Last week, we noted that Apple had successfully convinced a court that Samsung should be forced to hand over unreleased prototypes of its new phones and tablet computers as part of its patent dispute with Samsung. In response, Samsung (which filed countersuits over other patents) is demanding Apple hand over its next generation iPhones and iPads to Samsung. The whole thing is getting pretty childish, which is basically what happens in patent disputes of this nature. Why can't these two companies just focus on competing in the marketplace, and letting the best company win based on who's buying what?
If you don't want to watch the video, here's the key part:
"A few short weeks ago I came to the House floor after having purchased an iPad and said that I happened to believe, Mr. Speaker, that at some point in time this new device, which is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs. Now Borders is closing stores because, why do you need to go to Borders anymore? Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble? Buy an iPad and download your newspaper, download your book, download your magazine. Chicago State University, in my Congressional district, in Freshman class, they're not being given textbooks any more. They're all being given iPads as they enter school. President Wayne Watson is hoping for a textbookless campus within four years, where this state university they no longer have textbooks! Well what becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs? What becomes of bookstores and libraries and all of the jobs associated with paper? In the not too distant future, these jobs simply won't exist."
Now, to be fair, I think he's trying to make a slightly different point than most are getting from this, but doing an incredibly bad job of it. This can certainly be read as a traditional luddite screed against iPads. Later in the speech, he admits that the iPad may have made life more efficient for Americans.
What is true is that disruptive innovation does shift around jobs. No one denies that, and I think that's the point he was trying to make, and then arguing that Congress should be helping those displaced workers. Of course, instead, it comes off as an anti-iPad screed. Separately, it comes off a bit as an anti-Chinese screed, because later in the speech he bitches about the fact that the iPad is made in China, so they get the "benefits" of it while Americans do not.
Of course, that's simply wrong. As Gary Shapiro points out in his article (linked above), the Chinese get very little of the value of the iPad, and the reason the jobs are there is because they're low cost jobs:
The Chinese believe their people only get a few dollars of the iPad’s cost, as the profits, research and development, and many of the components are sourced from outside China. The Chinese only get paid for the lowest value assembly their workers provide. Most Americans do not want this type of repetitive assembly work – and if Apple used Americans to make their products, the products would be much more expensive and less accessible to most Americans. Yet, devices that access the Internet allow the poorest among us to have access to a wealth of education and information.
But the key point that Rep. Jackson appears to be totally missing is how the iPad and other technology innovations create a ton of new jobs in the US as well. Technology disruption does that sort of thing. Automated phone switching was supposed to be horrible in that it would put all those human operators out of work... but it also enabled the internet, which now certainly accounts for much greater employment opportunities.
Rather than complaining about the iPad, or saying that it's killing jobs, why isn't Jackson encouraging more such innovation which creates new jobs?
Earlier this year, we pointed to an excellent Danny O'Brien blog post comparing the media's mad dash for the iPad as a "savior" to the media's similar mad-dash to CD-ROMs as a savior. I'm reminded of that after Tom Teshima pointed us to Michael Gartenberg's review of Wired's well-hyped iPad app, where he, too, notes the similarities to CD-ROMness:
In the mid 90s, a friend of mine was involved in a project to recreate magazines like Time on CD-ROM for the multimedia PCs of the era. The results were pretty cool, but the CD-ROM versions of the publications hardly replaced their print counterparts. Content has since moved from optical disk to the web, and now the allure of tablet devices has created a market for specific newspaper and magazine apps -- the number one paid app for iPad is a digital version of Wired, which sold about 1,000 copies an hour the first day it was launched. While it's a much better effort than some of the other efforts, more than anything Wired for iPad shows the weaknesses of media apps and demonstrates how the tablet remains a still-imperfect medium to deliver this type of content.
Wired's efforts, like the CD-ROM efforts of the past, by has some cool features. A video clip of Toy Story 3 graces the cover and there are various interactive features, but more than anything else, it feels like a scanned in copy of the paper mag. Although navigation is better than most iPad magazines, it's still never clear when a screen should be scrolled down or just swiped horizontally.
Gartenberg notes that the iPad version is, in some ways, a worst of both worlds. It's not like the website, which is easily shared or emailed or discussed with others. Most of that functionality is effectively missing, which is really quite limiting for folks who are used to sharing the news as a part of experiencing it. Second, it doesn't allow physical notations or markup the way an actual paper magazine does -- or, again, the ability to easily share the magazine with others. You could share your iPad, but that's not quite the same thing...
He then goes on to point out the ridiculous economics. We've already seen other media publications come out with crazy pricing, but Wired unfortunately followed suit, and it makes little sense given the economics involved (which, Gartenberg points out is ironic, given editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's last book on "Free" in business models:
Even worse, the price point is hard to swallow. Charging the full cover price for a digital magazine makes no sense when I can subscribe to the paper edition of Wired for a year at a much lower cost per issue -- especially given that there's no paper, ink, shipping or distribution charges. Given the lack of flexibility, I'd assume there would at least be some incentive to get me to make the digital purchase, and even more so in light of the fact that the bulk of the content is already available online at Wired's website for free. It's ironic that Editor-in-chief Chris Anderson famously wrote a book called "Free" -- the Wired iPad app is the perfect case to try out some of those business models.
Of course, the obvious retort is the damn thing sold like hot cakes when it was released. The real question, though is how sustainable will that really be in the long term? As more people realize how much they're paying, they may wonder why. And I'm still confused as to why publications like Wired hype up all these special features for the iPad... but don't offer the same functionality on the web -- which they easily could.
