I said that Microsoft’s attempts in this area had met with niche success. Later, we followed up the debate on email:

Ian:

Still not convinced about the Apple tablet — Microsoft’s Tablet PC was a pretty good platform (I know, I know…) but remained very niche because touch screens are so expensive. Their cost increases exponentially by size because the fault ratio on LCD panels is so much higher once you add touch. Also, people don’t like ‘typing’ on touch screens because of the lack of physical feedback.

Malcolm:

I love typing on a touch screen :-)   I hated my Nokia btns.

I think we’ll be surprised at the way a fully-functioning, populist, personalisable, programmable, portable (rather than mobile) entertainment, communications, information carrying, global gps and wireless, device will have infiltrated daily life before we even know it. iPhone is a real trojan horse. I don’t think the Microsoft tablet was any comparison.

IDEO had been saying for years and years that a touch screen device would NEVER be attractive to the public and consequently never be successful. I sure I saw Bill Moggridge say it in another article again at the weekend, despite such recent evidence to the contrary. In my view, iPhone blew that long-held tenet away comprehensively.

IDEO simply came at the issue of the interface design in completely the wrong way. A visual screen needed sophisticated and contextual visual feedback, not tactile as Bill Moggridge and his ilk steadfastly, and failingly, maintained. I believe iPhone proved that. People are ready for things that work in an obvious way, the actual hardware/software ‘concepts’ are lost on them. Only the effects (i.e. practical and usable) mean anything. The touch screen revolution has effectively happened, now the results will begin to inundate us. This is akin to 1998 when the web supposedly broke into the mainstream and ceased to be new or interesting to the cognoscenti. That was wrong then — it was almost ten years more before it really could be described as mainstream.

As ever, we will need to be alive to exactly who are audience is, or should be, and target accordingly.

Ian:

“People are ready for things that work in an obvious way”

completely agreed, but with the caveat “People are ready for things that are better”.

However, touch screens remain extremely niche despite being available for years. The causes for this are:

(a) cost (this can sometimes be offset by versatility/throughput e.g. tube ticket machines).

(b) durability (increasing this increases the cost considerably, only suited for high-volume public terminal-type applications; obviously the durability problem increases exponentially with size of screen).

© user experience.

You believe that © isn’t a factor any more, or can be overcome by great interaction design. You might be right — I disagree. Typing has been perfectly possible on touch screens for a decade. Nobody does it. Why is that? Not just cost and durability. Similarly, voice input. No one does it. Typing at a keyboard isn’t just learned behaviour — it’s incredibly efficient compared to the alternatives.

You think that the iPhone is a game-changer — yet, you struggled to give me Catherine’s contact details. Surely, that’s pretty basic functionality? And you are someone who has followed every innovation in the digital space for 15 years. What chance Joe Normal?

Malcolm:

Actually, I found Catherine’s details right away, much more easily than finding them by any other format I can think of. I struggled to show you the details on my screen as i recall, as i pointed and clicked simultaneously when i didn’t want to — a result of having big clumsy fingers, and being eager to please, and trying to do something that it’s not really designed for, nor intended to be. the iPhone is a personal device not a sharing device.

I appreciate your typing argument. However, my argument is that in the real world most people don’t type. They do text, and lot more than they type, and without a keyboard. it’s the keyboard that has kept the computer firmly perceived as a business machine. My argument actually suggests that because of the success and versatility of the iPhone touch screen many more activities stray away from the need to function with a keyboard at all. I think that is very significant.

My view has always been that the keyboard has restricted broader acceptance and usefulness of computers rather than the other way around. I think this is just the beginning of a new relationship between people and and their little computer pals.  Joe Normal has these little pals all around him as normal. It is we who are more likely out of step, not the young people naturally occupying the digital space that even I’ve struggled with these last 15 years.

That said, I do now make more notes on the move, because it’s easy and convenient to do it on iPhone, and it’s guaranteed to directly transfer into the (currently) more versatile and permanent environment of my laptop. i think the effortless connectivity of iPhone and MacBook is another key to success, and conversely a reason for the failure of Newton, and every other phone I’ve possessed.

Voice activation is not popular because it doesn’t work (still) and is vaguely embarrassing. but so is Skype and that is slowly (quickly?) finding favour. The time may become right for a having a useful conversation with your computer some time in the future. I’m not fully writing that one off just yet.

Don’t let all that poorly designed, poorly functioning, crap hardware of the past cloud your vision for the future. ‘Smartphone’ has always been a misnomer, until now.  yes, people are now ready for things that are better. And working in an obvious way is better.

Ian:

Before you had an iPhone, you had a notebook computer, I guess. And I am also guessing that you still carry that notebook around a lot of the time.

If you need to do serious data-entry, then you need a device that is designed for that – and that’s your laptop (or, to be totally honest, your desktop). Your phone is fine as the equivalent for the back of an envelope, or a filofax. It’s not the same as being at your real computer. And if it can’t really replace your notebook computer, then isn’t it just bling?

The mainstream. Allow me a little diversion. Twitter, for all the chat, has not managed to engage teenagers. Bluetooth has.

You’d kind of think it would be the other way round. Twitter is really easy, while Bluetooth is sort of techy. Why’s that? Because the take-up of a technology is about what people want to do. File sharing is something teens want to do – pictures, music, what-have-you. On the other hand, microblogging to a community of peers? Isn’t that the same as Facebook status messages? The mainstream doesn’t adopt technology on the basis of trendiness, I take from this, but on the basis of functionality and cost. Interestingly and counter-intuitively, convenience seems to be less of a factor.

The world does need personal, personalisable, portable devices for work/comms/entertainment/etc – no-one would be buying any of this stuff otherwise. However, I am dubious about the touch-screen proposition. What does a touch screen add that isn’t better served by keyboard and mouse?

One thing. It (the device, whatever it is, phone/tablet) can be smaller. So it is less useful, less functional, less durable, less usable and more expensive.

But it – whatever *it* is — is smaller. Does this not smack of gadget fetishism rather than a real advantage?

[Malcolm’s response to be posted as received over at Dynamo as well]

As you may know, I launched the newsstand magazine What Laptop & Handheld PC (as it was originally called) back in the day — 1999, to be exact. And I have grave misgivings about the whole affair.

One of the most popular marketing messages that advertisers were pushing then about mobile technology, and they still are now, was ‘maximising your downtime’. This meant — in their examples — your senior exec is travelling somewhere to meet a prospective client. If they were equipped with a laptop or a PDA, they could still be doing other stuff. Because, of course, employees are machines that can churn out 40 hours of work a week. If they are not at their desk, hard at it, then they can do it somewhere else with a laptop.

Total bullshit from the start, then. If you have ever been in these situations, you’ll know that meetings require a lot of preparation. Undoubtedly, more preparation than you have allowed, unless you’ve done the same thing a million times. Your train ride is spent bricking it and preparing, one way or another.

In 2001, or thereabouts, mobile communications got thrown into this. “Out of Touch -  I don’t think so! with Communicotron 2001″. This was about the point that Blackberries started to appear on commuter trains. Nokia had their 9000 series and Palm and Microsoft were waking up to the idea of smartphones.

More bullshit. A Blackberry is poison. I have had two on extended (6-month) press arrangements. They have made me more responsive to emails, sure. But also more worried, less creative and less productive. What’s your priority?

In 2003, the first Centrino processors meant laptops could run on battery power for — meh — in my experience 3–4 hours, but in the marketing parlance ‘all-day’. They’ve got a little better since then, and 6 hours isn’t quite such a stretch to the imagination.

Cool — I can actually ignore the conference and do emails instead. Thanks for the £700 or thereabouts spent on my presence, but I learned nothing, because I wasn’t paying attention or thinking about the topic under discussion.

In 2006, the first ‘all you can eat’ data packages started to appear, meaning that, yes, if you had coverage, you could do normal things on the Internet while you were out and about, and not worry too much about the charges.

I don’t want to even start on why this is not going to make you do more work. It isn’t, OK? There is no way on earth that people are going to do more work. Stop it.

In 2008, none of that extra productivity and connectivity seems to matter a stuff. What were all these executives up to with their high-powered communications gadgets? Certainly not bringing home the bacon or making sensible decisions. If the credit crisis does anything, I hope it explodes this myth.

Mobile technology is great — it lets you put in your four hours a day of real work — proper, excited, creative, wonderful stuff, from anywhere. But don’t expect extra anything.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am an enormous fan of downtime: skiving-off, fucking-about, pissed-up afternoons and all the rest of it. Extra productivity is an evil myth designed to make us buy more stuff because we’re continually so guilty about having achieved a normal amount of work. Having been given (or — the real kicker, bought ourselves) these toys to improve productivity, it gets even worse.

But get real. There is no extra productivity. People (even me) like work — we like having a purpose and getting down to the real nitty gritty. But I reckon there’s about 20–40 hours a week* of that in all of us, depending on how creative, clever and original you are supposed to be. You are naturally programmed to create a certain amount of real work. After that, you do busy work, “research”, find work for other people, do pointless admin shit and piss about.

AND, this is why downtime is so important: stay in the pub, wander off to the other department, go to networking events in work time: that’s when you make new relationships, connect different things together, come up with the new approach.

Fucking hell. Downtime is gold.

No links or proof in this post. Sorry. But true. Here’s to the value of downtime — see you in the pub.

(* Many clever, creative people put in 80+ hours a week according to the time clocks. But creative, clever, real hours…?)

I understand that Microsoft has to do something to build on its web strategy/presence. No-one uses Live Search, Live Spaces, or any of the rest. (OK. About one percent of people do). To build up any future trade for advertising, web services or development platforms, they have to increase market share.

I understand that Yahoo! has to do something. Their share of the search market is pitiful compared to the almighty Google. Their share of the search marketing budget is about 20% compared to Google’s 70%. And they’d just been forced to lay off a load of staff.

So if they combine forces, they end up with a market competitor?

I don’t think so.

Microsoft’s problem and Yahoo!‘s has been that they have not been able to identify what they do well. Microsoft used to do operating systems and business productivity software. They were quite good at that. YMMV.

Yahoo! used to have this great directory of editor-approved, quality websites. Then they diversified. They tried to make yahoo.com all things to all wo/men. That failed disastrously because there’s no such thing. They brought on some cool people and acquired a load of cool sites like del.icio.us, flickr and upcoming. But still it didn’t work for them because advertisers don’t buy cool; they buy results. Yahoo! announced 1400 job losses just last week.

Why didn’t it work and why isn’t MS able to make any inroads on the web?

Because neither of them have a core value proposition when it comes to the web. You couldn’t sum up what either of them do on the web in one sentence. If a business can’t do that, then they are in trouble, normally.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bits within both companies’ web presence that have considerable value. Flickr is a cool photo site. Microsoft’s technet is actually very good, IMHO. Live Spaces is arguably a much better platform than Blogger or Vox.

However, for end-users, if you want good search, go to Google. For businesses, if you want SEM, go to Google. What exactly would you willingly go to a Yahoo or MS website for?

Microo! doesn’t appear to me to provide a compelling alternative to any of that.

The BBC quotes Fred Tipson, MS’ senior policy counsel, who says:

“Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there,” he told a conference in Athens.

“We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there.”

“We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It’s a moving target.“

I’m interested in this, of course, because Google and Yahoo! have previously defended their decision to remain in China on the grounds that their presence is more likely to precipitate change and improvements than staying away. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft do indeed act against China, and if this propels action from other companies.

So sad, though, that it’s left to major corporations to take the moral stands our governments should be taking.

Below is a little taster. The full transcript is on Paul’s site here.

8. What ideas/values/approaches do you think will be permanent changes from Web 2.0 to whatever Web 3.0 brings?

I doubt there will be such a thing as Web 3.0. I think so many people will use the phrase “Web 3.0″ for their pet theory about the future of the Web that it will lose all credibility, and by the time there’s a change big enough to warrant a name like that, no one will want to use it. “Web 2.0″ is already close to the edge of credibility. Few people I know can bring themselves to use it seriously. “Web 3.0″ is probably already dead.

But as for the underlying question, yes, there are definitely trends I think will be permanent. One is the increasing focus on users. There are a couple promising variants. The most obvious are the social networking sites, which are entirely about the users. But there are also subtler variants — news sites where the top stories are determined by voting, like Digg and Reddit, and sites where people post their own stuff, like Blogger and now YouTube. This “stuff” is presently called “user-generated content” but if it becomes the default it will probably get a shorter name.

Another trend that’s here to stay is web-based software. This began in the nineties, but you can do so much more now that everyone can see it’s the future — even Microsoft. I think in twenty years most of the software people use will be running on servers.

There’s also a social trend that will last: the startup world will increasingly be ruled by technical people rather than business people. As in so many other areas, Google is the pattern for the future. The hackers dominate Google, and that’s why Google wins.

A lot of the most characteristically lame startups of the Bubble were that way because they were started by business guys, who then went looking for hackers to implement their ideas. That model may have worked in 1960, but it didn’t work so well in 1998, and it gets more obsolete every year. I think the future belongs to the hackers. Technology is an ever larger component of business, so of course power is shifting to the people who are experts in that, rather than management or finance.

Kent Lindstrom, the company’s president, said it was “too early to say” what the company would do to protect its “intellectual property”. Hypothetically, this might include attempting to make money from charging licensing fees for the technology to other social networking sites or other forms of litigation. Friendster has 9–10 million users, many of them in Asia. In the US, though, it has been overshadowed in terms of user numbers by companies like bebo and MySpace.

It is hard to decide what is the most depressing about this story. That it took three years to acquire a patent — the equivalent of decades in the online world — is pretty divisive. I’m fairly sympathetic to inventors, so the ability for other companies to mimic your technology in order to gain an advantage or undermine your USP for three years seems wrong. On the other hand, the terms of the patent appear to be rather broad, and perhaps reminiscent of the six-year battle between Xerox, Microsoft and Apple to establish ownership of the WIMP interface that had already become the defacto standard for modern computers. As I recall, the lawyers won.

Update:

I’m not a lawyer (obviously) and things may be better/worse than they appear, depending on your stance. There has been some discussion of this at Mashable*, and RJ Herrick says,

This filing is an Application document. Friendster has not yet won any actual protection for the idea, the USPTO has simply acknowledged that this idea has been filed and is under scrutiny for potential granting. If it passes, another (Grant) document will be filed, at which point they are assured their monopoly. Many apply, far fewer are granted. Mostly this is a signal for anyone who wants to contest the filing to speak up– companies are continuously combing through both Apps and Grants to see what their competitors are up to and protect their intellectual turf.

Users benefit in multiple ways. They are empowered, with an internet that they choose and have, in part, created. The content they read and write is about what interests them rather than what a publisher thinks might interest them. They get cheaper access to applications. They are able to participate in and create a social network with like-minded people that may not exist in their day-to-day lives.

Businesses can benefit in similar ways. Many Web 2.0 services have specific business purposes. Startup 37Signals sells online collaboration services specifically designed to allow geographically remote teams to manage projects and agendas. Business documents and handbooks are recreated as Wiki’s (the information structure program used by Wikipedia). BusinessWeek reports that “Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein uses a Socialtext wiki instead of e-mail to create meeting agendas and post training videos for new hires. Six months after launching it, traffic on the 2,000-page wiki, used by a quarter of the bank’s workforce, already has surpassed that of the company’s intranet”.

Maintaining and developing contacts can be achieved through services like LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com, a ‘grown-up’ version of MySpace). Businesses can also add to or replace some of their PR activity with corporate blogs. Erstwhile Microsoft blogger, the gracious and disingenuous Robert Scoble has arguably done more to soften its image than any of their PR activity over the last few years (http://scobleizer.wordpress.com).

For publishers, the Web 2.0 approach clearly makes for an attractive business model. Having created a platform like digg.com, ongoing costs are fairly minimal for a news site, with no reporters, no editors, and no production people. They have to pay for the bandwidth and some programmers to tinker with the platform to keep it working satisfactorily. Their revenue comes from targeted avdertising such as Google AdWords (more of which anon) and since we, the users, decide what appears on the front page, these advertisements will be very accurately targeted to what the digg community is interested in.

It is not surprising, then, that the promise of a successful Web 2.0 site has the business community excited and that VC funding and angel investment is coming back to the internet. News International’s acquisition of social networking site MySpace for $580mn in July 2005 has been the largest deal so far, but it is one of hundreds of deals.In most cases, the amounts aren’t astounding. Luckily for investors, with the low-cost business models these startups have adopted and users driven as much by word-of-mouth as traditional advertising, there isn’t actually a need for vast amounts of capital in many cases. There’s certainly no return to the frenzy of 2000 when, for example, pets.com, which sold pet food online, raised $82.5mn in an IPO before collapsing nine months later. But they are interesting nonetheless.

Communal video sharing site youtube attracted $5mn from Sequoia Capital in October 2005, while digg got $2.8mn. Online calendar service trumba attracted $8mn in November 2005 from three investment companies. Zimbra, an online equivalent to Microsoft Outlook, raised $16mn. Facebook, a college networking site, raised $12.2mn. The list goes on, most amounts are undisclosed, but a glance at the portfolio pages of VC companies like Union Square Ventures, the Omidyar Network and Selby Venture Partners confirms that confidence is high.