John Bresee

“(the iPad is) not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it” — Pogue In one sentence this anonymous scribe captured the essence of the iPad. It’s a consumer oriented cash generator with almost every form of payment waiting for you to join. We may well get out of this recession because Steve Jobs willed it to be.

One analyst just raised his 2010 sales number for the iPad to 8-10 million. Which is a ridiculous amount when you consider the category doesn’t exist yet. Which is silly for me to mention it’s not like the analysts spotted the housing crash, the dot com crash or any of the other eighty three recorded fiscal bubbles…but still, they are analysts and presumably they have more wisdom in their domain than I, so I listen.

But what I am guessing and feeling is that the iPad is going to revolutionize in a different way. The notion of personal browsing. That ecommerce+ will be at your fingertips  and it will be incredibly powerful. This is not a browser who’s history you have to wipe to keep corporate from reading it, but instead your own that you carry with you…history of all messages, commerce browsing, blogging, writing, photography. The iPad will be the window into your own lives and others.

Ecommerce only represents 6% of total commerce in the US…but it’s the fast growing segment  and will be for years to come. It is expected to grow 2% a year for the foreseeable future and that is without mobile factored in. The iPad will do an interesting thing in that it will help migrate those who have been resistant to ecommerce by way of a more friendly environment where commerce will, perhaps feel less threatening. So it will increasingly steal from the physical side of commerce. For the cognoscenti ecommerce will grow faster due to a deeper wallet share. Suddenly commerce that never would have happened over the web will be possible, be it the hot dog vendor or bike parts for a kick ass bike/community/commerce app. Those who comfortably spend on the web now will see their spending accelerate as the software grows to meet capabilities in the new hardware.

And in that way the iPad will work to combine the aspects of commerce that are already appealing with those of geo-tagging, nearest physical product, best price within five miles,  and much more to move a large percentage of wallet share to the web. So ecommerce will grow, again at a much faster rate than it has. And it will grow in new, unexpected places that get the distinct advantages of this format. For instance in-game digital product sales might well grow at an astonishing rate.

And Android will follow along with their impossible to beat “Better Than Free” model and slowly and they will own the lower pricepoints. Yet this is a market that is already proven, the $275 netbook is very desirable. Add in a touch screen and phenomenal OS and it will be a dream browser. The Tablet is here to stay. And so is the app. A web page is nonspecific brochureware for the dying 2000s and  an app is the perfect hyper-focused one purpose tool for which this generation was born to use.

High price-points will be Apple‘s as there is something luxurious in software and hardware designed together. But Android’s breadth of connectivity to massive data sets creates opportunities that I don’t have the brain power to imagine. Apple and Google do something that no other companies do, they create moments when the current and future exist at once. It’s this strange feeling, as if for a moment, we get a moment of living in the future just by way of a new product release. What a cool capability.

Tablets will not have to war for its share of computing. It will instead be the third form of computing and within 36 months the primary mode for ecommerce.We won’t stop using our laptops and desktops and we can’t give up our mobile phones.” The world never converges, it only diverges into more ways that we can stay in touch, buy, say hello, record our thoughts, support our existence.

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Image doesn’t relate to the article…I just knew this guy back in the day and Zemanta thinks that “O’Reilly” and “Reilly” are somehow related in its really cool suggest an image tool. Oops. Whaddup Tony?

An O’Reilly reader asked the question, “should I dump my iPhone for an Android?” and it seems to be a question that is being asked more and more. The simple answer is no, unless you are a very early adopter with a massive tolerance for behaviors like your phone crashing. There is much criticism of AT&Ts network and the occasional dropped call. I, being a pathetic dork, carry both phones at the moment. I lose one or two calls a week due to AT&Ts shoddy network. And my iPhone crashes maybe once a month…maybe less. And that’s the thing with my phone, it’s like a light switch or a car, you want it to work every single time you turn the key or flip the switch.

A crashed OS and a bad network leave you with the same result…no phone. That’s not okay. AT&Ts network seems to be improving faster than the next version of the Droid will arrive.

And the Android crashes constantly. They use nice words like “forced restart of search application” or some such thing, but the truth is I have to sit and wait for my basically beta version phone to settle down and begin working again. I am confident that by version 3.0 things will be rock stable. But right now the Droid is the crash-o-matic.

The question is kind of a, “should I buy an Acura or a Maserati?” thing. One of them is cool and works beautifully all the time and the other one doesn’t look nearly as cool ’cause it’s in the shop several days a month. But Maserati’s are cool in their own way. If you want a second phone, Droid it up.

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The Droid is far more phone than I gave it credit for initially. It’s seems inconceivable but in the two weeks that the Droid has been available the Android OS has suddenly amassed 20% of the mobile internet traffic in the US.

RIM, which is the DOS of mobile Internet, is watching its awkward mobile traffic share swirl down the drain. One could reasonably guess that the market caps of the trailing providers will follow.

Palm, the inventor of the space, will likely be gone in a very short while. It’s sad as it is a once great company that made understandable wrong turns.

Microsoft is so busy competing in a raft of worlds that it perhaps did not determine that only one path mattered; mobile. They can lose the living room and even the server room but mobile was a must win. And in years of OS (CE, Mobile, etc.) releases they never seemed to be able to envision the endless vista that mobile truly represents.

It’s a two horse race now, Android vs. iPhone. It’s important not to understate that apple has created the fastest consumer technology growth ramp the world has ever seen. But Android is much closer than I thought was conceivable.

What matters is that for anyone looking at mobile development the paths will have to be bifurcated. Releasing apps for one world won’t be enough anymore…and we have yet to release even one. To find the world changing so quickly, even before entering the game is a frightening prospect from an enterprise planning point of view. I cling to the hope that where change is fastest is also where opportunity is greatest.

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