Aphoenix.ca

I kid, I kid. But there’s a lot of talk about the iPad in the last few days, and I’m trying to keep an open mind because there are people I respect that seem to think it’s great. But I don’t get it.

The most cogent argument was from Doug, who had a vision. It’s true – Apple won’t be comparing themselves to the computers that you already have. They won’t be comparing to your mobile devices. They’re trying hard to carve themselves out a niche, which I understand and respect. I just think that they’re doing a crappy job of it.

The first mistake is that they have failed spectacularly to live up to their hype, which, to be honest, isn’t really their fault. It’s hard to live up to the exquisite fanboyism and ludicrous expectations. Most people who have a Mac swear by them; I seem to be some sort of genetic aMac-freak, immune to the whiles of the computers that “just work”. It’s only natural that these people hole their beloved company to some intensely high standard to which Apple can not realistically meet. What they have before seems to be solid gold; they want solid gold in the future and, at best, the iPad seems to be bronze, cobalt or some other baser metal. People wanted a Tablet, capital T, Mac-style; instead they get an iPod. Er, sorry. And iPad. It’s certainly not just an oversize iPod touch. There’s the core of their second problem: this is being labelled as an actual Tablet. There are some problems with that, and most of them have to do with the fact that tablets already exist and every tablet you can buy right now does so much more than the iPad. In fact, the iPad can almost be defined more by what it’s not and what it doesn’t: No Flash, Doesn’t Multitask, No GPS, No Webcam, No Widescreen, No Real Storage, No High Def, No USB, Doesn’t Multitask.

What Apple’s iPad isn’t is a tablet; not how we currently understand tablets to work, anyways. When we say tablet, we basically just mean “laptop with touchscreen”. That’s a bit of an over-equivocation, but it’s roughly true. When people say that they want a Mac Tablet, they want those Mac Tablets to have more in common with this Thinkpad X Series Tablet and less in common with this Telephone.

We all want our computers to be more powerful and less limited than our phones. Almost all of us frequent websites that use Flash. Almost all of us like to do more than one thing at a time on a computer. These things are an important part of the user experience especially in a pre-defined marketplace that already has dozens of different tablets to choose from. Most important, you need to distinguish your product enough from other products so that you don’t come off as a huge corporation that’s only trying to grasp money out of the hands of the clientele that you purportedly support and care for by reissuing a bulked up version of a product that you’re already selling at 30% over fair market value.

The aforementioned Doug had a vision whereby people would use their iPads in the kitchen with no pesky wires, and it could be a hub, an easy access point, for lots of different things, all of which is true (except, arguably, as a place to have your music library – they have no current plans for an iPad that would hold even half of my personal music library, so it just won’t work for me to store music on). But that already exists if you want it to. Point in fact: I’ve had this article open on 3 different computers in 6 different locations. One of them was the kitchen; I listened to a couple of youtube videos on my laptop, sans cord, while doing some dishes.

And that’s the biggest problem with the iPad; everything it can do, something else does better.

I’ve always been a bit of a duffer when it came to photoshop or other such image manipulation programs; I can work with pre-existing photos no problem – I can isolate images and put them together and do lots of the nifty photoshop tricks, like airbrushing people to get rid of blemishes, or reducing red-eye, or moving them slightly in a picture, or adding someone in or taking someone out, etc. etc. However, I’ve never been really adept at creating something from nothing. The current site design I did from scratch (all graphics by hand), and it’s not the most graphically exciting place in the world. I’ve done other things as well, but usually when it needed to be professional, I’d get our graphic design guy to do it.

Well, I’m still at the point where our graphic designer does much better work than me, but I’m improving, and most of it is due to brush sets. I think in the last 5 days I’ve downloaded almost 70 of them, and although I’ve since thrown out at least 40 of those sets, it’s amazing what difference custom brushes make to designers. I never knew. I was a design brush virgin. But NO MORE!

Look for more in this space soon.

I just read The Top 5 Reasons Why the Customer is Always Right is Wrong and it’s interesting, but there’s a whole part of customer interaction that they have kind of skipped over, and I think it’s important. I’m going to add my #6, which is really just more on #5.

The Customer is Frequently Not Right.

It’s kind of a simple thing to say, and it directly contradicts that saying that we’re all familiar with and mostly don’t like, but it’s a simple truth that we all know, deep down. Because Customers are People and People are frequently wrong. I know. I’m a person. I’m wrong a lot. Like the other day, I was playing a game with my family and I misinterpreted one of the rules. We read as a group and clarified. Or another time when I decided that I would try something called Sushi Pizza – I figured that two things I loved would be great when combined. Wrong. Or this other time when I thought that the cold that I had wasn’t anything major, but I went to the doctor and she told me that I was really sick.

That last one is the one I want to focus on.

In that particular situation, I was a the Customer and the Doctor was the Contractor / Employee (I’ll stick with Contractor for the purpose of saving myself typing time). I, the Customer, did not really know how to deal with a particular problem so I went to someone else who did – I Contracted that person, in fact, to help me out. I thought that I had a minor cold, and the doctor didn’t and gave me a bunch of medication. I, the Customer, was wrong. “But,” you might say, “that’s not a generalize-able situation! The doctor has a specialized service / knowledge!” That is the case about any producer / consumer, contractor / client, employee / customer relationship, though, and it’s an important thing to think about. You go to a producer / contractor / employee to get a particular good or service that you either decline to or cannot provide for yourself. In most cases, it is “cannot”; the customer is not able to provide for themselves the particular thing that they require.

Here is where I am frequently puzzled – if the customer does not have the ability to create the good or perform the service, why are they likely correct about it? The producer / contractor / employee is the one who knows more about their particular product. And if they’re good at what they’ll do, they’ll share the knowledge with the customer.

A part of good customer service is trying to find the points at which the customer is not right and to correct them. My doctor, for instance, corrected my assumption that I had a cold. A good lingerie salesperson would point out that their customer is wearing the incorrect bra size. A good web developer might tell you, “No, we’re not going to put all the styles in-line”. And after all of these mistakes are pointed out, they will come up with the right solution and you should listen to them. You should listen because, if they’re successful, they know more about what they’re doing than you do, and a large part of what you are paying for is the knowledge that they have accrued over the time that person has spent in their chosen vocation.

The customer is frequently wrong. That’s why they’re the customer.