>Which is exactly what the iPad was. Everybody said it was stupid and nobody would buy it, and now the sales figures speak for themselves.
The tablet market has been around for well over a decade, it's just that Apple was the first not to build one totally half-ass and as an afterthought or add-on to some more mature market. Tablets before the iPad were basically just weird laptops, and sold about as well as you'd expect something with that description to sell. Same with smartphones, which really replaced both mobile phones and PDAs: the market was there, and entities were making products, but every effort was half-assed and horribly crippled in some way.
I don't know where this product and market is headed. I lump it, for now, into the same category I lump Glass: very interesting tech, but I don't think I have a use case for it. But that's exactly the opposite of where I put tablets before iPad, and PDAs before iPhone, where I knew I had a use case for this stuff, but all the tech was overpriced garbage.
e: and, just to add, this is typical of an inexplicably common failure mode I seem to notice an awful lot, which is:
1. identify a potential market for X, with few or no participants
2. design shitty product B, in attempt to capture that market
3. when shitty product B fails, declare there is no market for X, move on to something else
One of the strengths of Apple, I think, is that they don't do this very often, i.e. they build good products even if they have no apparent competitor. Thus they can build new markets more easily.
The tablet market has been around for well over a decade, it's just that Apple was the first not to build one totally half-ass and as an afterthought or add-on to some more mature market. Tablets before the iPad were basically just weird laptops, and sold about as well as you'd expect something with that description to sell. Same with smartphones, which really replaced both mobile phones and PDAs: the market was there, and entities were making products, but every effort was half-assed and horribly crippled in some way.
I don't know where this product and market is headed. I lump it, for now, into the same category I lump Glass: very interesting tech, but I don't think I have a use case for it. But that's exactly the opposite of where I put tablets before iPad, and PDAs before iPhone, where I knew I had a use case for this stuff, but all the tech was overpriced garbage.
e: and, just to add, this is typical of an inexplicably common failure mode I seem to notice an awful lot, which is:
1. identify a potential market for X, with few or no participants
2. design shitty product B, in attempt to capture that market
3. when shitty product B fails, declare there is no market for X, move on to something else
One of the strengths of Apple, I think, is that they don't do this very often, i.e. they build good products even if they have no apparent competitor. Thus they can build new markets more easily.