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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.
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.
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 don't think they will be doomed. Eventually the processor, the display, and everything else will be "good enough" for anything anybody wants to use a tablet for. The the prices will start to come down. Already you can get some seriously overspec'ed tablets for $300. What happens with the iPad 3 level of tablet only costs $300, or even $200. It will end up becoming something that just about everyone has, like a DVD player, or an MP3 player, or a TV. People will just buy them because even something really cheap will be something that accomplishes quite a bit.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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
Eventually the processor, the display, and everything else will be "good enough" for anything anybody wants to use a tablet for.
You're forgetting input devices and UI. Go ahead, try and write a thesis on your iPad. You'll see why PCs will always be superior pretty quickly.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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?"
they're basically more limited multipurpose computing devices.
That is exactly why they are NOT doomed. Most people do not want, and never wanted, a "multipurpose computing device". Most people wanted a limited, easy to use, safe content consumption device. That's what a tablet gives them.
Make no mistake: tablets will take over as the world's primary computing device. If you do not see this, you do not understand human nature.
Eventually the processor, the display, and everything else will be "good enough" for anything anybody wants to use a tablet for.
Some of the things I use computers the most for are writing books, software development and darkroom work.
I like to do these things when travelling too, but I can't see how a tablet would be well suited for either. Even with an external keyboard and mouse (and then, why not use a laptop?), the screen is just too small, if it's still going to be usable as a tablet.
Add that touch screens are not well suited to any kind of prolonged activity, no matter what it is. Remember the gorilla arm syndrome, and why tablet PCs failed the first two times they were introduced.
You're forgetting input devices
What, did all the world's manufacturers suddenly stop making bluetooth keyboards and mice?
You're missing the point. You can connect all the peripherals you want, when you want them. When you don't, you can carry the device around without them.
That seems to be the model people want. Tablet sales are increasing dramatically year over year, while PC sales have stagnated. It's widely expected that tablets will outsell PCs within a decade.
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.
I won't write my thesis on an iPad (although along with a wireless keyboard it has more memory, a better screen, better performance and more storage than the Otrona Attache that I did write my thesis on - ah, Wordstar....) but I would use it to look up patient med lists, vital signs and the like.
The electronic clipboard is really here. Don't underestimate clipboards.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
...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!
Eventually the processor, the display, and everything else will be "good enough" for anything anybody wants to use a tablet for.
...
Even with an external keyboard and mouse (and then, why not use a laptop?), the screen is just too small, if it's still going to be usable as a tablet.
Add that touch screens are not well suited to any kind of prolonged activity, no matter what it is. Remember the gorilla arm syndrome, and why tablet PCs failed the first two times they were introduced.
To paraphrase -- The killer app for the tablet will be an air keyboard.
The air keyboard will probably still be QWERTY still predominate. Input technologies are zombies.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
You do realize that the new iPad screen is likely bigger than your home monitor? 2048x1536 is a lot of room...it's more space than any laptop currently on the market. And if the complaint is the physical size then send the display to an external monitor or TV.
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.
The World Wide Web browser was the killer app that turned PCs from being novelties for geeks into something everyone wanted to have. "I don't know what the 'web' is, but I want to check it out." - common people.
I fully expect the same for the tablet, though I doubt it will ever be as popular as the Web on the cellphone which is nice and compact, plus always on your person. Tablets might find a niche for students taking notes, but I doubt it (it's easier to just use pen and paper especially for writing formulas).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I believe GP was referring to actual physical real estate. 2048x1536 is kind of useless on a 10" screen.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A tablet is not suited to those things. However, those things are not what the vast majority of people use computers for.
Tablets are just fine for checking your Facebook, watching YouTube and Netflix, sending emails, and playing the sorts of games most people play.
I know a few people who have ditched their home internet and just have an iPad and a 3G wifi hotspot. It's all the computer they need, and it carries easily. Heck, it fits in a good-sized purse.
Thats where connecting it to an external monitor or TV comes in...it works wired or wireless. The point is there is plenty of room to get stuff done...especially if your comparing it to a netbook.
To paraphrase -- The killer app for the tablet will be an air keyboard.
Only if you mean "killer app" as in one that will kill the popularity of tablets. Otherwise it's exactly the opposite of what I meant.
You want to rest your hands while performing input for long periods, and get tactile feedback from a keyboard. Neither is possible with an air keyboard, and you get both gorilla arm syndrome plus an uncertainty in typing.
ha, ha! I read that as 'oh bitter, bitter onions..."
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I still don't understand why no one has done a thin client tablet, with the real horsepower being a server, or even just server software, sitting on your home network somewhere. Most everyone has a desktop or laptop with multiple times more computing power than a tablet. Use wireless N to get the speeds you need for input and display and you could have 10 tablets for $50 each running off a single PC shoved in a closet somewhere. Yeah, no portability, but portability isn't the be all end all for many users.
"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.
When voice recognition gets a little better writing a thesis or book might actually work ok on a tab. Now CAD/CAM will be a little tougher.
I'm pretty sure that Apple sells more iPads in a year than all Betamax decks ever produced.
To a certain extent, the form factor is more novel than the features.
Personally, I find it more comfortable to browse google maps when I can scroll and zoom with my fingers and be sitting in a comfy chair. Same goes for reading web pages. Hell, I once used mine to review a 1000 page PDF document for a proposal our company was working on -- and I did it in a lawnchair in the backyard for some of the time.
Being able to watch a movie on a plane is far easier with a tablet than a laptop -- I know this because my boss and I were on the same flight a few months ago, and when the guy in front of him reclined, there wasn't enough room to keep his laptop fully open. On the next trip, he'd gotten himself an iPad and is loving it.
Unless you think the smart phone is also a novelty because you can do the same and more with a PC, I fail to see why the tablet is any different. It's a scaled up version of the same thing. I don't want a smart phone because I already have a tablet, and I'm not that interested in one. I know people who already had smart phones who don't want a tablet for pretty much the same reason.
I can lie down on my sofa to play games, read an ebook in bed, surf the web from my lazy boy or my lawn chair. I can also get quick wireless in most airports and when I visit family. So, for just a quick email to the wife while I'm traveling or even checking my company email, it's very convenient.
I didn't buy it to do 'work' on; I've got a desktop and a laptop for that -- it's mostly an entertainment device, and most people buying them know that. If you don't expect it to do the same things as your PC, you don't really feel it's missing something. I find I use mine entirely differently than I would my desktop.
I predict you'll be proven wrong about the long-term viability of the form factor, because most of the people I know have some form of tablet (HP, Apple, Android ... you name it), and all of them get a lot of usage out of them.
I travelled for business about 9-10 times over the last 14 months -- every time I had both my iPad and my laptop, and in all cases I only ever used the iPad. Mostly because the iPad is much more portable, has way better battery life than my laptop, and lets me get to the things I need much more quickly (since it takes about 5 seconds to turn it on and connect to wi-fi).
Slashdot is a horrible representative sample for this kind of thing ... because most of us are looking to do much more exotic things than most consumers. But most people, most of the time, are much more passively consuming stuff and just noodling about on the web. For that, a tablet is a really good choice.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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
Unless a tablet can batch render to the same degree as my 128,000 node cluster I built in the basement, it's totally useless and of no use to anyone, anywhere, at anytime, EVER!
I drank what? -- Socrates
I use RDP on my ipad on a daily basis... It is a little rough with 1024x768, but usable for the basic needs. I can set up a term app and do whatever I want in *nix with a physical keyboard.
There Can Be Only One...
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
VMWare View, RDP Lite, and iSSH apps lets you handle a real machines through a tablet but then that's just remote computing. There's also an iPad app that lets you use your iPad as an additional screen of a desktop system. I'm not sure I've seen anything that will let you work with local files on a tablet but do the crunching on a desktop system.
What I'd like to see is a tablet dock that includes GPU's, external monitors, full range of peripherals, and storage, but is still based on the tablet OS; not just sync'ing. That'd be cool.
I drank what? -- Socrates
What you're missing is that a tablet is, by and large, an appliance. It has few user-serviceable parts, and its app ecosystem is intentionally locked down to make it hard for people to stray outside the lines of safe computing. This isn't true for any PC.
The reason this matters is that the average person is not that great at safely using a PC. Not everybody is a sysadmin; not everybody knows how to check the checksums of a downloaded piece of software against a known source of checksum info to determine if the app is a legitimate copy, read reviews of the app on various trusted download sites to make sure it isn't spyware, and so on. And a lot of people who do know how still don't want to have to bother with it. For folks in either category, the limited app ecosystem means that they don't have to worry about viruses, spyware (for the most part), or any of the other nasties that accompany the more flexible full-blown PC.
For people like you and me, tablets can be somewhat limiting. For the vast majority of my friends who don't work for a major computer company (and even a lot of the folks who do), tablets are a godsend. They free the user from having to think about the computer itself so that they can focus on getting the job done. Up until they need to do something that the tablet can't do (whether because the software doesn't exist or the OS doesn't allow it), the locked-down tablet will always be preferred to the PC simply because it doesn't break as often. More importantly, outside of niche markets, the majority of computer users never run into significant things that the tablet can't do.
And this is why in 2011, at 40.7 million units according to ComputerWorld, sales of a single tablet—the iPad—were almost 12% as big as the entire computer market by themselves, and growing. Turns out that the killer app is not being able to get killed by a killer app.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Of course I understood human nature; I'm smarter than 99% of humanity and what I want is obviously what everyone else needs as well. 'Cause I is smart.
I drank what? -- Socrates
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.
For mobile computing the form factor just isn't there at a 10" screen. If I'm out and about, I'll be using my phone. The screen is small, but it's portable. If I'm at home want to get something done, I'm going to set my phone on the desk and link it wirelessly to a 24" monitor, keyboard and mouse.
The recent Ubuntu on Android demo is where I see things going. You bring your computer with you everywhere you go and use the touchscreen for convenience or use whatever input and output devices are around when you need more capability and a real OS.
Go ahead, try and write a thesis on your iPad.
There's an app for that (at least if you're in math).
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/tex-touch/id377627321?mt=8
I need to preface my comments with the face that I only have an Asus Transformer Android tablet. I don't have an iPad and haven't used one, therefore the following comment may be incorrect.
The problem with using my tablet for any serious content creation, like writing a thesis, is that the applications provided are, in my opinion, shit. My Asus Transformer has the keyboard and I use a bluetooth mouse. However, trying to use something like Documents to Go is a total pain in the ring. The spreadsheet side of things isn't any better than the word processer. Tried using the Google Docs App on an Android tablet? Also shit.
And browsers, which are meant for consuming content, also largely shit. I have Dolphin, Opera and Firefox Beta all installed. I have to use all three at different times to effectively load various sites. Then they will frequently crash, which is shit. They're also slow when compared to my desktop browser.
I use a product called Hootsuite to manage multiple social network presences, for work. In a browser this is a brilliant service. The App on Android is shit.
The best thing about my Android browser is the default mail client and its ability to connect to an Exchange server, which I am yet to master with Thunderbird. Skype also works better than Skype for Linux.
Overall, my tablet experience has been pretty poor, and I'm not convinced by the whole App mindset. My Transformer gathers dust most of the time, and may end up on eBay soon.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
So most likely you'll have a tablet in conjunction with a desktop or laptop. Or maybe you'll have all three. What I wrote does not mean that people will stop buying PCs or laptops, but simply that eventually tablets will be good and cheap enough that a very large percentage of the population will have them. People didn't stop buying consoles when the home computer became cheap enough, and they didn't stop buying desktops when laptops became cheap enough. Many people just own all these devices. Tablets will eventually fall into this too.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Designers thought of them as minaturized desktops.
Apples [perhaps accidental] innovation was to consider them enlarge smartphones.
Thats where connecting it to an external monitor or TV comes in...it works wired or wireless.
Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a tablet? Why not just use a desktop?
Hmm, how ironic :(
The assumption that tablets will outsell PCs within a decade is based on current growth rates remaining steady. That's a pretty big assumption.
Because tablets are a relatively new device they are currently in a growth market phase of their life cycle. Once the market has reached a saturation point (and we don't know where that saturation point is), then it will enter the same type of market that PCs are in: where people are buying replacements when their old one wears out.
Of course you might be right in that all you have to do with a tablet is hook it up to a keyboard and mouse (whether bluetooth or something else) and you've got a useful, but if that's the case why not just hook up your phone to a bluetooth keyboard, mouse and display and have something even more portable?
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
Thesis writing is a fair example of doing real work on a PC. You might be correct in that doing real work with a PC is a niche. But that doesn't help anyone argue that tablets are anything but toys.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Actually, I would think that CAD/CAM would be a perfect use case for a touch screen. The iPad might be a little small for most people (although I know a kitchen designer who uses an iPad) but for really industrial uses how about a Microsoft Surface?
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
You're missing the point. You can connect all the peripherals you want, when you want them
But you're still hobbled by a toy UI. Real work requires crossreferencing data, literature, documentation, and your own notes. This isn't feasible on a tablet.
That seems to be the model people want.
I'm not surprised that people want tablets. They're toys. People like toys.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why use a tablet at all in such a case? I guess if you had ten users your setup might make sense, butwhy not just use desktops?
Yeah, no portability, but portability isn't the be all end all for many users.
Then why use tablets?
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.
You could write a thesis on a an iPad, you just need a bluetooth keyboard.
I have written research posts for an online university course (taking a masters degree) using the on-screen keypad. Granted, it took MUCH longer than it would have on my desktop with dual 24" LCD displays. It took about 3x as long as it would have on my laptop, but the form factor allowed me to work while my mother was shopping for shoes (my parents were visiting from Canada and she wanted to do some shopping). Plus, the battery lasted well beyond the 4 hour limit of my laptop. The point is that if your thesis concerns any sort of field work or if you need to get work done while traveling, it may be the best alternative for the situation.
I do agree, however, that the current word processing options for the iPad doe not offer any advanced formatting options, you're pretty much stuck with the basics.
For me, this is the killer app. For more than 30 years, I've organized my life in a little three-ring binder filled with 8.5 x 5.5" paper. Addresses, phone numbers, to-do lists, how-tos for things I do infrequently, key paragraphs for papers that struck me while I was sitting in the park waiting for a kid, and voluminous (in total) notes including formulas, sketches of graphs, line-and-box drawings. Notes from the doctors office. I'd really like to replace it with a tablet, since the tablet can also do other things. But I've got to have good digital paper, which implies really high-res touch (for my crabbed little handwriting) and a stylus.
The Microsoft Courier with its two displays had a lot of potential. I had visions of taking notes in the right-hand pane, and flipping pages by "pushing" the current page over to the more passive left-hand pane in order to get a fresh sheet of paper while still providing access to the previous page(s).
I'm getting old enough to begin to wonder if I'll ever be able to buy what I want.
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...
#39365465 - timestamped 1 minute earlier
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
Oops, it appears that one needs an external program to complie the source files.
So as I see the future, the standard tech consumer will have:
Most people are not doing real work on computers. Most people let computers and the few of us that run them do that kind of work. For most people, computers provide information, entertainment, and communication. Order will vary.
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.
The reason Apple is selling gads of iPads is that they address a question you don't quite understand. The question is: Does a tablet replace a PC (desktop or laptop). For you the answer is no because you have all sorts of uses that requires a PC. For people who don't use a PC other than surfing, email, and FaceBook, the answer is yes. For those people, they might want a new UI as keyboard and mouse is more difficult to use if you are not sitting down.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Your comment about "novel features" is precisely the problem with keeping the inventive momentum going that Bricklin mentions.
The odds of the next "killer app" of any kind coming from people like you or me who have preconceived notions of what a "computer" is and how it gets used are slim to none. It's not that we aren't creative enough, but that our thinking is marred by too much baggage about what should be done. We already have this mental list of "rules" about what good UI design is, what people want to use computers for, and so on.
Recently there was a fellow talking about his iPad who brought up the point that he could stream the media to a PC, an Apple TV, or other devices, depending on where he was, without losing his place in a movie. This isn't an earth-shattering "killer app" like Visicalc was, but it's something I would never have thought of pointing out as a benefit. Not because it isn't a benefit, but because I would never have even tried to do it -- I would have just finished watching the movie on the tablet that I used to start watching it on a commuter train.
As I've thought about them for the past year or two, and worked on my own tools and technology, I've come up with a couple ideas that I'm keeping to myself. Will they be innovative? Yes. Will they result in "killer apps"? Probably not.
But my ideas might result in some killer pipe glue that changes the way we connect applications to each other in a world of globalized clusters forming logical clouds. Not because it's never been done before, but because it's never been easy before.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Speaking as a professional CNC programmer, I'd say the touch screen interface is lacking for the application. Most CNC programmers I know, myself included, use two of the largest screens they can get their hands on to maximize screen real estate. There's an awful lot of data that you have to get from the computer to your head. We also tend to use Space Pilots and the like for view control, and high end trackballs (or mice for some) for fast but precise selection (no, not that line, I meant this one!) I also prefer to set a bunch of hotkeys and use keyboard access to menu commands because then I can keep my mouse pointer close to the geometry I'm selecting, which makes it much faster. I can then get rid of most of the toolbars and free up more screen area. I think trying to do CAM on a pad would be an exercise in frustration.
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
The first people I know that had iPads were businessmen. Reading and typing emails and basic shared documents is definitely easier than using a non-portable pc, since most businessmen are in meetings, not sitting at their desk. I'm not quite sure why the base line is that tablets are "just a toy". As if toys are inferior, or that every computing improvement begins life as a toy.
Typing on a keyboard is not how hands, arms, or shoulders rest. A keyboard replacement will decouple my hands so that they can be at rest, which is at my sides. And yes, we need feedback, but tactile feedback is not necessary. My new smartphone uses audible feedback, which has worked very well.
I can't pick up my desktop and use it on the train to work. Decoupling isn't just for code.
The idea would be to have 1 powerful server that would serve multiple users. One box to maintain, upgrade, and update. One box to store you files, one box to install programs on. Think of it like a mini-cloud. Obviously the average home doesn't have 10 users, but the average classroom, library, place of business does (and yes, I think tablets can have a role to play in a business setting, used along side PCs and laptops).
But you can pick up your external monitor and use it on the train to wotk?
Remember ... why tablet PCs failed the first two times they were introduced.
Because Microsoft tried to cram a desktop interface on a tablet. Now they're trying to cram a tablet interface on the desktop, which will likely blow up on their faces just the same.
Circumcision is child abuse.
If the machine is powerful enough to serve ten users, will it be easy enough to deploy in such a setting?
mod_parent++;
On my iPad, I have a database with my entire reference library available for download and viewing. I also have note-taking applications. And a perfectly functional word processor that works fine with a bluetooth keyboard.
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
Touch screens do not necessarily suffer from holding your arm out. You hold them in your hands (like a touch-operated phone), or rest your hands next to and on them (like a trackpad or trackpoint). You just move one or more fingers to do things -- if the app is designed that way, putting controls near where your fingers would sit.
I wonder how many people commenting have actually spent hours and hours with an iPad (as opposed to other tablets or non at all).
-Dan Bricklin
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
A spreadsheet on a 10" screen is simply impossible to use.
We use a notebook with a 17" screen in the field because we have to be able to read what's on the freaking screen and enter data into those tiny cells. A tablet just wouldn't work.
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
I still don't understand why no one has done a thin client tablet, with the real horsepower being a server, or even just server software, sitting on your home network somewhere. Most everyone has a desktop or laptop with multiple times more computing power than a tablet. Use wireless N to get the speeds you need for input and display and you could have 10 tablets for $50 each running off a single PC shoved in a closet somewhere. Yeah, no portability, but portability isn't the be all end all for many users.
Because thin clients suck and you're never going to get the case, screen, ram, and even minimal hardware to run a thin client for $50 less than the full tablet let alone total. Add in that the case you propose, use in a limited manner around a computer with wireless is such a limited feature that you'd never sell enough to get economy of manufacturing. Maybe if wireless were ubiquitous in all situations, but it's not, and probably never will be if you are talking about free open wireless. Still, it all goes back to that for the price of a thin client, you can usually have the real thing that doesn't stop working if you lose your single point of failure at the server (at the long line of other single points of failure such as the wireless).
Of course, I'm biased because I've been hearing about thin clients for the last 15 years and why they should replace PCs, and each case I've seen implimented has been a complete failure where PCs would have worked better and cheaper.
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...
I have an iPod Touch but not an iPad. Although overall I'm satisfied with the device,I have some of the same experiences.
-Word processing and spreadsheet apps are poor, especially at the free pricepoint. I'm not looking for MS Office 2010 capability. I'd be satisfied with '97
-I haven't had a web browser crash this much in the past 10 years.
-Skype is bad. It's bad on Windows, it's bad on iOS. Frequent crashes, poor performance.
-More and more I'm suffering random unexplained bog-downs. Though the UI isn't giving feedback, it is registering my keypresses, so it will after stalling for a while catch up to what I'm typing.
You're forgetting input devices and UI. Go ahead, try and write a thesis on your iPad. You'll see why PCs will always be superior pretty quickly.
You're missing the overall point (which, admittedly, wasn't very well made): a tablet fulfills (or will fulfill) the needs of the majority of people. To go into more detail:
1. A "majority" is not "all". No sane person is saying that a tablet will, in the next few years, fulfill the needs of everyone. However, as most people just consume media and data (web browsing, email, IM/messaging, etc.), a tablet works just fine.
2. No, a "majority" really is not "all". Not everyone simply "consumes media and data", and a tablet won't work for them. Examples include people who do significant software development, people who analyze data (spreadsheets), and people who heavy-duty number-crunching simulations of varying types. There are many other examples. Of course, a tablet won't work for them. (I suppose I should include hardcore 3D games, too, as the keyboard/gaming keypad/mouse input combo is still a much superior UI. :-)
3. While there are many examples for which a tablet isn't good, your thesis example isn't very good. As other people have pointed out, there is such a thing as a bluetooth keyboard, and a tablet & keyboard will work just fine for a thesis that doesn't have a lot of pictures, plots, and diagrams.
4. No, the PC isn't going away, but it's long-term marketshare is going to fall into the toilet. Like the horse carriage, blacksmith, and buggy whip when the automobile came out, the long-term outlook for PCs isn't good. (And, just for emphasis, let me point out that horse carriages, blacksmiths, and buggy whips are still made today -- just not in the numbers of yesteryear.)
5. Don't ignore the potential of "AI". For example, today, Siri is like a 1-year-old baby. Wait until it grows up.
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.
The problem with using my tablet for any serious content creation, like writing a thesis, is that the applications provided are, in my opinion, shit.
And this is where MS is hoping to win with Windows 8. Word on a tablet... or well any other decent PC creation app.
And yes, we need feedback, but tactile feedback is not necessary. My new smartphone uses audible feedback, which has worked very well.
It works very well when tapping one key after another.
When doing touch typing, it's not useful because your brain won't know which key the feedback was for. With tactile feedback, this is not a problem.
Also, when writing 50-80 wpm (the average for touch typists), it's just going to be cacophony, and no more useful than the sound of hammer/ball/disc strikes were on electrical typewriters. IBM, Honeywell, Remington and others made sure there was tactile feedback for the keys, because audible feedback just wouldn't do.
Every app a tablet could run, a PC could already run
Yeah, but Angry Birds is shit on a PC.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Eventually the processor, the display, and everything else will be "good enough" for anything anybody wants to use a tablet for.
You're forgetting input devices and UI. Go ahead, try and write a thesis on your iPad. You'll see why PCs will always be superior pretty quickly.
While I agree with you in general, the percentage of people who write theses on their PCs must be vanishingly small compared to the number of people who just watch videos of babies and dogs.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
For mobile computing the form factor just isn't there at a 10" screen. If I'm out and about, I'll be using my phone. The screen is small, but it's portable. If I'm at home want to get something done, I'm going to set my phone on the desk and link it wirelessly to a 24" monitor, keyboard and mouse.
So what you're saying is that a phone or tablet is as good as a desktop PC, provided you add the peripherals to turn it into, well, a desktop PC?
That's pretty much like saying that my portable mp3 player is as good as an expensive hi-fi system, so long as I hook it up to an expensive hi-fi amplifier and speakers.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't see how even in theory you could make a decent spreadsheet app for something with the screen size of an iPod Touch.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
but the form factor allowed me to work while my mother was shopping for shoes
You fail both as a scholar, and a son.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That's exactly what I'm saying. Your MP3 player IS as a good as an expensive hi-fi if you hook it up to an expensive hi-fi. What good does that hi-fi do if you don't have your music to play it through? Data is the true value of computing.
A good touch OS and a good desktop OS are completely different. Use the right tool for the right job. On a small screen you sacrifice usability for portability. But why have totally separate environments and have to maintain two sets of data? Just take your desktop computer everywhere you go, because it will have a small screen attached to it should you need to use it on the go, but when you're somewhere that has desktop input and output devices available, hook your computer up to that and use a true desktop environment.
A horseless carriage is much faster and doesn't require maintenance during periods when you're not using it.
For the vast majority of people, as far as I can tell, PCs are used as toys. Gaming has always been a major driver in the market. Outside of the IT sector, I don't know anyone that does anything on a home computer that can't be done on a tablet. Work computers are a different story, but to dismiss the tablet as a toy is the same mindset that missed the boat on personal computers and the internet
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?