5 ms·

It's interesting to see how everyone tries to copy Apple's success without getting the point. What made the Ipad (and the Iphone and the Ipod) a success was th

by mixmax 16y ago

It's interesting to see how everyone tries to copy Apple's success without getting the point. What made the Ipad (and the Iphone and the Ipod) a success was the fact that Apple created a new category that didn't exist before and marketed the hell out of it. All the me-too products make the fatal mistake of trying to make a product that's better than Apple's in the category that Apple invented and owns. No matter how hard you try to make a product that's an Ipad-killer you'll never succeed because it's not an Ipad. It's like the cheap knock-offs of brand names - the chinese Konferse shoes might look like Converse, they might be cheaper and they might even be better but nobody will buy them because they aren't the original Converse. If you want to own a niche you have to innovate your way there. You can't out-ipad and ipad. One of the commenters in the article even called it a palmpad. I remember an interview with Jonathan Ive (Apple's chief designer) where he was asked what he would make if he was given the task of creating a phone for another company. His answer was "I don't know, but I do know that it would be nothing like the Iphone"

akikuchi 16y ago
Would you have said you can't out-Newton the Newton? You can't out-Atari the Atari?
- mixmax 16y ago
  Atari's greatest hit the 2600 was never equalled, but they never managed to create a successor for the product. Maybe because they fired Nolan Bushnell, or maybe because of the leadership of Warner. so I don't think anyone out-ataried the atari - they just stagnated and died. And the Newton was never a success, so there wasn't really much to out-newton. It was too far ahead of it's time, and the technology wasn't quite there yet.
  - akikuchi 16y ago
    I guess I have two points: 1. Your observations about Atari and Newton highlight one of the problems with your initial argument- it's not generally a safe bet to assume an early category-creating product will continue to innovate and develop to stay at the front of the pack. 2. Whether RIM creates a broadly superior product is beside the point. A new market has opened up, and they expect it should be profitable if they can capture just a small share of that market. Apple has shown a commitment to develop their successful product lines; but as the size of the market grows there will be plenty of room for profitable competitors even if Apple is wildly successful.
    - mixmax 16y ago
      Excellent points - this is why I love HN, it's a great place to have an intelligent discussion.
city41 16y ago
I disagree. You seem to imply the iPad is more a fashion statement than a useful device. But for many people it's both. If another tablet comes along that is more useful than the iPad, a sizable number of people will switch. Just look at iPhone and Android. No one who owns an Android phone is going to try and pretend it is fashionable or as sexy as the iPhone, but since that's not the only purpose of the device, they have succeeded anyway.
- mixmax 16y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that the Ipad is a fashion statement, my point was that whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost. For example, I think that Diaspora will never take off because they've positioned themselves as a facebook-killer. What happens is that a user who switches from facebook will look at disapora and say "what? How can this be a facebook killer? It doesn't even have (whatever feature of facebook). it's terrible market positioning. the android/iphone example is a good one, but I don't think Android tries to be an iphone killer. It's a phone with it's own values. It's about choice and open-source, whereas the Iphone is about closed-source, proprietary code and a closed ecosystem. This is probebly a major reason why Android is taking marketshares. Google has different values than Apple, and it shows in Android. It has a different soul.
  - Yzupnick 16y ago
    > whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost. You mean like an Altavista killer, MySpace killer, or Blockbuster killer? Companies fail. Just because Apple is hot right now does not mean that it is immune to this fact. It probably won't happen six months after the ipad's release, but like everything else, something new will take its place.
    - wtallis 16y ago
      There's a big difference between creating a product with the purpose of killing another product, and creating a product with the purpose of being better than another product. Google wasn't an attempt to cash in on any kind of "search engine market", it was an attempt to remedy one of the biggest weaknesses of contemporary search engines: how to usefully rank a now-sufficient number of results. Facebook wasn't intended to kill MySpace - it was intended to be better for a certain category of potential MySpace users: students. Initially, it was only marketed and available to them, and it was only after it had completely taken over that market that it was able to start seriously taking on MySpace. Netflix could be said to have been aimed squarely at Blockbuster, but it's major tradeoffs of long wait times and a subscription model versus Blockbuster's same-day service and pay-as-you-go model made Netflix risky enough that nobody could have reasonably stated at the beginning that it stood a good chance of completely killing blockbuster so quickly. Besides, none of the x-killers we see coming out these days are ever as drastically different as netflix was from Blockbuster; they're usually cheap knockoffs or more expensive versions afflicted by feature creep.
leftnode 16y ago
I think the analogy between the cheap Chinese knockoff and RIM falls apart in that RIM is a giant corporation that has years of smart phone development. Apple wasn't the first company with a tablet, they just did it the best. There's nothing saying RIM couldn't beat iPad.
- mixmax 16y ago
  It's not about company size - it's about vision. If you look at the Ipad and the tablets that came before it it's pretty obvious that it's another category. There's a vision with the Ipad that wasn't there before. It just works. The problem with the RIM tablet is that it looks just like an Ipad, it seems to me like the management of RIM has looked at the Ipad and said "hey what's going on here, they're going to steal our marketshare. Let's make one just like it." I just don't think that kind of strategy works. Copying a product without intimately understanding why it was designed the way it was just isn't a good strategy.
  - lallysingh 16y ago
    There's also focus. Apple has always focused on the consumer. At best, the "prosumer," which is a nice way to say a consumer with a bigger budget. They've never made the needs of larger businesses their priority -- even when they're doing the necessary work: for example, when they introduced things like Apple Remote Desktop, they talked about it in terms of school computer labs. RIM is primarily focused on the business side. The tablet, in this form factor, can fit into a purse or (har har) folio pretty easily. It talks to the blackberry their customers will already have. It's a way to extend the platform with a bigger screen, for Word documents, spreadsheets, etc, without losing the point of their brand. Apple -- and bless them for it -- pushes the bar up across the board for user interfaces, usable power (as far as I can remember, other smartphones as powerful as the iPhone had terrible battery life), stability (remember windows mobile, and garnett), and pure capability (HDR photos). But, they've chosen to focus their energies on an intentionally-narrow set of products. There's plenty of space in the market for them, Android, and RIM. Apple's got the core consumer experience down pat. Android's got the variety and hardware development pace. RIM's got messaging. Maybe Meego too, but that's probably just my silly wishing ;-) Why don't more Linux-based smartphone platforms come with an X server? :-(
iouytgyhjk 16y ago
Yes that's why everyone else's attempts to put email on a phone and copy the Blackberry has failed. What made the Blackberry a success was the fact that RIM created a new category ......
- mixmax 16y ago
  What a great way of turning my argument around. Kudos :-)
- m0nastic 16y ago
  I realize you're being clever by substituting the original poster's argument, but RIM did indeed create a new category. When the Blackberry shipped, it wasn't a smartphone. It wasn't a phone at all. It was a dedicated email device. And it was pretty much alone in that category. It became popular in businesses that had previously been using pagers (specifically 2-way pagers), and eventually they added a phone component (which was actually terrible for the first few iterations).
wvenable 16y ago
Apple created the first (affordable) personal computer with a GUI interface and a mouse, too. Just because Apple created a new category doesn't mean they own that category. By your argument, the entire PC industry as we know it shouldn't exist. I, for one, think the iPad is a little too limited for taste and I'm waiting for some other company to produce an reasonable alternative.
- Paulomus 16y ago
  Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Back in the early days of the iPod's success, company after company came out with iPod-killers that all basically flopped. Then, after the iPhone became a hit, everyone touted new smartphones as iPhone killers, which also flopped. Android is the only thing which has every reached the status of a legitimate iKiller. The Android tablet or some descendent of it might be your best bet for finding the tablet you're looking for.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    The iPod was an MP3-player killer. And the iPhone was a smartphone killer. In neither of those situations did Apple create the market -- they improved what other players were doing. Outside of Android, there were no new smartphone designs to tout as iPhone killers. My WinMo phone's underlying design predates the original iPhone by a long time even though the device itself is newer. Microsoft is finally getting around to making their iPhone killer with Windows Mobile 7.
    - nmcfarl 16y ago
      Actually I think the first 2 sentences here nail this for me. If your aim is to own a category, and you have a chance at designing an awesome product. If your aim is to dethrone the current market leader in a category - well your odds are a lot lower as your focus is off.
  - nhooey 16y ago
    By the 2nd quarter of 2010, RIM was still beating both Android and Apple in market share for Smartphones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone It's more like everyone else tried making Blackberry killers, and has yet to succeed.
Pewpewarrows 16y ago
Stopped reading after you tried to insinuate that Apple invented the Portable MP3 Player, Smartphone, and Tablet PC market categories. What they did was enter existing and established markets, make an Apple-branded product with a good UI/UX design, and marketed the hell out of it.
jonknee 16y ago
Apple didn't create the MP3 player market, but made out OK. Same for smartphones. You don't have to be first to be successful.
tici_88 16y ago
I am currently at the BlackBerry DevCon, and have to tell you that RIM is definitely not positioning the PlayBook (so-so name imo) as an iPad killer. They are after a whole new segment of applications here that seems to be envisioned to come off QNX distributed capabilities. It's very early stages still, but think along the lines of manipulating your BlackBerry's email from the PlayBook over bluetooth or piping a powerpoint presentation to a projector over WiFi.Just completely random examples here, but I think they definitely have the professional/business segment in mind.
- pinaceae 16y ago
  But then you haven't heard the news - the iPad is making big inroads into corporate userspace. SAP will roll out 17.000 units internally (http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/09/ipad_fever_hits.html http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/09/ip...). Read the statements of the CIo. Otsuka Pharma will roll out 1300 iPads to their pharma reps. In Japan. (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-07/otsuka-pharma-to-buy-1-300-ipads-for-sales-employees-update1-.html http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-07/otsuka-pharma-to...)
  - borism 16y ago
    wow, huge success!
ugh 16y ago
This is not a knock off. It’s a very distinct and unique product. RIM deserves a lot of credit for not merely creating an iPad clone.
xtho 16y ago
The category existed long before (take a look at, e.g., win ce-based tablets/pads that were released from 2000 on). They were the first though that used an OS that is truly optimized for a capacitive touch screen (those pads had resistive screens that weren't all that useful).
pwpwp 16y ago
If you think that RIM is in any way copying or fanboying Apple, you have probably never used a RIM product.

by mixmax 16y ago

akikuchi 16y ago

Would you have said you can't out-Newton the Newton? You can't out-Atari the Atari?

mixmax 16y ago
Atari's greatest hit the 2600 was never equalled, but they never managed to create a successor for the product. Maybe because they fired Nolan Bushnell, or maybe because of the leadership of Warner. so I don't think anyone out-ataried the atari - they just stagnated and died. And the Newton was never a success, so there wasn't really much to out-newton. It was too far ahead of it's time, and the technology wasn't quite there yet.
- akikuchi 16y ago
  I guess I have two points: 1. Your observations about Atari and Newton highlight one of the problems with your initial argument- it's not generally a safe bet to assume an early category-creating product will continue to innovate and develop to stay at the front of the pack. 2. Whether RIM creates a broadly superior product is beside the point. A new market has opened up, and they expect it should be profitable if they can capture just a small share of that market. Apple has shown a commitment to develop their successful product lines; but as the size of the market grows there will be plenty of room for profitable competitors even if Apple is wildly successful.
  - mixmax 16y ago
    Excellent points - this is why I love HN, it's a great place to have an intelligent discussion.

city41 16y ago

I disagree. You seem to imply the iPad is more a fashion statement than a useful device. But for many people it's both. If another tablet comes along that is more useful than the iPad, a sizable number of people will switch. Just look at iPhone and Android. No one who owns an Android phone is going to try and pretend it is fashionable or as sexy as the iPhone, but since that's not the only purpose of the device, they have succeeded anyway.

mixmax 16y ago
I didn't mean to imply that the Ipad is a fashion statement, my point was that whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost. For example, I think that Diaspora will never take off because they've positioned themselves as a facebook-killer. What happens is that a user who switches from facebook will look at disapora and say "what? How can this be a facebook killer? It doesn't even have (whatever feature of facebook). it's terrible market positioning. the android/iphone example is a good one, but I don't think Android tries to be an iphone killer. It's a phone with it's own values. It's about choice and open-source, whereas the Iphone is about closed-source, proprietary code and a closed ecosystem. This is probebly a major reason why Android is taking marketshares. Google has different values than Apple, and it shows in Android. It has a different soul.
- Yzupnick 16y ago
  > whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost. You mean like an Altavista killer, MySpace killer, or Blockbuster killer? Companies fail. Just because Apple is hot right now does not mean that it is immune to this fact. It probably won't happen six months after the ipad's release, but like everything else, something new will take its place.
  - wtallis 16y ago
    There's a big difference between creating a product with the purpose of killing another product, and creating a product with the purpose of being better than another product. Google wasn't an attempt to cash in on any kind of "search engine market", it was an attempt to remedy one of the biggest weaknesses of contemporary search engines: how to usefully rank a now-sufficient number of results. Facebook wasn't intended to kill MySpace - it was intended to be better for a certain category of potential MySpace users: students. Initially, it was only marketed and available to them, and it was only after it had completely taken over that market that it was able to start seriously taking on MySpace. Netflix could be said to have been aimed squarely at Blockbuster, but it's major tradeoffs of long wait times and a subscription model versus Blockbuster's same-day service and pay-as-you-go model made Netflix risky enough that nobody could have reasonably stated at the beginning that it stood a good chance of completely killing blockbuster so quickly. Besides, none of the x-killers we see coming out these days are ever as drastically different as netflix was from Blockbuster; they're usually cheap knockoffs or more expensive versions afflicted by feature creep.

leftnode 16y ago

I think the analogy between the cheap Chinese knockoff and RIM falls apart in that RIM is a giant corporation that has years of smart phone development. Apple wasn't the first company with a tablet, they just did it the best. There's nothing saying RIM couldn't beat iPad.

mixmax 16y ago
It's not about company size - it's about vision. If you look at the Ipad and the tablets that came before it it's pretty obvious that it's another category. There's a vision with the Ipad that wasn't there before. It just works. The problem with the RIM tablet is that it looks just like an Ipad, it seems to me like the management of RIM has looked at the Ipad and said "hey what's going on here, they're going to steal our marketshare. Let's make one just like it." I just don't think that kind of strategy works. Copying a product without intimately understanding why it was designed the way it was just isn't a good strategy.
- lallysingh 16y ago
  There's also focus. Apple has always focused on the consumer. At best, the "prosumer," which is a nice way to say a consumer with a bigger budget. They've never made the needs of larger businesses their priority -- even when they're doing the necessary work: for example, when they introduced things like Apple Remote Desktop, they talked about it in terms of school computer labs. RIM is primarily focused on the business side. The tablet, in this form factor, can fit into a purse or (har har) folio pretty easily. It talks to the blackberry their customers will already have. It's a way to extend the platform with a bigger screen, for Word documents, spreadsheets, etc, without losing the point of their brand. Apple -- and bless them for it -- pushes the bar up across the board for user interfaces, usable power (as far as I can remember, other smartphones as powerful as the iPhone had terrible battery life), stability (remember windows mobile, and garnett), and pure capability (HDR photos). But, they've chosen to focus their energies on an intentionally-narrow set of products. There's plenty of space in the market for them, Android, and RIM. Apple's got the core consumer experience down pat. Android's got the variety and hardware development pace. RIM's got messaging. Maybe Meego too, but that's probably just my silly wishing ;-) Why don't more Linux-based smartphone platforms come with an X server? :-(

iouytgyhjk 16y ago

Yes that's why everyone else's attempts to put email on a phone and copy the Blackberry has failed. What made the Blackberry a success was the fact that RIM created a new category ......

mixmax 16y ago
What a great way of turning my argument around. Kudos :-)
m0nastic 16y ago
I realize you're being clever by substituting the original poster's argument, but RIM did indeed create a new category. When the Blackberry shipped, it wasn't a smartphone. It wasn't a phone at all. It was a dedicated email device. And it was pretty much alone in that category. It became popular in businesses that had previously been using pagers (specifically 2-way pagers), and eventually they added a phone component (which was actually terrible for the first few iterations).

wvenable 16y ago

Apple created the first (affordable) personal computer with a GUI interface and a mouse, too. Just because Apple created a new category doesn't mean they own that category. By your argument, the entire PC industry as we know it shouldn't exist. I, for one, think the iPad is a little too limited for taste and I'm waiting for some other company to produce an reasonable alternative.

Paulomus 16y ago
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Back in the early days of the iPod's success, company after company came out with iPod-killers that all basically flopped. Then, after the iPhone became a hit, everyone touted new smartphones as iPhone killers, which also flopped. Android is the only thing which has every reached the status of a legitimate iKiller. The Android tablet or some descendent of it might be your best bet for finding the tablet you're looking for.
- wvenable 16y ago
  The iPod was an MP3-player killer. And the iPhone was a smartphone killer. In neither of those situations did Apple create the market -- they improved what other players were doing. Outside of Android, there were no new smartphone designs to tout as iPhone killers. My WinMo phone's underlying design predates the original iPhone by a long time even though the device itself is newer. Microsoft is finally getting around to making their iPhone killer with Windows Mobile 7.
  - nmcfarl 16y ago
    Actually I think the first 2 sentences here nail this for me. If your aim is to own a category, and you have a chance at designing an awesome product. If your aim is to dethrone the current market leader in a category - well your odds are a lot lower as your focus is off.
- nhooey 16y ago
  By the 2nd quarter of 2010, RIM was still beating both Android and Apple in market share for Smartphones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone It's more like everyone else tried making Blackberry killers, and has yet to succeed.

Pewpewarrows 16y ago

Stopped reading after you tried to insinuate that Apple invented the Portable MP3 Player, Smartphone, and Tablet PC market categories. What they did was enter existing and established markets, make an Apple-branded product with a good UI/UX design, and marketed the hell out of it.

jonknee 16y ago

Apple didn't create the MP3 player market, but made out OK. Same for smartphones. You don't have to be first to be successful.

tici_88 16y ago

I am currently at the BlackBerry DevCon, and have to tell you that RIM is definitely not positioning the PlayBook (so-so name imo) as an iPad killer. They are after a whole new segment of applications here that seems to be envisioned to come off QNX distributed capabilities. It's very early stages still, but think along the lines of manipulating your BlackBerry's email from the PlayBook over bluetooth or piping a powerpoint presentation to a projector over WiFi.Just completely random examples here, but I think they definitely have the professional/business segment in mind.

pinaceae 16y ago
But then you haven't heard the news - the iPad is making big inroads into corporate userspace. SAP will roll out 17.000 units internally (http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/09/ipad_fever_hits.html http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2010/09/ip...). Read the statements of the CIo. Otsuka Pharma will roll out 1300 iPads to their pharma reps. In Japan. (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-07/otsuka-pharma-to-buy-1-300-ipads-for-sales-employees-update1-.html http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-07/otsuka-pharma-to...)
- borism 16y ago
  wow, huge success!

ugh 16y ago

This is not a knock off. It’s a very distinct and unique product. RIM deserves a lot of credit for not merely creating an iPad clone.

xtho 16y ago

The category existed long before (take a look at, e.g., win ce-based tablets/pads that were released from 2000 on). They were the first though that used an OS that is truly optimized for a capacitive touch screen (those pads had resistive screens that weren't all that useful).

pwpwp 16y ago

If you think that RIM is in any way copying or fanboying Apple, you have probably never used a RIM product.