Profitable Progress is Boring
The best most profitable progress is without fail, boring.
Whenever’s something’s in the labs and there’s a video of it, it’s whiz-bang. A monkey controlling a computer… with its mind! Cool! You can imagine, though, that in reality that would mostly be used to send SMS messages in a meeting while zoning out.
There was a great TED video a while back about turning the internet into a Sixth Sense- you wear a necklace around your neck with a projector, and then interact with that projection in real life. Whoa! Cool! Ooh and aah!
The reality of it is a lot more mundane- no one’s going to wear a freaking internet projecting necklace. It’s hard enough to get someone to buy your stuff, it’s a whole other ballgame when your product makes it harder to get laid.
Evolutionary imperatives places pretty strict limits on hardware design.
There was another TED video, this one for multitouch- again, oohs and aahs all over the place. The demo was drawing with multiple fingers, resizing images, all the generic touch-screen-that-doesn’t-suck demo gestures. That was 2006, and it’s now been productized into the iPad. And, truth be told, it’s a pretty boring device. Nothing flying around in space, no table of images scattered all over the place, no built-in drawing app with the express purpose of painting with all of your fingers at once. The reality is, organization is good when browsing large amounts of pictures, and it’s hard enough to draw with one finger at a time.
To my right is a Magic Trackpad. It recognizes ten fingers of input in real-time and has completely replaced my use of the mouse. I have software that lets me tie gestures to hotkeys, creating massive potential for customizing the hell out of my work environment. Things flying around? A new multitouch language to replace the keyboard? Conversations taking place in tap-speak?
Nah, I mostly use it for tab navigation. Three fingers to the right to tab right, three to the left to tab left, three up to open a tab, three down to close the tab. It’s freaking amazing. I love it! It speeds up browsing like crazy, and I can’t imagine going back to a mouse. Years of massive research and development, all so I can manage my tabs in Safari a bit better.
The real products and real businesses occur at 30% of the demo- when you see folks ooh and aah’ing there’s always a great business to be had by making that advancement more mundane– and useful.
Our business isn’t amazing page turning algorithms, gyroscopic 3D book browsing, or breakthrough real time machine-learning book recommendation algorithms. Its taking books that have been digital for 20 years and making them way easier to browse, download, and read. That’s it. It’s what’s lead to our apps being in the Top 10 of Books for a year straight, and having a Top 100 iPad app since the day of launch.
While competitors made sweet page turning animations, we put together collections to make book browsing easier. Instead of making our own animation, we just used Apple’s built-in one. Guess what? Most folks don’t care. By focusing on nailing the 30% of demo we’ve succeeded- and profited.
