Crude Technologies

From his living room to the iPad in yours, Steve’s aesthetic, his quality, carried all the way through.  The following words are from Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech in June 2005: 

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

“Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

The article below is a couple months old but interesting to look back on now the iPad has sold close to 4 million units, supporting Job's point of view.

Ballmer commented yesterday that Apple's sold more iPads than he would like. He was surprised by the iPhone, and is surprised by the iPad. After all, Microsoft was already selling phones, and tablets, and if so many people wanted them, they'd have bought them ... right?

You see the problem in Ballmer's iPad interview below. He thinks everything is a PC, just evolving form factors. The hardware shape changes like a fashion fad, but it's still a PC, and people are going to do the same things on it.

On the contrary, it's not the hardware form factor people are excited about. Joe Wilcox didn't repurchase an iPad because it was fashionable. It's the shape of the software — the usability. The iOS multi-touch platform pushes the OS into the background, putting goal-oriented apps front and center.

Everyday people (tech geeks call these people "normals") can poke a button for the thing they want to do, and the device becomes a tool to accomplish that thing. Your goal, in a sleek metal frame.

It's not a personal computer riddled with OS anxiety between you and your goal. Turn it on and it's a personal radio, Facebook, magazine, navigator, or photo album. It's whatever you need it to be at the time, and nothing else.

Steve Jobs' and Steve Ballmer's starkly different visions of the future

"PCs are like trucks," Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg Tuesday night at the Wall Street Journal's D8 conference. When America stopped being an agrarian society, people started buying cars. Devices like the iPhone and the iPad, in Jobs' analogy, are the cars of computing as society transitions into what he calls the "post PC world."

"And this transformation is going to make some people uneasy," he predicted. "People from the PC world."

Enter Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft (MSFT), who was, in his D8 turn two days later, the embodiment of the uneasy PC guy, whether attacking Google's (GOOG) "incoherent" operating system strategy, damning Research in Motion (RIMM) with faint praise, or dissing Apple as living in "the bubble of Terranea" -- a reference to the swanky resort where the conference was held and whose participants could afford to own "five devices per person."

All Things D has posted excerpts of Ballmer's interview (along with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect) on its D8 site. We've pasted several below the fold, along with the Steve Jobs video that includes his vision of the post-PC world. It begins at the 3:30 mark in the first clip. Ballmer's response is in the video about the iPad.

 

Steve Jobs on the iPad and the post-PC world:

Steve Ballmer on the iPad:

Ballmer and Ozzie on cloud computing:

Ballmer on the battle for control of the mobile phone business:

If you know how to use an iPhone then you know how to use an iPad. I would not agree with some who say the iPad is *just* a "big iPhone".  In fact I see the iPad as the beginning of the end of a lot of things as we know them today. It will not immediately replace laptops, netbooks, magazines, Kindles, and televisions -- not immediately. Over time, however, it is easy to see how the world will change. When we introduced the ThinkPad in 1992 it seemed like a huge deal just to get everyone at IBM to agree with the name. No one, certainly not me as VP of marketing at the time, had any idea that more than 30 million ThinkPads would be sold. The iPad will surely sell multiple times that number but more important the iPad will change the model of personal computing -- not immediately and not for everyone, but for many millions of people the PC will begin to look like a dinosaur.

John Patrick was VP of Internet Technology at IBM before retiring and was VP of marketing for the introduction of the ThinkPad in 1992. He sees the iPad as becoming “so pervasive in our lives that even though it is a very powerful computer, it will not be thought of as a computer."

Patrick suggests the iPad “is at the crossroads between technology and the arts.”

I've used a friends' iPad for a few hours. Even formerly staunch naysayers who browsed with it came to the same conclusion I did—this experience is the way to read a newspaper or magazine “online”. At the same time, it's sufficiently typable to make the netbook form factor obsolete.

My own reaction to handling the iPad startled me. While I'd speculated about it before, I didn't expect the experience to be so pointed. I'll explain later this week after interacting with it more, if I feel the same after the newness wears off.