In 1991 Geoffrey Moore wrote a book called ‘Crossing the Chasm,’ and it became a technology marketers bible. Someone at Apple has clearly read it.
In talks this week reported in, among other papers, PC World, Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook has told investors that he can’t believe that anyone who has seen the ‘magic’ of the iPad UI would go ahead and buy a Netbook. And we believe he is right.
We analyzed the chances for the iPad a few weeks back and felt that it will take a small slice of five or six markets, which between them will make up a new, but small market of its own. But why do we bring up Crossing the Chasm?
Well one of the rules for breaking through (and this is from memory so excuse me if we get the odd word wrong) from the innovators (read nerds) and early adopters (read rich technofreaks) to the early majority that IS the process of crossing the chasm, is to define your own competition.
So Cook has defined it as the Netbook. And by doing that he is able to avoid comparison with the Kindle, with any device running Chrome or Android, many of which will use the same approach as the iPad, which is to use a multi-core ARM processor tightly integrated with a graphics engine ‘ in other words a smartbook.
The iPad is a special case, non-phone version of a smartbook, many of which have been postulated and pre-announced, but none of which are on the market today. We first heard about the idea of a smartbook in August 2008 from Qualcomm. Apple has had time to take that on board, copy the idea, develop it and take it to market, more or less without making any changes to the concept. It is only making a special case of a tablet styled smartbook and it only has to be optimized for a single operating system which it controls ‘ which is why it can get to market so quickly. It is only a non-phone version in the sense that it is only set up for data and any voice service must be VoIP. Come LTE they will all effectively be VoIP.
Qualcomm at Mobile World Congress was showing work which came out of its acquisition of ATI’s Mobile Graphics division a year ago, which it calls Adreno, bundled so far into the MSM 7230 chip alongside a CPU very similar to the Snapdragon. In one demonstration it rendered 4 videos on a phone simultaneously and the chip will hit the market this summer.
So the iPad is a copy of an idea widely publicized which Apple got to market first. Oh yes and it has a neat design. We can applaud Apple for both those points, getting it out first and a neat UI, but come on now, it didn’t think of it and it has to accept that it is competing with the Smartbooks that will come, mostly with Chrome, later this year. Not with Netbooks.
Interestingly Apple switched the Mac from an IBM chip to an Intel chip a few years back, citing Intel’s acceptance that the number of Mips per Watt was a key design goal. It has now, rather predictably, moved to the ARM cores, already preferred by its iPod and iPhones (oh yes and the entire cellular industry) simply because of that Mips per Watt market lead, an open secret that originated at ARM and is being put into action by everyone that has come out of cellular.
The space race is what forced the US to reduce the size of chips and this created Intel. Handheld battery power is having the same influence on chip design going forwards. The real competitor here to the iPad is likely to be Google, on hardware for the rest of us, based on chips from Qualcomm, Samsung and TI, such as the Adreno chip mentioned above.