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VisiCalc's Dan Bricklin On the Tablet Revolution
snydeq writes "Dan Bricklin, the co-creator of the PC revolution's killer app, weighs in on the opportunities and oversights of the tablet revolution. 'In some sense, for tablets the browser is a killer app. Maps is a killer app to some extent. Being able to share the screen with other people — that it's a social device — also might fit the bill. I think that for tablets, there isn't and won't be one killer app for everyone. It's more that there are apps that are killers for individual people. It's the sum of all those that is the killer app. This has been true since the original Palm Pilot.'"
The Palm was the killer app. They sold the company right around the time they killed it.
If the guy who gave people a reason to buy a computer says this, it must be true.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
Tablets don't deliver novel features. They are the following: slightly less complicated to use for simple applications, and still a novelty. They are pretty much doomed in the middle term.
There isn't a "killer app" because they're basically more limited multipurpose computing devices. Every app a tablet could run, a PC could already run, and the good ones are already invented and quite refined for existing UI paradigms.
Oh bitter, bitter ironies...
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I'm writing a new app that will revolutionize Dan Bricklin's life. It will randomly insert the word "killer" into every sentence he writes, thus cutting his workload in half!
Or more generally, smart phones have increased the number of game developers by a order of magnitude or two. Even if most of those games are not that good. In the past you need specialized game hardware or high end PC.
List (and discussion) of it here:
http://www.bricklin.com/tabletcomputing.htm
and I still miss Looseleaf Notetaker even when using EverNote or Microsoft Journal.
That said, I still haven't seen a tablet which displaces my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 which has:
- daylight viewable display --- I use it as a map reader on trips
- handwriting recognition w/ a pressure-sensitive stylus --- I type quite enough at work, writing something, even on a screen is a pleasure by comparison
- pressure-sensitive input for graphics apps --- I draw or sketch in ArtRage or AutoDesk Sketchbook or FutureWave SmartSketch (which was ported over to Mac and Windows from PenPoint and eventually became Flash by way of FutureSplash Animator), and work up drawings and letterform designs in Macromedia FreeHand
- the ability to run pretty much _any_ application, directly on local files w/o jumping through hoops --- I use LaTeX and FontForge
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
5 years later, the first lawsuits began. They were small ones at first, easily dealt with. However over time, they began to merge, and become larger.
The lawsuit's content? Repetitive Stress Injury, from using a tablet for more than an hour a day. With a regular computer, you have a mechanical or membrane keyboard cushioning your fingers, allowing you to work for hours without ill-effects (allowing for a standard positioning of hands). Tablets, on the other hand, have a hard glass screen which you are tapping away at. It will later be revealed that the executives of these prominent companies had performed studies that showed RSI would become an issue after too much use, but went ahead with the product's launch anyway.
Among the suffering were legions of secretaries, data entry specialists, and college students. Programmers, despite their fondness for technology, were not readily known to suffer from this injury, as they are far enough off the fashion wagon to plug an ugly keyboard into a tablet when needed.
I am John Hurt.
i have a netbook.
it goes everywhere i go.
i sleep with it.
i shower next to it.
i take it to the bathroom with me to pass the time.
i can do anything i want on it
i can code a new OS or the latest game on my netbook
i can play real games on it
flash lets me surf the nastiest pr0n sites
why do i need a tablet?
Irony huh... let's see.
*sings* It's like getting the see-heecond post, when all you wanted was the first.
Yup, irony.
Just FYI: My comments about "social device" in the InfoWorld interview relate to the fact that a 10" tablet is easily usable by one person while a few other people watch. It isn't "between" you and them the way an open laptop is or a phone held in front of your face. The actions you are doing (tapping, dragging, pinching) are easily followed by the other person unlike a keyboard and mouse where what you are doing isn't as obvious or direct. I first mentioned this in http://danbricklin.com/ipad1.htm .
The "lots of apps is a killer app" comment (and the reference to the Palm Pilot which was based on an interview I did with Palm's head) comes from the essay I wrote in 2006, "When the Long Tail Wags the Dog" (http://danbricklin.com/tailwagsdog.htm). It explains why "There's an app for that" was such an important selling point for Apple.
Finally, more recently (a little over a year ago) I wrote "Is the Apple iPad really "magical"?" (http://danbricklin.com/magical.htm)
-Dan Bricklin
Tablets are not new. What makes the current crop different from the last one, or the one before that, or the one before that. Its like 3D movies. Every now and then the idea gets reintroduced and everyone raves about it, till we grow tired of the idea and move on. I still have a beta-max copy of the 1950's movie Cat Women On the Moon in 3D some place, right next to my Dauphin DTR-1 486 25mhz tablet running Windows 3.1 For Pens.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I find the form factor to be the "killer app". Holds/handles like a book, but does much of what you might want to do on a computer, without having the awkwardness of even an ultralight laptop.
I get into countless arguments with people who INSIST that a laptop/netbook/macbook air is "the same" but that just hasn't been my experience in trying to sit on the couch, fly on a plane, ride in a car, etc and use the same devices.
There's no debate that those platforms have greater computing potential (keyboard/mouse, OS choices, HDD, yadda yadda). But they all still need to be opened up, generally lack the battery life of an iPad (even my 2 year old iPad 1 still goes 2-3 days without needing charging) and just aren't as physically useful as a tablet.
...longer than a search query in Google. And then you reach for your terrible Bluetooth keyboard/dock with it's equally-terrible leatherette cover and try to juggle the thing on your lap, all the while wondering why you didn't just get a thin laptop or a netbook.
body massage!
The tablet form factor is here because we started consuming much more lean-back-style entertainment via the internet (facebook checking, casual games, youtube clips, photo browsing,...) and it's just not comfortable to consume that kind of content at a desk. And it's also not comfortable (enough) to sit on the couch with a laptop (or pc). Because you'll burn your testes.
So man created the tablet. And it is here to stay. It's complementary to a laptop and even a smartphone (less social because so small).
A thin laptop (aka an "ultrabook") costs twice as much as an iPad, and netbook makers such as Dell have been discontinuing their netbook lines.
ha, ha! I read that as 'oh bitter, bitter onions..."
http://www.acetonestudio.com
"PC shipments will remain weak in 2012," said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. "PCs will face more competition as we see new media tablets based on operating systems from Android and Microsoft, as well the new iPad."
Consumer computing habits are changing as more applications shift to the cloud. Email, Web browsing and social networking, which once required a PC, can now be done on a smartphone or tablet.
Even content creation tasks like photo editing, word processing, and music creation are migrating to tablets. Though PCs are still the best for those kinds of applications, Atwal said consumers have shown that they are willing to make trade-offs for tablets' better content consumption capabilities.
I'm pretty sure that Apple sells more iPads in a year than all Betamax decks ever produced.
Isn't Viscalc the first program with a license explicity noting, "We can't say it works for sure. And you can't sue us if it doesn't." IIRC, it was because of fears some P. Eng. would use it in designing a bridge or automotive brake.
I'm open to correction on this one.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
I can see two crucial differences. Firstly, technology has improved. The tablets now are lighter, slimmer and have higher resolution screens than any before. The batteries last longer, and they pack the processing power to easily stream video. Plus we have wireless everywhere, which makes them more useful still, and they even cost less (Yes, even the iPad cost less than my old tablet of a previous generation!). Secondly, Apple... they are masters of marketting. They took the tablet, a tool for geeks, and made it cool. Their brand alone sold the iPad - had exactly the same product been made by HP or Dell, it'd never have caught on so well.It's possible that just the power of their marketing could get tablets established long enough to stick.
There's only one hope left: The All Purpose Emergency Plan. Fake a seizure.
Tablets don't deliver novel features.
Touch is inherently a novel form of interaction with computers. Until now direct touch has been rare.
They are the following: slightly less complicated to use for simple applications, and still a novelty
Allow me to update your list:
They are the future.
They are pretty much doomed in the middle term.
Translation: The future will hit you like a Mac Truck.
There isn't a "killer app" because they're basically more limited multipurpose computing devices.
Spoken like someone forcefully unwilling to see a fundamental change in process because you fear it..
You fear change, you fear a means of interaction that you find comfortable with going forward.
You don't think of it as fears but your post is full of the kind of denial only fear can bring.
The truth is that direct touch is a very powerful form of interaction with computers. It is more friendly for the average person and so tasks that people want to accomplish with computers will migrate to be done with touch.
What you really fail to understand is that touch is not "more limited". It's simply different. It does some things worse than a keyboard or mouse, yes, but on the other hand it does some things better.
And the thing is, people using computing devices through touch. Regardless which side of UI "wins" by any measure you care to put forward, it is irrelevant because people will buy touch devices and things that run on them.
If you have not seen an 80-year old, or a three year old with an iPad you are really missing a lot of understanding.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A Desktop PC is like a big tool box, a laptop is like a tool belt, and a tablet is like a leatherman. What would you rather to carry around all day?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
They are poor e-readers compared to digital paper systems
That was arguably true before the new iPad.
Now that is no longer true. The iPad is now superior to e-Ink, it has greater resolution, better color and much better touch interaction (which yes is important for the mechanics of reading on a text reader).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Obligatory Oatmeal
Well, therein lies the rub.
We all saw the HP tablet -- it was a dog that eventually HP themselves was selling for about $99 to their employees to clear it out.
My brother's tiny little off-name Android tablet is cool enough, but has a fairly low-res display and seemed to have some warts (the clock stops when it's turned off, I kid you not; how hard is it to keep the clock going?). Can't speak to the Samsung or other Android based tablets since I've never had a chance to play with one.
My wife's Playbook -- well, the browser crashes all of the time, there's not much software available for it, and usually when she turns it on she has to wrestle with it to get it to connect to our wi-fi, or occasionally hard-boot it as the whole thing locks up. She's getting to the point where she might stop using it. Which is sad, because when I bought it for her at Christmas, it was a really sweet deal and thought she'd get some use out of it.
What Apple did was to actually produce a polished product that worked when they released it. Microsoft is playing "me too" as usual and trying to build something. HP released a turd and then discontinued it. RIM hasn't yet caught up yet. The Android marketplace comprises so many different devices that I'm not even sure you can compare them to themselves.
So, I'm just not convinced that another of the candidates could have released "exactly the same product" ... because they don't seem to be doing it yet. I will say this for Apple, by the time they release it, it actually has been tested and works. A lot of products get released which shouldn't be considered anything more than a beta release.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I feel the same way Dan Bricklin does about Apple and Microsoft, solving for 1 and solving for n respectively. This is what makes Metro from MS so promising and yet so risky.
Designers thought of them as minaturized desktops.
Apples [perhaps accidental] innovation was to consider them enlarge smartphones.
Hmm, how ironic :(
Failure to envision appropriate and unique uses for the device is a failure of your imagination - not a failure of the device. There are plenty.
those horseless carriages are just overpriced toys and they'll never amount to anything. For serious work, I'll take a horse and carriage any day!
seriously, you guys ought to listen to yourselves sometime.
Oh bitter, bitter ironies...
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From Dilbert Newsletter 49.0 -- InDUHviduals Humor Break
I've also learned recently that "ironic" means anything you want it to mean. Example:
Me: "I heard that Bob was killed by a meteor."
Induhvidual: "Wow. That's ironic."
Me: "Why is it ironic? Was he an astronomer?"
Induhvidual: "No, it's ironic because, you know, what are the odds?"
Me: "So anything unlikely is automatically ironic?"
Induhvidual: "No, it also needs to be bad."
Me: "This conversation is ironic."
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
that huge consumer market of people writing books, software development, and darkroom work.
Secondly, Apple... they are masters of marketting. They took the tablet, a tool for geeks, and made it cool. Their brand alone sold the iPad - had exactly the same product been made by HP or Dell, it'd never have caught on so well.It's possible that just the power of their marketing could get tablets established long enough to stick.
People who still reduce Apple's strength(s) to marketing will never understand why they have been successful. Apple has always been about polish. Geeks here on Slashdot might put up with mundane tasks to get something working but the general public does not. Every step it takes to do something makes it a negative in their mind.
I had a Diamond Rio player when the first iPod came out. Technically it was a higher capacity version of the Rio if you want to reduce it down. But in the mundane daily tasks of operation, the iPod kicked the crap out of it.
To rip and encode MP3s required me to find and use two different programs. Apple had iTunes. To sync my device required multiple steps and another program. Even then you could mess up the syncing. With iPod, just plug it to your computer.
When I got an iPod around 2005, my brother got a Dell MP3 player. At the time he disparaged my choice. A year later I asked him where his Dell was. He kept it in a drawer because it was too much of a hassle to keep it synced/use it. I used my iPod for years until I replaced it with a smart phone.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
all those Windows based tablets before were huge heavy and without great battery life on top of a clunky Microsoft defined UI which had to be like desktop Windows. The phone market was the same and those phone vendors would not create something interesting and easy to use. Apple's iPhone was a great package for ease of use and with the iPod like tie-in with the Apple App Store to make adding enhancements simple. That was easily slid over to the iPad and using the same model of a sleek, light and easy to handle device with the same easy to use UI. No tablets I'd seen ever did this before and most of the problem was because they had to run Microsoft Windows.
So all those things may have been on previous generations of tablets before but those tablets were junk from a user friendly perspective.
This is another reason why there's a good chance that Windows 8 on tablets is going to suck again. They're likely to require lots of CPU, lots of RAM and lots of battery power compared to the iPad. And the apps from Windows don't run on them and Microsoft is confiusing desktop Windows with the tablet and people will not get it. This Windows table phase is also likely to fail. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Yo Dawg, I heard you like killer apps so i've got the killer app app so you can kill while you use your killer app app.
I have an Android phone. I love it. I also have a 10-inch Android tablet--a good one (A500), not one of the junks out there. Every time I drag it out, I ask myself "Why did I buy this again?" OK, I bought it because I'm a nerd, and it was shiny, and I got it for 1/2 price on a Black Friday sale. Still, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with it. I purchased a Bluetooth keyboard, thinking that would make it more useful. It hasn't. Maybe if I was the kind of person to lug a laptop with me everywhere I go, then a tablet would be a better choice. But I'm not. Perhaps I'm just not the target audience for a tablet, but I can't see a good reason to have one.
The problem with reading books on an LCD display isn't the resolution. It's the fact you're staring at a light bulb the whole time.
That is not a problem. The problem is when your surroundings vary significantly in luminance from your "book". Lot of tablets crank up the brightness, so that is why is seems to strain your eyes.
The iPad is very good at dimming brightness. As long as you don't read it in a pitch dark room (which you should not do with a real book either) there is very little eyestrain to be had when the brightness of the screen more closely matches the surroundings.
My e-ink reader is only 600 x 800, no higher a DPI than some of my LCD-screened gizmos, but it's FAR easier on the eyes.
I've used them before and they are better than a bad LCD, but not better than a good one and due to the low resolution and terrible refresh rate significantly worse than the new iPad screen. Reading is WAY nicer on a display with a good DPI (which includes real books).
Also, I fail to understand why 'touch interaction' matters. My reader has a button for next page and a button for previous page, well placed, and a D-pad for navigating menus. What more does it need?
As interactive content becomes more prevalent, you'll need to, well, interact with it.
Also as well placed as those buttons are they are not as convenient as the whole screen tapping effects you can have with a good touch-screen.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The ipad (because that's what we really mean by "tablets" here) is a new kind of computer, but it doesn't replace the existing kind of computer, because it doesn't have a keyboard.
Yes, I agree 100%.
Touch is great for certain kinds of things, and keyboards are great for other kinds of things, and it simply doesn't make sense to do anything text-heavy on a touch interface.
I totally disagree, here you are simply not thinking ahead, or frankly to what exists already in terms of attaching external keyboards.
Smartphones didn't replace computers. Tablets won't replace smartphones. "Post-PC" doesn't mean the PC is going away; it means the PC is no longer the sole center of the computing universe.
Yes, exactly - but tablets and smartphones will make up the great bulk of it going forward, PC's are shortly going to be very marginalized.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The lawsuit's content? Repetitive Stress Injury, from using a tablet for more than an hour a day.
And then the suit is dismissed because only an idiot hits a display as hard as they hit a normal keyboard.
A touch display needs only the lightest of touches to react, why are you not moderating your presses? Everyone else does.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For me, the killer app was a hemisphere of sectional maps, airport directory, notepad, mp3 player, audio book reader, email client, pdf reader and engine monitor all in the format of a pilot's kneepad.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
People who still reduce Apple's strength(s) to marketing will never understand why they have been successful.
Here I want to both agree with you and disagree with you. That people who reduce Apple's strengths to Marketing will never understand why they are successful is true, but not because that is false, but because they have no idea of what marketing is. Marketing is not advertising. Marketing also includes figuring out what the market wants, building a good product to appease the market, and then presenting it, including advertising, to the market so they buy it. It is a combination of telling the people what they want along with the fact that it is actually what they want. Apple is successful 'because of marketing', but the people who use that phase usually have no idea what even wikipedia says about 'Marketing".
How many people ONLY have a tablet and not a PC/Mac/notebook. Hands up out there. Well that is not many. The post PC world is still driven by the PC in one form or another. Would anyone seriously write a book on a tablet, even with a bluetooth keyboard attached? How about do serious video editing, audio editing, desktop publishing? What on a 10" screen? Even accounting. The time will come when you can sit you tablet down next to an external large screen, keyboard with extra USB3 connections and HiFi speakers and it will all automatically sync together and become ..... a PC. You can then pick it up and walk away with it until your significant others shout "who has taken the PC?", then you will need a second tablet to supplement your err PC.
I have a PC, a notebook and a Xoom and a Samsung Galaxy S - they all share calendar, email, docs via the cloud and they all work in harmony. And they all have their purposes. The only real redundancy is that the notebook could replace the desktop, but not if the tablet replaced the notebook.
If I was in school today I'd trade a laptop and a ton of books for an iPad in a heartbeat.
I wouldn't, if only because of some of Apple's iOS developer policies that make an iPad not very useful for a computer science major. An Android tablet, on the other hand...
has not been for a while, we have all that we really need, and its been that way for quite a while. Back when VisiCalc came out, was still during the period of "ok you have a personal computer, now what the hell do you do with it" and average people did not have an electonic spredsheet, their software was a game changer spawning an entire industry (for a while), and that was a killer app, for many, they bought an Apple II just to be able to run THAT software.
Today everything is icing on an already made cake *, though I am not saying there is no innovation in the computer software world now, I am saying that the software landscape is not a wide open frontier anymore and, something truly unique AND that everyone just has to have, does not happen.
* icing on an already made cake, for example if I just want to visualize data or forms in a excel sheet, it actually takes me less time to fire up a 16Mhz, 16 bit, 1986 Mac SE and start dumping numbers into excel before ANY modern OS even gets to the desktop. Though I am not going to be able to drop a 1280x1024 24 bit color image as a popup comment in a cell with a few mouse clicks either ... good and bad
It's worth making it through the article for the final two paragraphs, which I found poignant.
...with Dan Bricklin. Most of my friends are heavy tablet users while I've yet to find a use for one. Everyone's got a different killer app that sold them on it. Unfortunately for me, no one has written one for me yet!
What I disagree with mostly when people use "marketing" and "advertising" interchangeably to mean the same thing. Advertising is part of marketing. For me, I separate design from those three. Apple's core product design strategy hasn't changed since Steve Jobs returned: Make product X for consumers. The "consumers" part is where many companies have not succeeded. Sure they put out a product that works mostly but they don't take the extra steps necessary to polish for them. The Rio was just one example. All the major shortcomings could have been solved by software but Rio didn't bother with making a ripper and encoded even though it was going to be necessary for most consumers to transform their CD collections into MP3s. The syncing could have been much easier.
I would say that the best example of your presentation of marketing is the original iPhone commercials. At the time, most consumers probably seen a smart phone and maybe knew about them in general. Each of the 4 30 second commercials showed a function of the iPhone: media player, maps, browsing, mail, etc. At the end of each commercial, it showed that is was a phone. Each of these commercials were a simple 30 second demo of how it worked. At the time I had a WinMo phone issued by work. My original thoughts were that the functionality could not have been that simple to use. I played was one and was pleasantly surprised when I was wrong. For WinMo, I remember that the 3 way conferencing functionality was stupidly more complex that each time, I had to look up in the manual how to do it. It was like 3 menus buried somewhere (all the while you're on the phone with someone). It's the same scenario over and over with Apple. Yes, product X existed and had that functionality before Apple came into the market. But the functionality was not that simple.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
A horseless carriage is much faster and doesn't require maintenance during periods when you're not using it.
Also missing that until the ipad, I'm not aware of anyone making a tablet UI that was significantly different from their desktop one. I have an old Fujitsu tablet running win-2000 that would be completely useless if I didn't also have the wireless keyboard. It had its uses, but Windows was the wrong interface for it. IOS, and Android are built around the touch screen, Win-8 looks to be an attempt to marry the 2 UIs (possibly to the detriment of both) While tablets have been tried before, they were alway better used like laptops than tablets. Now, they are optimized for the form factor. Microsoft may have the right idea with Win 8, one OS and 2 UIs, with docking capabilities, may help to create a device that can act as a tablet, and a family PC (sorry kids, I took the PC to work with me) There are already laptop docks for smart phones, why not laptop and desktop docks for tablets, when combined with an OS that can utilize both form factors?