Proof that the iPad has changed the game

When the iPhone was released, Microsoft's Steve Balmer laughed at it indicating that he did not think it would appeal to business customers. The iPhone has gone on to change every smart phone out there.

Apple announced the iPad on January 27, 2010, and the market began to change. The HP Slate had shown off at the CES in January 2010 by Steve Balmer, and it has now been withdrawn from the market.

With rumors of over a 1,000,000 shipped in less than a month, in only the US market, it will change the way people see computers.

iPad vs. The Knowledge Navigator

So the 2010 iPad is announced, how does it compare with the with the 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept piece for 2010?

The iPad has many of features that the Knowledge Navigator forecast, and some it did not.

• The Internet. It did not really even have a name in 1987, yet alone the concept of accessing data bases from around the world, as well as adding in voice and video access. Wow. Remarkably close.
• Built in wireless phone connections. In the video it was almost a glorified answering machine, however the iPad can offer very similar functionality through Skype and other similar services.
• A multi-touch panel display. The iPad is shockingly close with the ability to manipulate daa directly

The iPad is missing a few, some for the better.

• Agents with voice recognition. While voice recognition must still be available on the iPad, there definitely is not a built in agent (played by Bill Nye in the video) who not only recognizes your voice, it understands your intentions. This is a big one, and the only systems that come close now have a real person at the other end.
• A video camera for conferencing. While Macs have had video cameras standard for iChat for 5 years, it does not seem to have been included on the iPad (or iPhone). Yet.

The iPad also has a few features that did not show on Knowledge Navigator.

• The App Store. It would have been tough to show in such a short video, however the tens of thousands of apps now available for the iPad give it a customizability that was never previewed by Apple.

Carrots and Sticks Don't Work for Knowledge Work!

When it comes to motivation, what science knows, and what business does are two different things. The science is pretty clear that for cognitive tasks higher rewards do not produce better results, in fact they produce worse results.

Dan Pink provides a very entertaining presentation at a TEDtalk on how motivation works. The ideas are not new, Abraham Maslow may have been one of the first to study what motivates people to do better, the well known Hawthorne plant studies, the best selling In Search of Excellence book, even the recent publication of the 4 Hour Work Week have all come to the conclusions that external rewards are not enough to truly motivate people

In fact, for cognitive skills that require creative solutions rather than repetitive solutions, external rewards have the negative impact of narrowing focus and degrading the solutions.

Why then, do so many business and government go to a system of competitive bidding based largely on price?Why do firms offer significant financial bonuses to high performers?

Google has found that over 50% of its new products come from the 20% of time they ask their engineers to allocate to personal projects that are not company sanctioned. The Lockheed Skunk Works has produced some of the most innovative aircraft in history in production times that are unmatched.

Window 7 - How the desktop world has changed

With Microsoft's release of Windows 7 and Apple's Release of OS 10.6 the world of personal computers has slipped quietly into a new era.

On the shelf beside my desk are a series of disk recovery utilities that were once a key part of my kit. System crashes and the need to completely rebuild a disk or server were a regular part of what was required to be in the business. I have not needed to update those utilities in years, because the systems have been so stable.

It was not that long ago that the regular system backup was used every couple of months to restore a system. Now those backups have to be explicitly tested because the combination of better disk technologies and much more stable operating systems have meant that system backups are needed, but seldom used.

Knock on wood.