CIOs have a tough problem to solve.  It is typically their responsibility to maintain all of the applications within their network, safely and securely.  This means CIOs have to say ‘no’ a lot.  Lately, however, CIOs have been using a secret weapon that can help them reduce risks, bounce back from downtime and manage several times more computer resources at once.  In essence, they are able to say ‘yes’ much more frequently.  This is a dream state for both businesses and consumers and it is enabled by a technology known as virtualization.

Virtualization decouples the operating system from the underlying machine, allowing you to spin-up any operating system on demand.  This makes competing operating systems more accessible than ever.  This capability fueled the growth of infrastructure as a service which revolutionized IT resource management.  This really is the foundation of cloud computing, which marked the beginning of the end for some software compatibility issues since many productivity applications that used to be [enter favorite OS here]-based are now appearing free, online and delivered through the browser.  Further, the ability to spin-up Windows from Mac made it easier for a consumer to decide to purchase a Mac without giving up desktop software that needed to run on Windows.  Consumers were liberated from vendor lock-in and had more choices.  Virtualization was therefore a big win for consumers but has made it much more competitive for desktop operating systems that can no longer monopolize your overall experience.

With the relevance of the desktop OS eroding, many platform strategies started looking to the cloud and mobile to capture the shift in demand.  The two forces combine to create a full spectrum of offerings beyond the benefits of a single device, which include specialized marketplaces, cloud storage, music synch, home entertainment device interop, lifestyle accessories etc…  This is where virtualization becomes an intriguing wildcard.

Enter BlueStacks.  BlueStacks uses an embedded virtualization approach that lets you run native Android applications within Windows.  This capability merges two very large user groups and merges the benefits on both platforms.  You can use BlueStacks on your Windows 7 computer to spare your mobile phone’s battery, save on mobile network data charges, or generally free yourself from device dependency.  Maybe you want to configure your Android applications with a proper keyboard, like adding routes to a transit tracker or typing a shopping list into Springpad to synch to your mobile device.   Maybe you need the Google Authenticator app to login to Google Docs on your laptop and you don’t have your mobile device handy.  Or maybe your phone’s battery is dead.  As the platform arms race heats up, this dual approach is compelling.  Why lock into one platform when you can consolidate two?

Windows 7 desktop view. My selected Android applications loaded into BlueStacks

Windows 7 desktop view. BlueStacks running the Android Chicago Transit Tracker

Going forward, the next logical step would be enabling the mobile device itself to swap between platforms. The iDroid project has demonstrated it can run Android on a jailbroken iPhone – in dual boot mode.   Microsoft’s approach in their ambitious Windows 8 vision is more usable by switching between desktop and tablet mode, albeit both running proprietary instances of windows.  Imagine that you would no longer need a specific device to get access to a specific application.  You could port your own user experience with any device you have adapted to any interface you encounter.  You just switch between virtual machine instances (VMs) on your device as needed.  Imagine never having to configure an application again – the VM will have restricted OS access so you can pre-load all the settings required.  Even still, you may ask why someone would really need to dynamically switch platforms (switching two instances of Android or switching Android with iOS).  It’s not so much that you, the consumer, really needs it as much as you, the corporate citizen does.

Consider this – you work for a small company that is paranoid about security and won’t allow iPads because malware was once introduced to the internal network from being used by carefree kids at home.  With virtualization on mobile devices, you can now purchase almost any device you want, but while at work, you get a pre-loaded virtualized, secured instance that allows IT to manage the safety of the devices on their network.  Further, the VM can be preloaded with all of the productivity tools you are standardized on (e.g. Exchange email/contacts, Dropbox, Yammer, Salesforce etc…).  Your iPad can now be used safely at home by the kids as designed, but your work assets are encrypted and physically inaccessible.  This is exactly the type of abstraction that can help thwart network intrusions, whether introduced from downloads or usb-connected devices.

iDroid project’s dual boot screen on a jail broken iPhone 3G

Legal issues will likely prevent virtualization from becoming ubiquitous across mobile devices in these early days.  After all, Mac OS X is not legally permitted to run inside of a virtualized instance on non-Mac computers (although you can run Windows from a Mac if you have a Windows license).  As our mobile lifestyles evolve, the context of our problems will change.  Within a single household, consumers will want platform independence and a consolidated way to manage all of their devices much like the CIOs of an enterprise today.  So while some applications of virtualization may not be endorsed, virtualization is proven and is mostly limited by licensing with proprietary platforms.

For the past few years Roundarch has been partnering with Avis Budget Group to develop a consolidated digital strategy.   In June, Aman Datta, vice president of Roundarch, and Kathryn Kiritsis, director of online marketing at Avis Budget Group presented at the Association of Travel Marketing Executives (ATME) Travel Marketing Conference in Boston, MA.  AMTE, chaired by Henry Harteveldt of Forrester Research, is a non-profit, professional association made up of experienced and innovative travel industry marketers.  We were very excited to share our strategy and the success of our partnership with Avis Budget Group at the conference.  Roundarch and Avis Budget Group have partnered to focus on a “go to where the customer is” strategy for digital marketing/commerce including a redesigned Web site, mobile apps, fully-functional booking widgets and a comprehensive optimization strategy.

The first step in this strategy was to develop personas to serve as the foundation.

After developing the personas we worked with Avis to completely redesign the car rental experience on Avis.com.  The rental process was reduced from 5 clicks on different pages to 3 clicks all on one page while displaying choices and prices dynamically to improve conversion.  Then we expanded to the mobile space with the first-to-market iPhone app for Avis.  We continue to work with Avis Budget Group to grow in the mobile space with apps on other platforms as well as site extensions that allow Avis to take their experience to affiliate sites.  This mobile strategy has resulted in a 300% increase in mobile revenues.  We have also partnered with Avis Budget Group to focus on optimization including multivariate testing and improved organic search.  The case for optimization is compelling:

• Revenue from SEO has doubled each of the 4 years since Avis upgrades its SEO efforts with a 40% decrease in SEM costs.
• Together search makes up over 25% of online revenue for both the Avis and Budget Brands.
• Budget conversion rate more than doubles for incremental SEO traffic.
• Landing page conversion from search traffic increased by 30%.

Recently, Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research published a case study outlining how successfully Avis has used personas to drive SEO, specifically organic search, in the past few years.

“Over the last few years, we’ve invested a considerable amount of money on this SEO project, but it’s still less than 10% of what we spend on paid search.  SEO is more cost-effective than paid search, so we need to strike the best balance.”

John Peebles, vice president of Avis Budget Group

Our partnership with Avis Budget Group has shown that a comprehensive digital strategy is essential in the market today.  We are continuing to not just plan for the future of digital marketing, but evolve with new technologies and design the future of digital marketing to best align with the customer.

Forrester’s IT Forum 2011 was an insightful three day conference of direction setting for the IT professional. With over 90 different sessions across 9 tracks focused on the various roles within IT from the CIO on down, there was something for everyone. Although the sessions had great information to impart, the biggest draw for all the attendees was the ability of everyone to actually schedule one-on-one discussions with the analysts themselves in their fields of expertise. I’ll briefly go over the primary themes of the forum and also the additional wisdom we gleaned from our one-on-one sessions. The three main themes at Forrester this year were: Business Technology (BT), mobile, and the App Internet. All the themes were relevant to emphasizing the continued value of developing a cohesive digital strategy for every enterprise no matter the size.

The first theme of the conference was Business Technology – “Speeding up at the intersection of business and technology”. While the term itself isn’t apparent at first glance, the subheading provided a clue. Forrester defines Business Technology as the future state of IT. This is where the business side of the enterprise increases their role in procuring their own technology solutions instead of using the traditional IT provided ones. Forrester says that as the general business workforce gets more and more tech savvy, they are more likely to bring in solutions they have from the consumer realm into the business realm. So in order for an enterprise to be agile in being able to rollout solutions quickly, this change in roles had to be embraced by IT. IT would continue to provide its expertise around scalability and security in the form of consulting to the business. We can actually see this in our offices with the proliferation of smart phones and tablets that people bring in to do work. This phenomenon is something that we have been encountering with our clients at Roundarch as well where the ease of procuring SaaS (Software as a Service) based services has allowed the business side to roll out technology without IT being the one to bring it in-house.

The next theme was the continuing rise of mobile and the need for having a plan for its growth. Mobile devices (tablets, smart phones) are becoming more ubiquitous and robust in processing power as well as storage. Companies need to have a plan on how to tackle the increase in consumption of their digital content, which traditionally has been made available on their web sites, on these devices. Forrester presented several levels where companies today needed to decide how to distribute their content to these new mobile mediums. Should companies support feature phones? Should companies support mobile web (web browsers on smart phones and tablets)? Should companies put all their resources into native mobile apps to gain access to richer functionality provided by the devices such as geolocation, local storage, or other features such as the built-in camera. The answer to this is never simple of course, and Forrester presented some good concrete recommendations on how companies should approach answering these questions. For our clients, we have enjoyed great success in providing clients with a hybrid approach of implementing liquid framework designs in order to allow all web sites to scale to the various form factors. As with everything, the fit will vary depending on the unique requirements of each client, so a thorough understanding is needed to provide the right solution rather than a one size fits all approach.

The final theme, presented by the Forrester CEO and founder George Colony, was the term of the “App Internet”. This was a forecast of the future where the increase in capability of computing power in devices will lead to a proliferation of different “app stores” for various devices not just phones. Increasingly tech savvy users will prefer the richer capabilities and user experience supported by more native apps on various devices. This, George theorizes, will lead corporate IT to focus more on providing functionality through apps instead of the traditional web. It is the universe of these new app stores that comprises the new reality of the “App Internet”.

It would be interesting to see whether this prediction comes to fruition, but with the splintering of devices even on one base operating system (think Android tablet, Android phones with different form factors, etc), we think the biggest bang for the buck for our clients right now, looking several years out, is to still build out capabilities in being able to do more with less. This can be done by doing the following: designing compelling user interfaces than can scale multiple form factors, architecting a strategy for making content as reusable as possible across different channels,  implementing solutions using content management systems as repositories, and creating a service layer to federate that collateral across myriad service consumers.

In reviewing the events of the forum, we found a great metaphor of the dynamic state of flux that IT faces today. The first day we had to navigate the confusing Venetian-themed streets of the Palazzo Hotel. “The venue was right off of St. Mark’s Square to the left past the Blue Man Group theater overlooking the Grand Canal with its gondoliers ferrying tourist beneath an artificial sky” – these were the initial directions given at the hotel front-desk. Easy! After taking many wrong turns along the way, and asking lots of questions from people we encountered, we finally found the conference venue. It was worth it because the forum did deliver on its promise of providing a map of the major areas that IT needed to focus on, if it is to keep pace with our ever faster rates of change. You first had to get there though, and the journey itself was part of the insight.

What if your mobile device could listen to the world around you and activate actions based on your preferences?  The actions could initiate a number of capabilities on your mobile device from displaying a map to executing a purchase transaction.  If you own a smart phone, you are one of 45.5 million mobile consumers that have devices with the capability of processing sound signals.  The device simply listens through the microphone, captures a sound signal then translates the signal into a digital signature which is used to lookup a corresponding command for that signature.   This capability is perhaps one of the most seamless ways to interact with the digital world- no wires, no configurations, no typing… just listening.   The opportunities are very exciting.  As you work through the rushing ideas, you will begin to realize that many possibilities have been addressed by other means… but not all.  Let’s explore some of the benefits and practical applications for this particular concept.

At this stage in our human-computer evolution, due to the mobility of computers, most of us may excuse ourselves from a social setting to interact with our devices in the middle of an otherwise social event.  Some are even less well-mannered than that.  I recall going to an Interactive SXSW conference the year after Twitter made its social media debut.  What struck me most about that conference was how ironically anti-social some of the etiquette was.  Online, real-time socializing seemed to be where the excitement was.  Sure, most people were very friendly, but they were also frequently buried in their mobile devices attempting to stay connected.  There has to be a better way to use your device more seamlessly in a social setting.  For starters, imagine if you are at a conference like that and you didn’t have to type anything into your mobile device to register for a Twitter feed of a favorite presenter.  Or, imagine sharing your contact information during a meeting with a new team, without Bluetooth configuration, using sound commands between devices- passively, as a matter of habit.  You just saved a bunch of time without disrupting the social interaction.

While there are many potential applications for mobile devices, including tablet pcs, the sound command paradigm may be best leveraged by a sort of broadcast scenario.  A situation where you have a captive and targeted audience that may want to know more about what you are broadcasting.   When you use this formula, the possibilities become a little more focused without straying into the paradigms already addressed by QR codes, SMS text messaging and Bluetooth capabilities.  Here are some thoughts:

• Radio – Synch the listener to related information of the broadcast, supplementing the experience with visuals.

• Auctions – Synch the audience to additional details of a product on display.

• Public Service Language Translation – Metro trains could broadcast sound signals that will render transit and location information on your device in your chosen language.

There are some really exciting opportunities to explore.   While sound will not address all of our computer interaction deficiencies, it is a big step in that direction.  Over time, I’m sure these capabilities will become much more robust and wide-spread.  We’ve got a lot to look forward to.

Read the full white paper here.

My second day at Microsoft MIX10 centered on a focus group dealing with building connected applications that span multiple device types and form factors. The ability of MIX10 to bring people together in a room to talk about a particular topic is such a great feature of the conference.

Notable members of the Microsoft planning team, Windows phone team, and Windows SDK team came together to chat about concerns surrounding developing and designing a user experience for multiple devices—desktop, browser, mobile, etc. Great insight was provided as to how Microsoft gathers feedback from its partners.

We had a very interesting discussion about the modality of software where we broke mobile devices down into two modes: an ID to label your identity and a conduit for pushing content and serving as a control point. Keeping these two modes in mind, we spent a lot of time on how user experience is specific to devices, which is generally accepted as a benefit by end users.

Similarly, capturing context dominated a large portion of the conversation.

• Social context- at work or at home and differentiating work time from family time.

• Geographic location –traveling or commuting.

• Surrounding environment –in front of the television, at your desktop or without a mobile devise.

It’s incredible how much depth there is to context and how it informs the user experience.

What an amazing meeting of the most discerning minds in the industry. It was so great to see Microsoft focusing on user experience, technology, and design—which happens to be the core focus of Roundarch. I took away a lot from today’s roundtable, a definite highlight of MIX10.

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

This week, I’m in Las Vegas for MIX10, a conference for web designers and developers to mix and mingle ideas about how to create superior user experiences. Now in its fifth year, MIX10 attracts the very best in the industry by exposing conference-goers to new Microsoft technologies and serving as a catalyst for inspiration to create the next generation of rich web applications. Some of the sessions included in the conference this year are: Designing and Delivering Scalable and Resilient Web Services, Securing Microsoft Silverlight Applications, Building Web Applications with Windows Azure Storage, and Stepping Outside the Browser with Microsoft Silverlight 4.

One of the biggest announcements at MIX10 came today in the form of new details surrounding the Windows Phone 7 Series (WP7s). This is Microsoft’s new power play in the world of mobile media. This series is a reset from Windows Mobile 6.5, which left a lot to be desired as a phone operating system. The new mobile platform, however, simplifies development by tying in well to the Microsoft ecosystem. The WP7s also features unified application and game development that creates synergy between products and services from the living room to the desktop to cloud to mobile and beyond. The applications and games are built with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft Expression Blend, two free designer and developer tools for phone development.

The WP7s platform possess many features common to most mobile platforms such as: touch gestures, accelerometer awareness support for direction and movement, maps integrated with Bing, push notification. My favorite feature, uniquely supported by WP7s, is try and buy awareness built into the application programming interface. This streamlines the process of converting trial to full versions of applications for developers and end users alike. The software development kit includes Silverlight support for building applications and XNA support for building games.

Another important announcement is the milestone release of Silverlight 4 next month. It will deliver features that combine with Microsoft’s existing tools for designers and developers, Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Blend, to create a substantial vehicle for application development. The workflow between designers and developers utilizing these two tools is the same across all platforms, a major bonus. The application development story continues to evolve as Silverlight deploys to browsers, desktops, and mobile media.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more from MIX10 …

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

Many people are turned off by iPhone app development because they don’t want to learn another platform (Objective-C). In many ways, learning Objective-C is taking a step backwards. Things like memory management and pointers are not something the modern web developer thinks about anymore. Also the idea of having to have different code bases for different mobile environments can be a huge deal breaker for adopting a platform. Nobody wants to create an application and maintain different versions of the app for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Not only is it a developer’s nightmare, but the costs can be huge. New development frameworks attempt to solve this problem by abstracting the specific phone platform so that the developer can write in one codebase (usually one that is familiar to the web developer) and deploy to multiple platforms. Here are some of those frameworks:

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. It is free to use and can deploy to iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry.

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is another free and open source development tool. You can build cross-platform apps that deploy to desktop, iPhone and Android using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. I’ve personally tried Appcelerator and have nothing but good things to say about it.

Monotouch

MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and Apple’s iPod Touch devices. This is great for your typical Microsoft shop or enterprise that has a strong .NET skillset. A 1 year corporate license will run you about $1000.

These are just a few of the tools you can use to do cross platform mobile development while leveraging existing web development skills. It represents an exciting time because as traditional web developers we can quickly and easily create mobile applications. Speaking from my own experience over the weekend, my friend and I created an iPhone app in less than 12 hours using Appcelerator Titanium for the Day of Mobile Hackathon, and we went on to win Best iPhone app. Not too shabby for 2 people who didn’t know any Object-C walking in.

It has traditionally been assumed that enterprise users are very transactional in focus and not interested in fluffy experience stuff.  There are a few key ideas that no longer hold in this assumption.  First of all, the fluffy experience stuff isn’t just fluff.  Enterprise users, even more than consumers, don’t have time to waste.  Forcing an enterprise customer to porpoise in and out of multiple systems through various interfaces and different logins to accomplish a simple, logical task flow is bad for them and your relationship with them.

In the early days of the Web, people were happy to have the ability to get at information and perform self-service.  Enterprise systems exploded with Web offerings and experimentation in the early 2000’s only to have money pulled back after the dot com bubble burst.  These systems continued to creep along and organically evolve into cobbled together sets of offerings.  Meanwhile, this channel moved from being experimental to a core business channel and in many industries, such as financial services, it is now the primary interface to customers.

These customers don’t just interact with the tortured experiences they have with their business partners. In their personal lives they have experiences on Amazon.com, Facebook, iGoogle, and iTunes.  These users come into work and legitimately ask themselves why the business partners they spend millions of dollars on subject them to an experience so far below what they get from the above consumer offerings for free.  It’s this paradox that is fundamentally the forcing function behind the consumerization of the enterprise.

In this series of blog posts I am going to examine the factors a company must consider as the enterprise evolves.  First, I will examine the factors that are driving the consumerization of the enterprise key amongst these: The Shift-consumer digital experiences are driving the demand for a richer experience in the enterprise, The Arrival of the Digital Native in the Workforce-the impact of Digital Natives entering and moving up the workforce dramatically changes the talent pool.  Second, I will examine the factors that directly affect the capabilities of a company to proactively evolve the enterprise: Commoditization of IT and Offshoring-IT organizations are not structured in ways that are highly conducive to the idea of being user centric and consumer oriented, Existing Process/Structure-a basic understanding of User Experience and deliver capability tends to be the furthest most enterprises have gone and many have no capability at all.  Finally, I will provide a very compelling case study that exemplifies the success that can be obtained by reinventing a company’s digital offerings and experience.

Let’s start with examining why the consumerization of the enterprise is not just a luxury, but an essential next step for businesses.

The Shift
In the traditional enterprise model, organizations dictated the tools and technologies employees could use in an inside-out push model.  During this time, enterprise level investment from industry and government (military) fueled both the demand and profit for cutting-edge technological innovations.  New developments trickled down into consumer usage.

Source: Forrester, February 2008.  Embrace The Risks And Rewards Of Technology Populism

However, key forces have shifted the balance of influence, with employees and individuals voicing greater expectations on the tools and technologies they work with, creating a strong outside-in movement.  Users in turn bring their consumer expectations into their work environments.

This trend continues to gain momentum from a combination of:
1.    Vast consumer market growth and rate of tech innovation in consumer products.  Innovation is no longer concentrated at the enterprise level.
2.    Shifting social demographics of the workforce as the boomer generation shifts into retirement or other activities and a growing population of digital natives/millenials/generation Y enter the workforce bringing their native tech skills and expectations (more on this topic below).
3.    Blending work boundaries with employees expecting mobile access to information anytime, anywhere.  Workers are exercising greater flexibility with telecommuting/mobile computing accessing both work and personal information in a location agnostic way.

The enterprise 2.0 user is not attached to a desk in an office. Sixty-four percent telecommute at least part-time, compared with just 34% of non-enterprise 2.0 users.  And more enterprise 2.0 users spend time working at locations other than their desk around the office and at client sites than their nonuser counterparts.  As such, large numbers of enterprise 2.0 users have laptops (55%) and smartphones (27%) — the tools that allow for flexibility in working location.

Source: Forrester’s Workforce Technographics US, Canada, and UK Survey, Q3 2009.

Source: Forrester,  February 2008.  Embrace The Risks And Rewards of Technology Populism

The enormous volume of the consumer market and fast adoption cycles draws new tech innovation efforts.  Users in turn bring their consumer expectations into their work environments.

Source: Forrester, November 2008.  The Hour Of The Vendor Strategist: Three Mega Business Trends Will Reshape The Tech Sector”

Users enjoy rich interactions online and via a growing range of networked devices.  Similarly Social Media has permeated the fabric of life.  As people adapt to and embrace new technologies, the gap between consumer and enterprise experiences creates pressure on organizations to leverage the best tools to enhance worker productivity rather than hinder.

Smart phones/mobile is definitely a huge part of this phenomenon and will be explored further in a separate set of blog posts as it is worthy of its own focus.  Smart Mobile devices are not just valuable to hip consumers but also to sales and services resources in the field and to all workers on the go.  Likewise Social Media is worthy of extended discussion in its own post and is becoming an increasingly important part of the enterprise landscape.

Here Come the Digital Natives
The impact of Gen Y, also known as Millennials or Digital Natives, entering and moving up the workforce dramatically changes the talent pool.  As this generation has entered the workforce their expectations of being able to network and interact on-line has met with woefully poor intranet and extranet capabilities and experiences.  Having not grown up in a disconnected world they are intolerant of this lack of capability and not easily impressed by merely being able to get by with basic functionality  Often missed is that this group is far larger than the generation that proceeded it and depending on how they’re counted, larger than the famous Baby Boomer generation.  They are becoming recognized as an echo of the Boomers.  Much attention has been paid to the impact of the Baby Boom generation and their impending retirement but the impact of the Digital Natives is just beginning to be felt.

The key thing to remember is that increasingly users don’t view there to be a major distinction between the technologies they interact with in their personal lives and in their business lives.  Business in the consumer market emphasizes usability, personalization, and customer intimacy.  In contrast business service providers emphasize security, central control, compliance, cost efficiency, and standards.  When designing new or updated services, companies can leverage the benefits of consumer technology usability and personalization.  People who understand consumer behavior can translate best practices into the enterprise environment.  Total cost of ownership should take into account improvements in productivity and speed of response.

In the next post I will examine the organizational inhibitors that create setbacks as companies work toward the consumerization of the enterprise.

I won’t beat around the bush. The iPad is the future of computing. And I don’t want it. Well, not yet.

Just Like Any Other Tablet

Many look at the iPad as a wi-fi enabled 10” 1024×768 flatscreen with no USB port, SD card slot, or camera. They look at the iPhone OS and wonder why you’d use something with far less functionality than the hundreds of other tablets that have been on the market since the early 2000’s.

What they’re missing is the potential for the iPad to be the start of something new. Coming in the form of an evolved iPhone, something familiar to most of us, it doesn’t seem all that new or different.

But imagine, for a second, using the iPhone as your main computer. The reason you never have to dig through folders to find what you were working on, deal with software conflicts, or spend time cleaning up the iPhone after removing a piece of software is because the iPhone approaches computing from a different angle than the computers we’re used to dealing with every day. By expanding the iPhone from a small pocket tool to a larger device, Apple is trying to apply the iPhone’s model of computing to the tasks we currently use laptops for.

Yes, It’s Underwhelming

At the iPad’s unveiling I could sense the disappointment in the discussions within my company and across much of the internet. When the iPhone was first introduced, it blew away notions of how a phone worked and what kind of experience a low-powered mobile device was capable of.

People were hoping for a similar sense of disbelief with the iPad. They wanted it to save the publishing industry, they wanted new input methods, they wanted “out of control” multi-touch interactions, and most importantly they wanted it to do things they hadn’t even dreamed of doing yet. In short, they wanted to feel like Apple had developed the future and was showing it to them. That’s what the iPhone introduction felt like.

Instead, what people got was something they’d already seen. And so it was easy to pick out the flaws. No open app distribution model? No camera? No multitasking?

But when you’re looking at the prototype of a new computing platform, those complaints are irrelevant. All of them will be added in time. What cannot be changed are the fundamentals of the software design.

The iPhone got these fundamentals dead right from day one, and the iPad is now inheriting them. Fundamentals like a touch-based interaction model. Fundamentals like an easy to understand way to acquire and run applications. Fundamentals like the complete change of focus from navigating a confusing hierarchical file system to a simpler task-based interaction model.

As Andy Ihnatko says,

“It struck me that Apple was making a clear statement with the iPad: ‘We were right about the iPhone.’ They had a clear and ambitious concept about an entirely new computing platform and an entirely new way that humans would interact with hardware. They were so right about it that when the time came to build a tablet device, changing the UI seemed vulgar at best. […] If the iPhone had never existed, the iPad would still have made sense as a touch-based computer.”

A New Interface

The very things that make the iPad so great are also its biggest weaknesses. By developing a new interaction paradigm — touch-based rather than mouse-based — Apple has rendered all existing desktop software incompatible with the platform. To truly take a step forward, this is necessary.

Starting from zero is a daunting proposition. It is the reason Microsoft has never been able to garner mainstream acceptance from the tablets it promotes, despite grand proclamations about the coming tablet revolution back in 2001. In Microsoft’s universe, compatibility is king, hence the constant attempts to put Windows on a touchscreen. The taskbar, windows, dropdown menus, contextual menus, rollovers, and the rest of today’s pervasive interface elements make for an awkward tablet experience, but one with the advantage of an entire universe of software already built for it. Starting from zero, as Apple is doing, takes guts. The risks are exponentially higher, as are the rewards.

Apple is bootstrapping the process by launching the iPad with enhanced versions of the same applications that have been successful on the iPhone. Watching movies, listening to music, browsing the web, checking email, and more are all designed to be seamless and elegant experiences. With these basics, the iPad is capable of meeting the casual needs of some people. In addition, it features compatibility with the existing library of iPhone apps, although this is of questionable value for many. Even with these boxes checked, it won’t come close to replacing a laptop for most people.

I Still Don’t Want One

For years, the tech industry has chased the dream of the device that fills the space between the mobile device and the computer. The difficulty with this space is that there isn’t obvious demand to fill. Devices have to muscle in and make their own space. The iPad may be one of the best to try, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not something many people need, myself included. My colleague Ben McNeil summed it up when he said, “This device doesn’t seem to blend everything I need but rather gives me one more gadget I own.”

And like a child needing a parent’s steadying hand on the saddle when learning to ride a bike, the iPad needs to be tethered to a real computer for tasks like backing up, downloading photos, and syncing music. Until my files live online, rather than on a hard drive tied to one computer, the iPad won’t seamlessly integrate into my digital life without a lot of awkward shuffling and copying to make things available to the iPad on an as-needed basis. I don’t need to pay for the added complexity of working this device into my life, and my iPhone already does a good job of surfing the web on the sofa.

And Yet

Given the option, the prospect of carrying an iPad around is already so much more enticing than using my laptop. I yearn for the portability, the battery life, and most of all, the efficient and focused interface that my iPhone has given me a taste of.

I want the productivity and joy of using something that sheds the 20+ years of baggage my computer has inherited. The design decisions made in the 1970s that seem unprepared for the scale of my online life today, such that I am constantly having to organize and clean and manage my system.

As Fraser Speirs states,

“The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.”

I want something that lets me get The Real Work done.

A Whole New World of Apps

Application development on the iPad has the ability to sustain bigger apps than what we’ve seen on the iPhone. The 99 cent app market on the iPhone has exploded because the device lends itself to quick, cheap entertainment. Lots of people will spend a buck for a couple of minutes’ excitement while waiting at the bus stop or standing in line. The iPad won’t be used in those situations, so the demand for those cheap thrill apps won’t be as strong.

Instead, people will start demanding more functional apps. Apple sent a clear signal by showcasing a highly functional and polished office suite in the form of iWork for the iPad. By doing this, they were in effect asking others to follow their lead by developing desktop-class applications. This call is already being answered. The Omni Group, the leading Mac development house responsible for OmniGraffle and OmniPlan, among others, has announced an immediate pause on developing their next generation of desktop software while they port their complete portfolio of applications to the iPad.

Apple also has the advantage of being in a better position than anyone else to cultivate a healthy 3rd party ecosystem of applications. It may be counterintuitive considering the discontent over their tight control of app distribution. But Apple has developed something even more valuable than open application distribution: a cohesive platform. This advantage may diminish in the future, but when launching a new platform it is incredibly important. Software developers will be hesitant to invest significant money developing applications if they are not sure what hardware, and by extension how many users will be able to run them. Android is starting to feel the effects of varying versions of the OS spread across a myriad of hardware configurations. Apple, meanwhile, has shown with the iPhone that it can drive a platform forward while minimizing the expense of dealing with device incompatibility.

What Happens Now

I won’t bother with a prediction about the iPad’s success or failure because they’re a dime a dozen in the wake of its launch. This post isn’t about whether Apple will tumble from its current summit or climb the next peak. This is about understanding why the iPad is more than just another tablet.

For the iPad to succeed, it doesn’t need to be a home run now, it simply needs to stick around and gain a modest number of users who are willing to pay for apps. If that happens, in 5 years time we’ll start to see a healthy ecosystem of applications that begin to turn the iPad into a viable general computer replacement. And in 10 years time we’ll see a new generation of users that have adopted iPads, or whatever Android- or WebOS-based tablets are around at that point, as their main computer. We’ll see existing expert users spending a large portion of their time doing work on tablets.

Of course, even then most of the computing landscape will still revolve around the traditional computers that are deeply entrenched today. But it will also be clear that they are part of a waning era. In 20 years’ time they will have relinquished the spotlight to take the place of the mainframes of yore: running back end services and thousands of custom business applications for years to come, while people use touchscreen devices for their everyday online lives.

And at that point, we’ll look back and realize that this drastic shift from Old World to New World computing, as Steven Frank terms it, began with something that at the time seemed like a boringly predictable, some would even say say lacking, evolution of an iPhone.

Nigel Warren is a UX designer at Roundarch

Dave Meeker, director of emerging technology at Roundarch, was interviewed on The Digital Scene Show during our participation in Adobe MAX 2009 in October. Dave discusses the innovative work we are doing with Tesla Motors and explains our prototyping process with Tesla. He expands on the development of the 17-inch touch screen panel to be incorporated into the console of the new all-electric Model S Sedan set for production in 2011. It is a compelling interview about our ongoing effort with Tesla to develop a first-of-its-kind infotainment system that will be the cornerstone of the user experience in the future vehicles.