I’ve read quite a few reviews, many negative, on the iPad product announcement.  Seems like most critics were looking for the all in one perfect device.  This would be counter intuitive to any great product company though.  Why would you develop something that cannibalized the rest of your product lines?  Not to mention the almost impossibility of achieving such a feat anyway.

I personally thought it was one of the best examples of product marketing that I could ever show to my clients of how it is done.  Apple filled a gap in their product line and for that matter an unfulfilled need in the lives of common people throughout technologically advanced countries.  While this original version of the iPad is not able to multi-task it allows us to do so.  I can sit in the family room talking with my kids and browsing the web researching certain topics and sending pages to be printed in my home office.  I could do the same thing with my laptop, but unfortunately when I use my laptop my family doesn’t believe they have my attention.  When I sit with a magazine in my lap glancing at it from time to time, it doesn’t bother them, they continue to interact with me.

The iPad like the magazine does not distract from the intimacy of the conversation.  At the same time it puts the world in my lap which the magazine fails to do.  While many were upset that there wasn’t a camera, or they believe the keyboard will prove to be too awkward, or they felt it should be capable of hand recognition, etc.  They missed the point.  Apple was not out to create a student device or a business device on the first version.  They were out to provide a device that could consume media in a completely new and fabulous way.  A way that would be affordable for most and provide Apple the foundational core for potentially advancing this product line to be the indispensable student device, business meeting device, idea generating device that it can become.  But why guess at what the market wants.  Get the core product out to the masses specifically targeted for family use and let the different members of the family tell you what else they would like it to do.

I believe this product will prove to be truly revolutionary in that it may teach the current generation to love reading as much as my generation did or as least as much as I perceived we did.  Trying to get my kids to sit down and read the black print on a cream colored page is painstaking.  However, if it was in color and when they tapped on the picture of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin it came to life and demonstrated how it worked and gave a visual comparison of how it was done prior to its invention and then a demonstration of how it has evolved over time they will become hooked.  Their requirement for visual as well as verbal stimulation will have been met.

While this device may not be earth shattering to many of the critics this is a vast improvement on the current market offering for reading the newspaper, magazines and books that will appeal to every generation within the family unit.  In addition, it is perfectly fine for viewing TV, movies and video.  If there is an industry that should be concerned it is television manufacturers.  I will buy this device over another TV in the future.  The only TV that I need now is a replacement for my 50″ Samsung when it dies.  I can see us owning two to three of these devices in the home and using them over our wireless home network.  We don’t need 3G access or plans.  Even the city that we live in is considering putting in a wireless mesh network that the public would have access to when we are out and about.

In the marketing speak of the technology life cycle as defined by Geoffrey Moore, the iPad is a “whole product.”  It is fully featured to the point that people of the major continents will buy it in its current state.  But just so I can get my request in:

Mr. Jobs and the Apple iPad development team,

Here are my requests for the business version:

• I don’t care about the keyboard – I want to speak to it anyway.
• I prefer handwriting my notes and attaching them to highlighted sentences, paragraphs or images  in the document.
• I don’t need loads of storage as I prefer keeping my data in a centralized place managed by someone else so that I know that it gets backed up regularly.  In addition, this makes it accessible to me regardless of what particular device/computer that I may need to access the data from.
• Finally, I just need to make sure I can always hook to a projector and speakers so that I don’t have to carry my laptop with me everywhere I go.
• Optionally, you can provide a camera so that I can not only speak with my family but see them and vice versa over the Internet.

by: Terry L. Massey

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