Why the Playbook will Fail
Interesting to see how many few people lined up for the Playbook this morning in the Big Smoke. I would say I’m surprised, but I’m not and it’s a shame I can’t dig up an old tweet from 6 months ago as proof.
It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that every ‘revolutionary’ consumer device RIM has put into the market has failed. The Storm was supposed to be the next, and better, iPhone. #fail.
The Storm2 was supposed to fix all the issues Storm1 had and be …uh, the next and more better iPhone. #fail.
I’m sure the Storm3 will carry the same hype and probably be twice as fast with 10x more features than iPhone5 will be. #futureFail.
The Playbook will fail miserably because consumers do not want a device that does everything. Consumers want a device that suits their lifestyle. I will admit I despised iFans until I tried out my first Apple product about a year ago. Yeah, yeah, cue the ‘Apple fanboy’ chants. I had used every generation device running Windows Mobile up until WM6.1 and was a die-hard Windows user.
Just under a year later I now have 5 Apple products. Why is that? Well, they all just work. I can play any media from any of these devices (and from my home server which is running Windows) anywhere. I can control my Pioneer receiver with my iPhone. My KIDS (4 and 6) can stream Youtube videos from our iPhones to the TV. It all just works. I don’t need extra cables to hook anything up, I don’t need to lug around a tablet (I don’t own and iPad, have no use for one) and most importantly I don’t have to screw around with any settings or fiddle with anything. Cripes, even my “designed for Windows 7″ printer worked flawlessly with my MacBook while it was a pain in the arse to get it to work with Windows 7. In the (almost) year I’ve had my MacBook, it’s locked up twice. I’ve rebooted my iPhone once (not counting iOS updates), and it’s never slow. All my Apple products just work, they’re not “in the way” of me listening to music, watching videos or viewing pictures. I don’t feel like I need to do anything extra to enjoy media.
So here we are, the morning of another, once again, hyped RIM product. It’s roughly a month later since iPad2 launched and I still can’t get one. They’re sold out everywhere. I just checked Future Shop’s website, the $499 Playbook is in stock at every single store in the GTA. The iPad2? Sold out at every store except for 1. Hard to draw a solid conclusion based on that data, after all, I don’t know how many iPad2′s were shipped vs how many Playbook’s were shipped.
The Playbook does much more on paper than the iPad does, same goes for Blackberry devices. The hardware specs are better, the feature list is longer, yet people still flock to Apple. The problem isn’t technology or features. The problem is culture. Like it or not, based on people I’ve talked to and case studies I’ve read, Apple fosters a creative culture based on a shared vision. Some may call it ‘cult-like’ but whatever it is, it works and it shows in the products Apple creates. Their products don’t come out half-baked feeling like they were rushed. It’s clear that RIM wanted the Playbook to be the best device on paper, shame people don’t want that. RIM’s half-assed attempt at creating developer tools also shows how dis-jointed their internal operations are.
Consider how Apple releases iOS updates. Recently Apple updated Air Play (which allows for streaming of media from iPhone to Apple TV) and the patches for all my devices were available within days of each other. RIM has released the Playbook and their own App Store (Blackberry app world) doesn’t show any Playbook specific Apps unless you search for them. Seems odd that you’d launch a major device and not update the place where people are likely to go to find apps. Actually, it’s pretty funny visiting their site using Chrome on a Mac. A nice big welcome messages says “You are browsing this site with an un-supported operating system”. Nice. Great way to persuade me to switch.
I’ll probably go check out a Playbook just to see one in action and this post isn’t intended to trash RIM, it’s to show that companies with creative and collaborative cultures build great products and companies that have clueless managers and executives make decisions on paper don’t. I’ve worked for my share of large enterprises so I get what these big companies are like. I’m amazed they actually get any products out the door.
So sorry Playbook, you may be a wonderful piece of engineering with a nice screen, expandable memory and 2 hi-def cameras but you are not what the majority of consumers want, especially considering you can’t do email or calendar without tethering! People will flock to your product when you empower your employees to build kick-ass products that THEY want to use, not some clueless manager who wants to be able to say that ‘on his/her watch’ he/she made the best (on paper) device the market has ever seen.
#fail.
