What Jobs Should Be Building

Jobs rolls out the Macbook Air, reversing his earlier stance that minimized laptops are unsustainable. It looks unusable for me, at least as a single laptop -- the video memory is shared, so I doubt it will drive my 30" monitor -- but opinions range from whether about whether it is super cool or a dog with fleas.

Steve demos the MacBook Air, originally uploaded by Tom Coates.

Perhaps we are seeing a different sort of tectonic shift here, when having multiple machines will become a mainstream trend. I have toyed with the idea of getting a Fujitsu Lifebook -- with a 10.5" screen, and the removable CD/DVD that can be swapped with a second battery -- and hiring some technoid to hack it so I can run OS X on it. In this mode, or if I got an Air, I would use the ultra small or ultra slim laptop as an occasional machine, only when away from my office, like on this trip to Europe.

Maybe Jobs is anticipating some curve that isn't just about a new cool machine, but a shift in how we interact with them.

His observations about the Kindle show a practical interest in the zeitgeist that surrounds reading. Like Egon in Ghost Busters, Jobs is saying "Print is dead."

[from The Passion of Steve Jobs by John Markoff]

[...]

[Jobs] had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Ouch! That would suggest that Jobs is willing to cede the ebook market to Sony and Amazon or any others who are willing to chase a fading pastime: the reading of books, magazines, and newspapers. I have to say I think he's right; and as the force behind Apple's moves into computing, music, and now movie markets, why focus on a dying end of fading segment?

I have found myself reading less in recent years: reading in the sense of hours immersed in a book, curled up on the couch. I am reading more today, in terms of text passing through my eyes, than ever before, however. It's just time spent in the browser.

Maybe Jobs and Ives can turn their attention to the browser, and revamp that old warhorse, if they are interested in bettering a real antiquated technology. Browsers do what they do, granted, but there is so much more that could be done, and I wonder why there is so little innovation there.

Instead of a thinner notebook or a better kindle, could you please look at improving the place where people really live their lives online? The browser is a prefab quonset hut when we need really new user experience patterns to inform how we are touching the world through the web.

Using another architectural metaphor, I don't think we need a new take on trailers: just a mobile form of housing. We need a new approach to dwellings in general, and the way we interact through our living spaces.

And in the world of the web the place to start is the browser.

Just as I believe we are turning a corner where the truly connected will have many computing devices for different times and purposes, I think we need to start conceptualizing the decline of the multi-purpose browser. Maybe we will have five or six tools for fiddling with -- and through -- the web.

I hope Jobs and Ives turn their attention to that. It's much more important than the Air or the Kindle.

If they can come up with Coverflow in iTunes and the Finder, and take the touch experience of iPhone and plant it onto the Air's touchpad, what could they do to the Web experience?

Comments

[Tim Walker]

Interesting thoughts here, Stowe. Like you, I ingest far more text now than ever, but only a small fraction of it comes from books. And the move toward various tools for online interaction seems to be well underway, given the heavy use of separate browserlike interfaces for IM, Twitter, music, podcasts, etc.

But while I acknowledge that building better broswers is more important than the Air, the Kindle, etc., I doubt that Jobs will turn (much of) his attention to doing it, simply because of Sutton's Law. From a financial standpoint, it makes sense for Apple to make *some* optimized software, but primarily for building an Apple-driven ecosystem that ties heavily into Apple-made hardware. Because that's where the margins are.

[Bob Calder]

If people are reading less, who the hell is filling the parking lot at B&N and Borders? When I was in college in the 70's I don't remember people reading a lot more than now. Of course B&N has the creationists shelved with real science, which I admit is a problem.

Stowe, your rant reminds me of the Finnish guy at Siggraph in 1995 who recounted his experience with the "manly strength machine" at Frontier Land's arcade and said our interface hadn't improved in 100 years. What I would bet on is a reader that runs a virtual face so you can watch a fake "friend" while you listen to him talk. It helps you retain information and holds your attention better than sound alone. You could skin it with your favorite babe. It could turn out to be an annoying as Clippy if it didn't behave though.

On a lighter note, there was a guy at the symposium on Virtual Observatories last week with a green OX and I realized it was as good as the MacBook Air for what I wanted to do. Wow. $1,700 versus $187. Now how will I finagle one?

[Matt Rogers]

It's not the browser but the web sites themselves. Any web 2.0 developer ought to have a deep knowledge of human interface guidelines. If not we will get many more myspace type interface disasters. Really in the end the browser is a media player with back and forward buttons, bookmarking, and text input fields. Improving it makes no more sense than improving a DVD interface.