"Last time there was this much excitement about a tablet, it had some commandments written on it." — A chuckling Steve Jobs quoting Wall Street Journal (Martin Peers, 12/30/09)
We wrote software for Tablet PC when they first launched in the early 2000s. I was in love with the form factor. We even bundled with Viewsonic’s tablets and had a couple around the office. In 2007 or 8, after it was way too slow to run Windows, I installed Linux on it and figured out how to get pdfs and ebooks running. Worked reasonably well but was a brick of a device and the battery was going so didn’t last long.
When the iPhone launched we released a version of our software for it. We did okay but the market was a mess. Novelty apps did better than productivity apps. For iPad, I had a friend who knew a guy in developer relations at Apple and my friend recommended us. Apple was looking for products they could promote that didn’t have an iPad version already. So last minute after announcing but before launch a couple of us went to Cupertino to make sure our software ran on the devices well.
That was amazing. 14 page nondisclosure agreement then escorted us to a room with brown paper over the windows. We worked on iPads tethered to the desk and anytime we ran into trouble they called in the developer who literally wrote the code we were struggling with. Just amazing experience!
We weren’t featured in retail or on stage but did get featured in the App Store a few times, the only time that ever really happened for us, and was a finance app of the year in 2011 (I think). That was the peak of financial success on iOS for us as well. Just brutal.
While I know some made lots of money on Apple’s devices, we did significantly better on Palm and Windows Mobile in late 1990s/early 2000s, honestly. More focused products on business customers and reasonable software prices.
My biggest regret at this time was not realizing how quickly iPad sales grew. I assumed a more traditional slow growth curve, which in my mind gave us more time to plan and execute our response. Netbooks showed the large scope of the desire for computing at some other form factor and strongly implied there was a lot of demand. I was too enmeshed in the PC ecosystem thinking.
There are a lot of strategy angles on this: How Micrsoft's focus on writing and productivity created a blind spot and how Microsoft's poor relationships in the Independent Hardware Vendor (IHV) community (the companies that make components of PCs, like touch screens) caused a miss in understanding how well capacitive touch was working.
The Courier project strikes me as a master class in how the PUM organization world competed for mindshare and resources. If the management team didn't fund an idea, tactics like this one were used to punish or coerce management to change their minds. It was a symptom of an organization out of control. Think again of the internet meme of the Microsoft org chart.
We wrote software for Tablet PC when they first launched in the early 2000s. I was in love with the form factor. We even bundled with Viewsonic’s tablets and had a couple around the office. In 2007 or 8, after it was way too slow to run Windows, I installed Linux on it and figured out how to get pdfs and ebooks running. Worked reasonably well but was a brick of a device and the battery was going so didn’t last long.
When the iPhone launched we released a version of our software for it. We did okay but the market was a mess. Novelty apps did better than productivity apps. For iPad, I had a friend who knew a guy in developer relations at Apple and my friend recommended us. Apple was looking for products they could promote that didn’t have an iPad version already. So last minute after announcing but before launch a couple of us went to Cupertino to make sure our software ran on the devices well.
That was amazing. 14 page nondisclosure agreement then escorted us to a room with brown paper over the windows. We worked on iPads tethered to the desk and anytime we ran into trouble they called in the developer who literally wrote the code we were struggling with. Just amazing experience!
We weren’t featured in retail or on stage but did get featured in the App Store a few times, the only time that ever really happened for us, and was a finance app of the year in 2011 (I think). That was the peak of financial success on iOS for us as well. Just brutal.
While I know some made lots of money on Apple’s devices, we did significantly better on Palm and Windows Mobile in late 1990s/early 2000s, honestly. More focused products on business customers and reasonable software prices.
My biggest regret at this time was not realizing how quickly iPad sales grew. I assumed a more traditional slow growth curve, which in my mind gave us more time to plan and execute our response. Netbooks showed the large scope of the desire for computing at some other form factor and strongly implied there was a lot of demand. I was too enmeshed in the PC ecosystem thinking.
There are a lot of strategy angles on this: How Micrsoft's focus on writing and productivity created a blind spot and how Microsoft's poor relationships in the Independent Hardware Vendor (IHV) community (the companies that make components of PCs, like touch screens) caused a miss in understanding how well capacitive touch was working.
The Courier project strikes me as a master class in how the PUM organization world competed for mindshare and resources. If the management team didn't fund an idea, tactics like this one were used to punish or coerce management to change their minds. It was a symptom of an organization out of control. Think again of the internet meme of the Microsoft org chart.