Are You Not Entertained?

What made the iPod, iPad and iPhone awesome?

The iPod wasn’t amazing because it was an Apple product — it was amazing because it gave people the idea that not only could they carry “a thousand songs in their pocket” and, much like pockets, it gave people the idea that they “should” therefore do so.

When you could only put a single CD/Cassette in your Walkman, it was realistic to associate that CD/Cassette as being worth the asking price of $14.99. When you start carrying over 1,000 songs in your pocket though, should those songs cost you the equivalent rate, or net cost of $1,500?

The iPad wasn’t amazing because it was an Apple product. It was amazing because now you were not glued to your desk to read, watch movies, write or record.

The iPhone wasn’t amazing because it was an Apple product. It was amazing because now you had a computer with you wherever you went, GPS, tracking, camera(!), the app store, SDKs to work with and so on, and it never stopped being a phone.

Each of these products was an iteration on software working with software, and furthermore each of these concepts became a market of their own.

No matter that Nokia came up with the N7 or Microsoft with Lumia, the public imagination now associated “Smart phones” with “Invented by Apple”. Everyone enjoys electricity but we are amazed and our imaginations inspired by Tesla. Steve Jobs was for a generation both Tesla and Edison. Both inventor and industrialist, innovator and unapologetic thief.

Heck, Apple came up with iTunes to compete with freeware music and give a reasonable alternative to piracy and it actually worked! What the music industry spent millions on was ads (you wouldn’t download a car..) and they couldn’t come close to the measurable effect.

Now we look at that legacy and what has Apple produced since? A wearable wrist-mounted iPhone called the Apple Watch? Is that really it?

Apple is the most valuable company not because of its strong sales (which are important), but because it has been a force in its own right rewriting the way we look at and measure the growth of new markets. The Pod, the Pad and the Phone all spawned just stupefying amounts of new jobs and growth in virtually all companies that took part in the new arms races.

Who’s copied the Apple Watch?

And Yet

And yet, it’s obvious to anyone that 1. Apple’s dividends this year have been its highest ever [2] if we ignore the effects of inflation and treat modern post-June 2014 shares as 1/7ths of pre-June 2014 shares ($3.99 April 2016 vs $3.29 May 15 2014) and 2., as CEO Tim Cook points out Apple’s earnings are equally massive [3].

It’s comical then that the CEO of a tech company is shocked to find that investors are making the stock sink like a brick after such announcements. It’s almost like that scene in Gladiator where the protagonist shouts: “Are you not entertained?” and the answer is No, no we’re not. Because the point is not the dividends or the massive gains, the point is how they’re brought on.

Looking across the pond to Microsoft, it’s almost as if the two CEOs are having a conversation without realizing it [4], though I doubt anyone seriously thinks Apple is going anywhere. We’ll see if the choice of the executives in Apple is the “right” one between the two, by now industrial standard alternatives: Either you diversify and spend on R&D to find something really new (or buy a company that allows you to do the same at a smaller timeframe) or, almost ubiquitously you slash R&D and dish out the dividends because that’s what the investors want.. Right?

While Apple’s phone sales are to hit 1 billion Soon™[5] we’re left wondering just what’s going on inside Apple. Microsoft for all its talk of being focused on industrial and professional aspects of the IT industry has yet to do anything remotely serious when it comes to verticals. Where is the professional’s device?

This would seem like a natural opening for Apple to capitalize upon as long as the vision of the “brand” doesn’t blind them from pragmatic solutions. Professional industries are in dire need of working solutions, and where Linux has historically been the DIY solution to the average techy the frankly nonexistent business models for developing devices for use by non-techies makes this impossible.

Android is the best overall due to its wide adoption[6] (in theory), but specialist devices are hard to come by and even harder to build a business plan around. iOS is a T-Rex that angrily brutalizes anything not specifically built to work with it, and Linux is Linux. There’s the Windows OS of course, but there’s just something to be said for dedicated tablet/pad/smartphone applications. And once again Microsoft has been mostly talking the talk when it comes to verticals and professional devices, but has shown its preference for the consumer market instead time and again.

Just because a device “can” be used by a doctor or engineer does not mean it “will be”. I recently asked a teacher at a law school “If you could have any app or software to help in teaching, what would it be/what would it do?” he blinked a bit, then laughed while saying something about how he’s doing perfectly fine, thank you.

We see this same resistance in virtually all of the professional fields. Software, devices and digital services have promised so much in the past few decades and delivered nothing but headache — why? Could it be simple incompetence, failures in executive leadership or product design? Or could it be something more minute but equally challenging, that is, a disconnect between the IT and non-IT fields of industry?[7]

When we move from paper and hard copy to digital healthcare information and end up worse than we started out with, this is a problem with implementation and design, not with IT or digitalization itself.

OPINION:

This is why I think Apple has an amazing opportunity in the healthcare sector, specifically in doctors’ pockets. But it’s an opportunity that is shared by Microsoft, Google and yes, even by Linux-based businesses. Back in the old mainframe computer system days of IBM, it was Microsoft and Apple that shocked the world by putting a PC in every home, proving the dinosaur days over.

What is an overly-complicated, hard to integrate, difficult to share information — from system if not the mainframe computer of today?

Not saying it’s easy, just saying it needs to be done.