut it.