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It is not the Apple Tablet, it is the Store

By Nick Hodge | January 11, 2010

The recent escal­a­tion of rumours sur­round­ing the so-called Apple Tab­let / Slate / Big iPhone / xxx (where xxx is a super cool Apple-ish name) seem to focus on the hard­ware. The gad­getry. The hard­ware specs.

I am a little over gad­getry. Every week there is a new phone, device or somesuch that junks the old tech­no­logy. Surely this is neither eth­ical nor sus­tain­able?

But that is not where the innov­a­tion, nor the future lies for Apple. Recent Apple acquis­i­tions, invest­ments and suc­cesses leads me to con­clude that Apple and Google are about to square off. Not in search. Search is rather bor­ing and a commodity.

In the forth­com­ing weeks, ignore the hard­ware. Hard­ware is dime-a-dozen, and many vendors are going to release slate like gad­getry in a sim­ilar form factor. Rather, watch what Apple does with their iTunes / App store. Presently this sys­tem provides music, tv, movies and with the advent of the iPhone – Apps.

The next depart­ment for the store are news­pa­pers, magazines and books. Either sold as sub­scrip­tion, or with embed­ded advert­ising. Just wait.

The rev­enue model will appeal to the tra­di­tional main­stream media — so expect a con­tinu­ing ava­lanche of obsequious and self-serving cov­er­age. Not of the store — but rather the hard­ware. Embed­ded within these stor­ies will be the expect­a­tion of a holy grail. The holy grail of the future of print media, without paper.

Some­how, I doubt it.

Topics: apple, future | 4 Comments »

4 Responses to “It is not the Apple Tablet, it is the Store”

  1. Geordie Guy Says:
    January 11th, 2010 at 11:06 am

    I don’t know Nick…
    You haven’t done it to the same extent as I’ve seen around the blo­go­sphere in the last short while (since CES), but there’s some­thing pro­foundly irrit­at­ing about tech­no­lo­gists declar­ing FMCE products as irrel­ev­ant and urging every­one to focus on the con­tent, plat­forms and usage cases that they provide.

    I think there’s a rush to abstract, even vacate the products them­selves as being a trivial means to an end. I don’t think it’s wise to be that quick to dis­miss it. There is still plenty, in fact more than ever, dif­fer­en­ti­ation ground avail­able for products out there. There’s still plenty of innov­a­tion to be done, and there’s still a lot of respect for those products and the people involved in their devel­op­ment. To dis­miss it as “details” and con­fuse innov­a­tion with legal wrangling between intel­lec­tual prop­erty trolls, seems to me to be a recipe for dis­ap­point­ment — as well as act­ive dis­cour­age­ment for true innovation.

  2. Nick Hodge Says:
    January 11th, 2010 at 7:04 pm

    Geordie

    Note: the opin­ion on gad­gets is purely mine — the mar­ket for devices is massive. Where there is demand, there are manufacturers.

    I sup­pose my “angle” there is to watch the next few weeks in rela­tion to the expan­sion of the highly suc­cess­ful Apple Store.

    Nick

  3. GTRoberts Says:
    January 11th, 2010 at 8:41 pm

    I agree to a ‘large degree’ with you Nick… although instead of say­ing its “the store” I would sug­gest its the ‘envir­on­ment’ that Apple have cre­ated around their port­able products — with iTunes being the front-end for it.

  4. Fraser Crozier Says:
    January 11th, 2010 at 8:45 pm

    It’s called value-add, which a lot of com­pan­ies try to mas­ter, and fail. That comes with evolving out in front of the mar­ket, not try­ing to copy it, and doing a second rate job.

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