The Oxymoronic Citizen Journalism

May 16, 2010 – 9:37 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Let’s fire a few missiles at politically correct ideas such as “Digital media makes all of us journalists”, “citizens will soon displace professional reporters”, and so on. That’s nonsense (I have more explicit words in mind). Does it means public input in news should be kept at bay? Certainly not. Quite the contrary, actually. Newsrooms have a challenge on their hands, they need to get better at handling such input.

First, would you trust a citizen neurosurgeon to remove your kid’s neuroblastoma? No, you wouldn’t. You would not trust a citizen dentist either for your cavities. Or even a people’s car repairman. Then, for information, why in hell would we accept practices we wouldn’t even contemplate for our health (OK, big issue), or for our washing machine?
Fact is, with the advent of digital media, the very notion of rigor and accuracy has become more… fuzzy, more analog. As I said here many times, we are now facing three types of news: the Commodity one (everyone gets the same account of the oil spill in Louisiana or the deadly unrest in Thailand); Mashup news (the more it buzzes, the better it works); and the Quality Niche, that tries to defend its standards. The first two are expanding and the third is getting to look like a Zant currant, (Raisin sec in French): good, tasty, but tiny and dry. And produced in small quantities.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a remarkable piece about fact checking at the New Yorker. In a loving and witty rendition, the author, John McPhee, details how an army of minutiae-obsessed researchers will spend days to check the smallest assertions in order to remove even the palest shadow of doubt. (I’m linking to the PDF file, hoping Condé Nast’s legal department will forgive this copyright infringement in view of my heartfelt homage; this article really deserves to be dissected in journalism schools).

A few years back, this colleague showed me a mail exchange he had with a sub-editor at a major US daily about a long feature story of his. Its original submission triggered a long email with dozens of questions about every aspect of the story: “Who says this? Could you add a source of this data? Isn’t there a contradiction between this figure and the other in paragraph six? Can you be more specific on this and that? It went on an on. The story was actually seen as a good one; the painstaking editing, checking and challenging process was merely standard procedure.

Who has the luxury of applying such treatment to news material, nowadays? No one, almost. Only some “Zant currant” news organizations are still holding firm on such a practice. Which leads us to my point: journalism is a profession; it comes with standards, techniques, and a certain level of demand, from the author and his/her editors.

These notions collide with the new information chain: Algorithm => Search => Filtering => Aggregation => Mashup => Social Feedback (i.e.: commenting, sharing, tweeting, blogging…).
We’ve been through the hardcore part (fact-based reporting, checking, sourcing, editing). Now, let’s sort out the new jargon.

Algorithm: it has become the main underlying engine for digital information consumption.  Think about Google News traffic: 3.7 billion people exposed per week, according to GeographicalMedia . Read More »

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Cloud 2.0

May 16, 2010 – 9:35 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Last July, I wrote about Google’s goal: Sink Microsoft by deploying Cloud-based Google Apps and, as a result, destroy the Microsoft Office money machine. Today, we’ll take another look at Google’s strategy and at Microsoft’s response with its just released Office 2010 which combines desktop and on-line apps.

First, the Cloud Gospel according to Google. Desktop bloatware is passé. Modern browsers can perform a magic trick: We, Google, maintain the applications on our servers, and we store your data as well—securely, trust us. For you, the experience is desktop-like. Word processing without Word. Spreadsheets without Excel. With one login and password, you can access your documents, create presentations, edit financials from any computer in the world that has an Internet connection.
If you’re on an airplane and want to edit your killer Board of Directors pitch, we’ll provide a local version of your files stored in what is technically called a cache inside your computer. You edit your slides and everything updates and re-syncs when you land and recover a Net connection. You have the best of both worlds: dual off-line/on-line modes. The magic relies on modern operating system, browser, and server technologies. The vast computing and storage power in today’s laptop does the rest.
To summarize: Take a laptop with a modern browser and you’re done. Everything–applications and data–resides in the Cloud. On-line or off-line doesn’t matter. It’s automagically synced.

Since it has no legacy business to protect, Google can offer free versions of its Web Apps. (As we’ll see later, they also offer paid-for versions.) Kill the $300-a-DVD Office Golden Goose and someday, my Son, all this will be yours: 1 billion users at $100/year…that’s a nice $100B/year service business. If you think I exaggerate, you’re right, but by how much? Facebook will have 500 million users sometime this year. The Google vs. Microsoft battle will play out over a decade or more. As a time perspective, Google will soon be twelve years old.

In the meantime, Microsoft isn’t asleep at the switch and they do have a huge legacy to protect. Last year, Microsoft’s total sales were $58B, down 3% from 2008.

(Numbers geeks can find Microsoft’s full 2009 Annual Report here. Note the Operating Profit, 35%. The company spends 15% of its revenue in R&D and 28% in Sales, Marketing and General Administration. Compare this to Apple’s 29.5% Operating Profit, 3% R&D, and 9% SG&A, with a comparable revenue level, in the $50B to $60B range annually. Microsoft’s Net Income is 25% of revenue, Apple’s is 22%. I used the latest available figures for both companies: FY 2009 for MS, Q1 2010 for Apple.) Microsoft Office represented 90% of the $19B Business Division sales, with a nice 64% Operating Profit:

Roughly 60% of all Microsoft’s profits come from Office and a little more than 53% from Windows OS licenses (or what MS calls its “Client” business):

pastedGraphic_2.pdf

Read More »

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Profitable Long Form Journalism

May 9, 2010 – 7:26 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Over the last month, I’ve been stuffing my iPad with books purchased online, long PDF files and other documents for later reading sessions. I’m waiting for the mind-blowing media applications, they’re still in the making. Several prototypes of French newspapers I have seen are quite promising. We have to be patient. This is just the start of the runway.

Compared to my computer, I realize I’m using the device in a different way. No mail (too clumsy), no writing, no twittering. Just reading stuff, the longer the better.

And I wonder: Can tablet computing be the missing link, the one that could rehabilitate (or rather introduce) long form reading in digital format — in a profitable way?

Let’s project ourselves two years from now. And let’s put the iPad aside for a while. It’s 2012. Tablets have become a cell-phone-like commodity, competition is strong. Aside of Apple, devices from Samsung or HTC running Android or god knows what operating systems are thriving. Standards for digital formats have emerged and e-books are heading toward a 25% market share in Europe and the United States. The digital publishing chain is running smoothly and efficiently with the following characteristics.

  • The old production and distribution system that was eating 65% to 70% of the retail price is now down to a 30% fee taken by publishing platforms. They get this 30% for putting the publications on their virtual shelves and for collecting the money.
  • These inventories are served by clever search and recommendation engines (not the Trabant-like system of the iTunes/iBooks store).
  • To reflect decreasing distribution costs when compared to physical books, e-books retail prices are down by at least 30%.
  • Authors also take advantage of the technological shift, they get higher royalties.
  • New formats have emerged; the old dichotomy between hardcover, priced at $25, and paper back, at $10, is gone, replaced a by a more diversified pricing structure.

Hence the question: What will the impact be on journalism and on the bottom line of media companies?

Before attempting an answer, let’s reframe this in the dual context of the current business situation and of the newscycle. Managing a newsroom within today’s constraints is a difficult exercise. In daily newspapers, physical editorial space (i.e. column inches) is scarce, making long pieces a hard-sell to the editor-in-chief. The web is more welcoming, although we all know that beyond a 600 words story, reader attention tends to fade — especially for younger audiences.

As for the newscycle, it accelerates and becomes increasingly complex, requiring more expertise and, in theory, more editorial resources — should editors decide to go below the surface. Take the debt crisis in Europe, for instance. The general framework is pretty simple: thirty years-old traders in shark-frenzy mode, going against sixty years-old politicians. The sharks prey on the politicians who have failed to build decent economic leadership since the introduction of the euro system (coins and banknotes entered in circulation January 1st 2002). Read More »

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The Incumbent’s Curse: HP

May 9, 2010 – 7:24 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Last week’s acquisition of Palm by HP makes a clear statement: HP recognizes we are at the beginning of the end of the classical PC era — and we’re witnessing the birth of a new generation, really personal computers, currently called smartphones (and tablets).

HP doesn’t want to be left behind, as it has been with its iPaq line of Windows Mobile devices, nor does it want to join the race to the bottom, again, to make profit-challenged Windows Phone 7 or Android clones.

This brings to mind an almost forgotten episode in HP’s past, one exemplary turn of events to keep in mind when looking at companies who dominate a market — for a while.

Once upon a time, HP owned the Personal Computer market. Then, in a characteristic case of the Incumbent’s Curse, lost it.
What? HP lost the PC market? But they’re the market leader with more than $10B in sales in the latest reported quarter.
That’s in today’s version of personal computers, the Wintel machines.
But the idea, the desire for a personal computer is very old.
For HP, it starts in the late sixties. They buy a design from Tom Osborne, the founder of a company called Logic Design.
I highly recommend reading Tom Osborne’s own words, it’s a long piece but one of the best I’ve ever read in the genre. You’ll find gems like:

‘I remember the overwhelming realization that sitting in front of me on a red card table in the corner of our bedroom/ workshop, sat more computing power per unit volume than had ever existed on this planet. I felt more like the discoverer of the object before me than its creator. I thought of things to come. If I could do this alone in my tiny apartment, then there were some big changes in store for the world.’

And, later in the same piece, his involvement in two more seminal products, the HP 35 and HP 65 pocket calculators, the latter being programmable and incorporating a magnetic stripe reader:

‘My role in the HP 35 was quite different than that in the HP 9100. Except for the card reader and the power supply, I did most of the circuit design in the HP 9100. I did none of it in the HP 35. Instead, almost all of my effort went into prescribing functional characteristics. This time, I knew that someone would want the calculator that followed the HP 35 to be programmable. A couple of times, I dug in and argued for features that would grease the slides for the follow-on product, the HP 65 (which, I think, was the best product I ever worked on).’

The HP 65

I can’t resist adding this last quote:


‘We had no idea whether the HP 35 would be a success or a dud. (Before it was introduced, a market analysis by a major consulting firm had determined that it would fail because of the tiny keys and the RPN notation. In my opinion, it succeeded for those reasons.) Anyway, we gave it our all and found that it was so well received that overnight, it made the slide rule a relic.’

There is also an EDN interview of Tom Osborne here.

I was there. My biggest break in business, even bigger than being hired by Apple to start Apple France, happens when, in June 1968, HP France takes me off the streets. After dropping out of college and going through four years of what Californian therapists delicately call a “psycho-social moratorium”, I am ready, I get lucky. Read More »

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Balkanizing the Web

May 2, 2010 – 12:14 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Creeping Balkanization is the internet’s worst enemy. As worldwide literacy grows exponentially, for the web, such expansion results in increasing pressure from corporate interests and regulatory nationalisms. Rising from its arcane beginnings as a DARPA research project, the net has become a symbol of borderless communication between individuals and of unlimited access to knowledge. Unfortunately, the net is about to become a heavily controlled environment, serving two classes of citizens: a dominant class that sets the rules (technological, legal and commercial) and the underclass of citizens and consumers.

Consider these two macro trends:

The first one stems from the world’s linguistic evolution. As of today, there are about one billion English-speaking people worldwide, half of which are native speakers. This latter proportion keeps growing as education improves; this growth reinforces the prevalence of English as the main internet lingua. With 500m people, English accounts for 27.5% of the connected population. Chinese makes the second language group with 400m people, 22.6% of the net population (and the mother of all government-mandated restrictions).

Beyond that, only the Spanish group (7.8% of the internet population) and the Japanese (5.3%) are above the 5% threshold. French accounts for 3.2% of internet users, with a global number of 57m.
Asia’s expanding literacy involves not only national languages (such as Mandarin or Hindi), but also the learning of English. In fact, the “use” of English could be much larger than shown in official statistics. Back in 2006, according to linguistics professor Braj Kachru, the “use” of English, as he called it, involved more than 500m people in India and China combined (see story in the Asian Times).

In many European countries, teenagers’ exposure to the English-speaking internet (for example through illegal downloads of movies and series) is a powerful learning vector.

The second trend involves the telecommunication infrastructure. The physical world is increasingly connected. Take optical fiber: its 2009 global market (outside China) represented 171m of fiber-kilometers, a 22% growth versus 2008 ; and that doesn’t reflect each fiber’s capacity to carry more data as carriers use more sophisticated modulation/demodulation circuitry. Read More »

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Very Personal Computing

May 2, 2010 – 12:11 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

The center of financial gravity in the computing world—the Center of Money—has shifted. No longer directed at the PC, the money pump now gushes full blast at the smartphones market. One of my colleagues, Bob Ackerman, calls smartphones the very personal computers. Measured by size and potential, they’re both smaller and bigger than today’s PCs.

The Math

Consider the numbers: HP, the world’s foremost PC maker, sold $10B of “Personal Systems” in its last reported quarter:

(turn “on” display image in your mail reader
to see the graphics)

Despite their premier position, HP isn’t making much PC money: $500M, 5% Operating Profit. (The full HP Q1 report in PDF can be found here.)

Now let’s turn to Apple’s most recent quarter. Smartphones constituted 40% of the company’s revenue:

When we add up the numbers, we see that the iPhone = Mac + iPods. And this rough calculation “misunderestimates” the weight of the iPhone OS. In the more mature iPod category, the iPod Touch (the iPhone without a phone) grew by 63% year-to-year according to Apple COO Tim Cook in the most recent earnings conference call. (Full Q2 2010 SEC filing available here.) Read More »

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Reconciling efficiency with serendipity

April 26, 2010 – 8:31 am | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

For digital media publishers, Design is the biggest challenge. Business model is king, of course, but it needs strong design to reign. The same goes for content. Without clever navigation, after a quick stunt on the home page, a good story might die buried deep inside the bowels of a site before realizing its full potential. (Smartly enough, Slate.com used to call “compost” its stacks of forgotten stories). In this regard, many web structures are lethal: they give way too much weight and visibility to novelty, at the expense of relevancy.

After more than fifteen years of internet presence, many online publications are still having trouble moving past the newspaper metaphor. Columns, pages, sections, vertical scrolling…, the old-world graphical newspaper attributes still rule the web and contribute to a quasi-failure on three critical counts:

#1 The identity test. Check for yourself. Take the home page of a dozen online newspapers; once you’ve cut off the header displaying the publication’s title, they become extremely difficult to differentiate from one another. To say nothing of connecting to the paper’s brand. General grid, typography, colors palette, are almost all alike. Of course, the web lowest denominator rule is largely to blame – but there is more.

#2  The personality test. Browse every physical newspaper and see how you “get it”.
First, you’re quickly able to capture of the news cycle’s dominance and its intensity. The size of headlines and illustrations, the space devoted to stories, the angles, all give you a clear idea of the day’s flavor.
Second, you’ll be able to quickly assess the publication’s political leaning, again by evaluating the hierarchy of treatments. Because of the computer screen’s narrow funnel, as opposed to the carbon-based paper UI, it is much more difficult to do so for an online publication.

#3 The serendipity test, i.e. the ability to enjoy something that we were not looking for, a sort of semi-accidental discovery. To me, this might be the most important feature/function.
A print publication, magazine or daily, carries a mix of contents that, in turn, leads to a collection of experiences. I pick the publication because of the implicit contract between the publisher and me, a contract based on trust and expectations.
Trust combines editorial judgment and execution; it can fluctuate. A newspaper can become less trustworthy if its editorial leadership weakens. Expectations carry the serendipity factor: I know this newspaper is going to trigger my curiosity without taking me into totally unchartered territories. I take this paper for its business section to see how it covers the Goldman Sachs scandal, but I will find this fantastic profile of an unknown tycoon, or this opinion piece that challenges my views on a particular subject, but is well balanced, well written. Read More »

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iPad: Which way do you lean?

April 26, 2010 – 8:31 am | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

The iPad is a strange animal—we don’t know where it fits, yet. Is it a laptop replacement? Is it an entertainment device? Can I do “real work” on it or is it merely a brobdingagian iPod Touch, a more colorful Kindle with better email and Web browsing?

Spiritual traditions associate the angle of the spine with the state of mind. We use the phrases “lean back” and “lean forward” to differentiate between “production” and “consumption” activities. When I write, I lean forward; when I watch The Fugitive, I lean back in my airline seat. Laptops are mostly lean forward devices, even if we watch the occasional movie on the road. Is the iPad a lean back device?
Apple’s ads for the new product, on TV and Silicon Valley billboards, depict lean back use with (insufferably clean-looking) models in lounge attitudes as they surf, flip pages, and select videos. And their posture doesn’t change when they tap their way through the iWork for iPad productivity suite. What, I’m supposed to do work while reclining like the models in the ads? It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation that illustrates the tablet PC’s uneasy positioning. If you don’t offer an office suite you’re pilloried: This product is useless! But if you deploy the obligatory word processor+spreadsheet+presentation triad your ergonomics/UI contradictions are exposed.

(The apps in the iWork suite—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote–show great promise, which is a way to say that they’re imperfect. See last week’s comments on file sharing.)

Apple’s properly black microfiber iPad Case accessory valiantly struggles against the posture incongruity. It folds into a lectern and offers a better typing angle than when the device rests on your thighs:

The lectern works reasonably well in landscape mode, but shows its kludgy side when you rotate it to portrait. The raised top side becomes the left side, still raised. Ah well…

My occasional frustration with the iPad’s shortcomings is partly due to their contrast with the device’s shining qualities. For me, the half skeptic/half enthusiast, the charm hasn’t worn out after three weeks. The iPad is fast, the touch UI is very well executed, the battery lasts forever, and I can fly through “office tasks” such as pruning, reading and replying to email, or traversing the fifty or so blogs I follow on a daily basis.

When we turn to printing, however, we see another illustration of the iPad’s unsettled position. At home or in the office, I’m on a WiFi network that lets me see the printers on my PC or Mac. Windows 7 and OS X can find and connect to them quite easily so I’d expect to see my printers from my iPad, as well. But no. If I want to print from my iPad, the simplest solution—and trust me, I’ve tried many—is to email my file to a PC and print the attachment.

Just as on the iPhone, peripherals aren’t part of the picture. It’s part of the iPhone/iPad ethos: No peripherals, no need to get the right driver. Move right along, sir, nothing to drive here. But that hauteur hasn’t thwarted enterprising geeks. On the iPhone they came up with a number of file sharing and printing workarounds. I bought a few and wasn’t too impressed. On the iPad, I tried PrintCentral and Fax Print & Share Pro.

They both try to bridge the device’s limitations but, in my certified klutz experience, they create more problems than they solve. Network connections break, documents don’t print or else print gibberish, to say nothing of instructions such as “Enter your iPad’s address on computer: http://192.168.1.122:8080.” Right…so much for simplifying computing.

PrintCentral asks you to install a software module (WePrint Server) on your PC or Mac so it can take your iPad document and print it “normally”. And so it does, if you can manage your way through a forest of menus and settings. On the other hand, PrintCentral does provide file sharing. I can download a file from a server (I tried both Word and Pages files), open it in one of the applications the iPad supports, and then edit and save it. This is in contrast with the iPad’s native file sharing where I can click—pardon—tap on a document residing in (remote) file server, such as iDisk, and view its contents, but nothing more. Better than nothing but not good enough for production purposes.

The other app I tried, Fax Print & Share Pro (beware of longish names on anything, cars, banking services, software) is even more ambitious. It purports to print directly to my Brother 2170W wireless networked printer, but no deal—it prints gibberish, even if I carefully re-install it (I’ve been trained on 12 years of Windows) and select the recommended “IP Printing” variant.
(As a side note, I’m partial to Brother printers. They’re made by a Japanese sewing machine company, thus the delicate mechanics of moving paper inside the beast tend to work. Further, they don’t insist on installing hundreds of megabytes of self-serving crapware on my machines, and the drivers are updated nicely via Apple’s Software Update channel.)
The Fax part of Fax Print & Share Pro comes with four free fax transmissions. I used up three of them trying to get it to work. On the first try, it faxed the cover page but not the document. Second attempt: No cover page and the app told me that the file couldn’t be faxed. Finally, I tried a simpler .rtf document. It worked, but the impression had been made. Third time wasn’t a charm.
I haven’t tried the app’s Fedex Online Printing module. Click on the link and you’ll see that “strange” file formats aren’t supported. As we say in America: Some restrictions may apply.

The diversity of supported and unsupported file types gets us back to the driver problem, one that bedevils normal humans—and could $$pell an opportunity for Apple and others. The printer driver converts your file’s contents—what you see on the screen—into instructions that the printer understands. The problem is that files are built in a bewildering but necessary variety of ways, and there’s no real standardization in printing.
When you see a printer on the network and say Print, the document ought to print. It’s almost as simple as that on a personal computer, even if the chain is sometimes fragile and a link breaks. The iPad isn’t there yet, but if I can see a network printer on the device, “driverless” printing for The Rest of Us can’t be too far behind. I’m not assuming the iPad will ever offer all the printing capabilities that we “enjoy” on a PC/Mac—that would ruin the simple (too simple, some say) iPad user experience. However, I believe the day isn’t too far off when I’ll be able to open and save a document from/to MobileMe’s iDisk without a third party app. (Today’s iDisk app works on the iPad, although it’s still the small screen iPhone version.)
The next step for Apple or an enterprising developer would be to take my file, convert it somewhere in the cloud, and then send it to my printer without asking me to deal with the plumbing. It’s more complicated than I make it sound but, as the PrintCentral example shows, we’re already doing it locally. Replace my local PC acting as an intermediary between my iPad and my printer with a remote server and we have direct printing. Present tense used with poetic license.

As for the iPad’s louche identity, nothing that a couple of million units won’t make taxonomically correct.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Data Schizophrenia

April 18, 2010 – 7:28 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Let’s discuss a developing data management contradiction. People thinking in strategic terms about the monetization of digital medias, publishers, marketers, are unanimous. Collecting and poring over data has become more important than ever.
That’s one trend.

The other involves the gatekeepers. As I briefly explained last week, we now face a small club of high tech giants — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and Apple — who, over the years, acquired an unprecedented ability to gather and process data. As competition is heating up among them, the data they’ll be able to get will continue to increase in tactical and strategical value. As a corollary, they are increasingly inclined to keep such data close to the vest.

The latest example came up with the April 8th launch of Apple’s iAd initiative for the iPhone platform. As Steve Jobs delicately puts it, mobile ads “suck”, his own words for what we’ve been saying all along in the Monday Note (see The future of content navigation). Digital ads suffers from an inherent flaw: they are designed to take the viewer away from the content (again: see Jobs’ keynote speech for details, go directly to the 44 minutes mark to watch the ad chapter). Hence the solution envisioned by the Cupertino boys: embedding the ad within the application – which, in the process, becomes the commercial Trojan Horse of mobile computing. Next step: connecting the ad to a transaction system that will collect a 40% commission fee.

The data? Apple keeps them. Publisher, consider yourself lucky, you get the money and a set of basic numbers. As pointed out by Peter Kafka in The Wall Street Journal’s blog All Things D, contractually speaking, the terms are unambiguous.

Section 3.3.9 of the developer agreement, stipulates:

“Notwithstanding anything else in this Agreement, Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple’s prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited.” Read More »

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iPad Second Impressions

April 18, 2010 – 7:28 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

I’m “stuck” in Paris (poor me), volcanic ash from Iceland has closed the airports. Stranded but not ignored. I have my iPad. In business meetings, in cafés and restaurants, the iPad is, as I reported two weeks ago, an all-around guy- and-chick magnet. Sit down, stroke the screen, and Parisians, not normally the easygoing sort, admire and strike up a conversation. Norway’s Prime Minister, stranded as well, used his iPad to govern remotely…très chic. I’ve never seen anything like this.

I gave myself two weeks to form an opinion of the iPad. (And note well the my and opinion: I may let a fact sneak in here and there, but I intend to convey my personal impressions. (As we say on-line: YMMV. You might come to a different conclusion.) I carried my brand new iPad everywhere, and I mean everywhere: From the smallest room in the house to the office, out to the coffee shop, into the 747 cabin and then on, to a magazine industry conference in Paris. I wanted to know if this dog would come back to the pail after a fortnight. Call me a skeptic, but I’ve spent too much time inside too many sausage factories to trust a demo, a first impression.

I’d pre-ordered two iPads and was given an appointment on launch morning at the Palo Alto Apple Store. In and out in a few minutes, then back home for the unveiling. Initial setup was easy, although you should learn from my mistake: I’d forgotten to prevent iTunes from synching automatically. I have thousands of pictures in my iPhoto library; this was going to take hours. My suggestion: Get the apps you want from the App Store and start enjoying your new iPad right away. Sync your media while you sleep. With more than 3,000 programs, most of them written for or adapted from the iPhone, the App Store is a pleasant and welcome surprise. My existing iPhone apps look a bit dwarfish on the bigger screen and pixelated when blown up in 2X mode, but they’re serviceable.

So how does the iPad feel?

Work
I purchased the iWork productivity apps: Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (presentations). This isn’t the iPad’s strongest suit. When you transfer a document to the iPad, the hyperlinks are “unfolded”. Here’s the original…

…and the same file on the iPad:

I hoped the URLs would somehow fold back “under” the linked words when re-imported into my Mac, but no.

The trouble doesn’t stop there. On a networked PC and Mac you can drag-and-drop a file from one machine to another by using a shared folder arrangement. Here, the desktop metaphor breaks down because the iPad (and the iPhone) doesn’t have an explicit, exposed file system. To ship my Monday Note draft from my Mac to my iPad, I have to email it to myself as an attachment, or use a convoluted iTunes service. The email method is simple. I click—sorry—tap on the attachment and the iPad automatically offers to open it in Pages.

The iTunes method, slightly more complicated, uses the File Sharing section in the Apps tab that you see when you connect your iPad:

This is, in effect, a folder. You add your PC or Mac files and they’ll show up in My Documents on your iPad after the next sync. When you’ve finished tapping your Great American Novel, you can sync it back to your desktop computer through the same mechanism.

Applications such as Air Sharing HD and GoodReader help, but not completely. With Air Sharing and a WiFi connection, your iPad can show you the files on your PC or Mac, but you can’t use them—you can’t open them in your iPad apps.

There’s also a Mac app called PhoneView. Once your iPad is connected, you’ll see “everything” inside. Proceed with caution.

Geeks can go here to see more details about the promising doc compatibility and sharing features…and “promising” is the right word. I’m disappointed. I can’t perform tasks such as writing (or editing) a real-life, hyperlinked document on my iPad. Let’s hope the iWork software updates will quickly make the promise a reality.

Email
Very nice. Fast, easy to set up, easy to use. For me, it’s fully functional; not much to say beyond that. I hear we’ll get a “unified” mailbox some day.

Web Browser
Browsing shows off the iPad’s speed and smooth finish. It has the Apple design “touch”, literally. Scrolling and pinch-zooming are well-tuned and convenient. The browser doesn’t have tabs, but bookmarks sync with my Mac through MobileMe.

Speaking of scrolling and zooming, the Maps app (in collaboration with ex-friends at Google) is spectacular on the iPad. Treat yourself to a satellite view of your favorite city, move around with one finger, zoom with two. I just sent myself this iPad screenshot; you push the Home and Sleep buttons to take it, just like on the iPhone:

As on the iPhone, the iPad’s built-in Safari bookmarks show a User Guide, very nicely done. Enterprising geeks have discovered that Apple uses a specific framework, dubbed AdLib, to create a “desktop-like” Web application. They speculate that this augurs well for more high-quality Web apps from Apple.

Entertainment
Everything works well–even very well. I’ve loaded iTunes movies, rented one, I’ve used Netflix and the ABC app. Same for the iPod function and its CoverFlow. “Nothing to see, here”, by which I mean no trouble, no disappointment, the iPad does a spectacular job.

Games
I have nothing to say about games; I’m simply the wrong customer. Out of curiosity I loaded Smule’s Magic Piano, and Korg’s iELECTRIBE, Accordio and miniSynth Pro. Very impressive although, again, I’m not the target. As food for thought and extrapolation, I typed “iPad game” into Google: 112 million hits.

eReader
After two weeks, Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle still look good. I hear the debate about e-ink versus backlit screen. I don’t mind reading on a computer screen, but I also like paper. I can load a math textbook from the Kindle bookstore on my iPad, and solve exercises using pen and paper. As an investor, I’ll be watching what the iPad (and its competition) does for–or to–the textbook industry.

Turning to newspapers and magazines, I like the agitation surrounding the iPad. The presentation I gave to the Presse Magazine conference in Paris last week confirmed the  enthusiasm and the anxiety. There’s much skill, energy and €€ in play.

I’ve tried the New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Popular Science, GQ, the Zinio magazine distribution app, Paris Match and Le Monde. They’re all promising but they show that the genre still needs work on both the UI side and particularly with the business models. I have an aversion to subscriptions that make it difficult to cancel, and only Le Monde lets me buy a single issue using their in-app purchase mechanism.

Regarding the UI, the gold dust needs to settle for some, while others need to lose their East Block smell. The former (names withheld) enjoy the new UI toys a bit too much. They’re tiring, distracting. The latter need to do better than a timidly sexed-up screen replica of the paper-based product.

Still, I’m hopeful. There’s no good culture without bad taste; the excesses prove that designers are pushing the envelope and conquering uncharted territory. The medium has yet to coalesce and find its sui generis place, but I’m optimistic because there’s enough competition, interest, and customers to make “it” happen—a thriving electronic newspaper and magazine industry. As for Apple’s role as an advertising platform (iAd?), that, too, will be worth watching.

Presentation
Keynote, Apple’s PowerPoint-compatible superset app, shows us the iPad idiosyncrasies. I brought the official iPad-to-VGA adapter with me to Paris, hooked it up, and hoped for the best. Zero setup, as we have come to expect, with no fiddling with F-keys or Desktop Properties. The projector displayed the presentation while my iPad displayed a (limited) presenter’s console. But, wait, switching out of Keynote, there’s no way to display the main screen. The iPad manual says I can display photos using a projector, but there’s not a word about a general replica of the iPad screen. At the conference I tried to show a movie but got an “Unauthorized” message, instead.

The conference organizers had insisted: Don’t forget the VGA adapter for the iPad. I didn’t. But, while I brought two machines for friends, I forgot to pack mine. No problem…almost. My configuration automagically resurrected itself on one of the spare machines when connected to iTunes. This gave me the opportunity to use MobileMe’s Find My iPhone service. It found my two iPads, the one left behind in my office and its freshly minted clone. The one in it found in Paris is shown below:

I could lock it, display a message on it, or remotely wipe its content. I chose the latter, I’ll see the results when I get back. In the meantime, as advertised in the screenshot above, the one left behind is now “dead”.

Conclusion and memoriam
Has the long-suffering tablet device finally emerged? The iPad isn’t perfect but, for me, it’s more than good enough, and extrapolating from the iPhone trajectory since 2007 we’ll see a steady string of improvements, especially if competitors such as HP and (the now-disliked) Google spur Apple and drive investment and creativity.
A final word…for Bill Gates. In 2001, he predicted that within five years, the Tablet PC would be the most popular form of PC sold in America. The timing was off, but he might end up being right, even if he might not enjoy the fruits of his vision.

Being a visionary is a bitch.

Bill’s prediction was only one of a long string going back to Dynabook, Newton, Grid, Go and other prophecies. The iPad might be the real thing, finally.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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