mouldy.org

One Percent

During his keynote, Jobs asserted that they have a first-year target of 1% of the mobile phone market, or 10 million units.

To anyone who's dealt with startup companies or has researched starting one themselves, this should sound awfully familiar. This is one of the oldest bogus assertions in an entrepreneur's pitch: "We only have to get 1% of the market to be successful". Guy Kawasaki's "The Art of the Start" calls this the Chinese Soda Lie: "If just 1 percent of the people in China drink our soda, we will be more successful than any company in the history of mankind."

The problem is, of course, that it just doesn't work. If 1% is the best estimate you can come up with for your market share, then you've picked the wrong market. You've said "well, we're definitely going to sell more than one unit, so we won't get 0%, and 1% is the next smallest integer, so we'll definitely get at least that." You need to pick a smaller, more specific market segment.

At $499 on a two-year plan, the iPhone is well and truly in the high-end smartphone category. Estimates place this at maybe 2% of the total market. Why are people buying them? Because their companies pay for them, or they want a geek toy. I can't see companies paying for an iPhone over a Blackberry (you'd just play games on it instead of answering your email!) Geeks will undoubtedly buy the thing, but they're pushing for consumers, not geeks. Which is fair enough (there are a lot more consumers than geeks), but are consumers going to pay $499 (plus plan!) for a phone?

"But Ian," I hear you saying. "Jobs isn't trying to drum up investor cash. Apple already has all of the cash it needs." Yes, but why do we care how many patents were filed in creating the iPhone? Apple is a public company, and its duty is still to its shareholders - its investors. Quoting patents counts and made-up sales figures are one way of bolstering shareholder confidence and hence the stock price of the company.

"But they're so wildly successful with the iPod. How could they go wrong with a phone?" Because the iPod does one thing and does it well. It didn't succumb to featuritis like so many other products. The fact that it does one thing makes it tremendously easy to market - "personal music". The ads remind you that it's a music player, but emphasize the trendiness of the device and how it's practically a fashion accessory nowadays. Simple. Creates desire in the consumer.

Now, the iPhone - pick two words to describe it. "Digital life"? Wait, isn't that what Nokia are pushing? "Media convergence"? What's that? "Touch your phone to do stuff?" Hmm. This is hard.

The product isn't easily definable, because it's a phone, and nowadays phones do so much garbage apart from make calls. If you designed the iPhone along the lines of the iPod, you'd have a small, sexy device that made calls - but that'd be it. The UI would consist of a list of people that you know, a scroll wheel and three buttons: "Call", "Answer" and "Hang Up".

I think where they're aiming long-term with the iPhone is to combine your phone, iPod, flash drive and other little gadgets into one do-it-all device - but more importantly, it contains all of your personal data from your conventional computers, too. Plug it into your Mac at one end, it's mounted as your home directory. Unplug it, take it to work, plug it in again, and it's mounted again and your life stays with you. Powerful enough to interact with stuff as you travel. This would be cool, but right there is the problem - I'm a geek, and I think it's "cool". How are you going to explain to a consumer that they're paying $499 for "digital mobility" or "location independence"?

Tactility Matters

Oh, Apple, Apple, Apple. You are so widely lauded for your pretty devices. If only you realised how painful they are to use.

Pick up an iPod Nano. Don't look at it; hold it behind your back. Now, start it playing.

What's that? Can't find the play button? Search around with your thumb; you can find the edges, and the headphone socket, so that must be the bottom, so the play button must be about in the middle and a few centimeters up.

The problem here, and it makes me so irrationally mad that it's kinda crazy, is that you cannot feel a damn thing on the new iPods. It's just smooth, smooth plastic, and there happen to be magic bumps that you can apply pressure to to do things. You need to look at the device to interact with it. Why does it have a dedicated play button if you need to look at it first? That defeats the whole purpose of a dedicated play button!

Every other device in history - including the older iPods - have a UI that is largely thumb-navigable. That is, without looking at the device, you can find any arbitrary button. You can perform 80% of your interactions without taking your attention off what you're already doing.

Take a look at your keyboard. Yep, the one right in front of you. Look at the F and J keys. See those little bumps? Those are called the home keys, and experienced typists know that if they feel the little bumps, their fingers are in a known position. With a little practice, you can sit down at a computer, completely blind, and align your fingers accurately on the keyboard just by feel.

It makes the keyboard easy to use. It improves the usability of the thing. But when I'm out driving with an iPod Nano and want to change tracks, I have to look down at the thing to figure out where to put my thumb so I can move to the next track. With the Mini, I can at least locate the centre button and hence figure out that the magic area for 'next track' is a bit to the right of that. (I still get it wrong and hit play/pause occasionally).

So that's the iPod. Smooth plastic means pretty, but more difficult to use. So what about the iPhone?

Well. We have a touchscreen. And a screen. The interface is completely, totally modal, by which I mean you have to look at the screen to figure out what context you're in and hence what touching is going to do. There's no way in hell that you're going to be able to merely run your thumb across is to find the 'next track' button, because there won't be any features for your thumb to run into, and you might not be in iTunes anyway.

Because the iPod spends most of its time on the Now Playing screen - it'll often change there automatically if you don't interact with the device for a while - you have a pretty good idea of what the buttons are going to do at any given time. And often, the buttons still do what you expect when you're not at the screen - 'next track' will usually still give you the next track even when you're in a menu somewhere.

I think this is going to make it a tough sell for iPod users. I can see that as a major justification for the price - "I can buy an iPhone instead of an iPod and a phone". But the iPhone won't have the same fashion appeal as the iPod, and the interface is going to make it painful to use for the same purposes. (Side note: How long until someone builds a music player for the iPhone that presents a photo of the iPod and lets you interact with it in the same way?)