The Fourth Time

Steve Jobs and Apple announced their iPad to the world last week. This marks the fourth inflection point in the history of the company - - first was the graphical, mouse driven computer; the second was the iPod; the third the iPhone.

Below are a collection of comments that I heard and read last week regarding engineering and technology in the context of Apple, Jobs, and the potential impact of the iPad:

• Apple excels at taking existing, half-baked ideas and showing the rest of the world how to do them properly.
• Apple hopes that many people will use the iPad instead of a laptop - - it could open up a new market for devices that are larger than phones, smaller than laptops, and also double as e-readers, music, and video players and game consoles.
• A "Jesus Tablet" such as the iPad cannot perform miracles for some ailing parts of media organizations.
• Book publishers have the business advantage that they are not dependent on advertising.
• Approximately 6 out of 10 sales on Amazon are now for a Kindle edition (where available).
• The history of communication is that new technologies reinforce rather than displace the old.
• Every age is an information age - - it's just organized in different ways.
• People find their own knowledge paths - - reading horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, wherever the electronic may lead.
• Technology is about to make a deep engagement with information.
• As technology rewrites what it means to be a book, we will raise our expectations for our information experience.
• Innovation at Apple is more elitist and individual than open and group.
• Auteur Model of Innovation - - tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created.
• Yes, there is a team at Apple. But the vision is personal.
• Great products, according to Jobs, are triumphs of taste.
• Taste is a byproduct of study, observation, and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.
• A defining quality of Apple has been design restraint - - an outcome of "featuritis" management (cramming everything in an engineer's head into a design).
• Jobs formula is about tenacity, patience, belief, and instinct.
• Great engineers are not 30% better than average engineers - - they are 10 times better.
• Timing is essential to make big steps - - listen to the technology; find out what it's telling you.
• Jobs is a skilled listener to the technology. He calls this "tracking vectors" in technology overtime, to judge when an intriguing innovation is ready for the marketplace.
• People concerned about the price of the iPad should remember that iPod is an acronym for "idiots price our devices."