outside-in

Attack of the Clones

Several months ago I conducted a straw poll amongst friends and colleagues and found that over eighty per cent had at one time or another owned a Nokia phone, but that fewer than one in twenty did so now. More worryingly for Nokia virtually no one had Nokia, even post Microsoft partnership, on their consideration list for their next phone. Rumours and the experience of those who have used the Window’s Mobile 7 powered phones suggest that the next generation of Nokia’s phones will attract interest and sales, but perhaps there is a deeper issue as well.

Recent press coverage and online commentary has highlighted the increasingly heated battle between iOS, Android, Blackberry OS and WM – and it seems that the operating system has come to the fore in phone purchase decision making. A quick survey of local phone stores confirms that people decide on OS first and then device.

So what does this mean for Nokia and the other device manufactures? Apple and Blackberry are the exceptions since device and OS are exclusively and tightly bundled. But for the rest is there a danger that they become generic and commoditised? It is already apparent both from a glance around your typical phone shop, and from the slew of patent-infringement claims, that there is actually little difference between the vast majority of handsets. Nokia was possible the last to have a distinct style to its handsets. Now, my guess is, that the dominance of the iPhone as well as the demands of conforming to a common operating system, are creating ranges of look-a-like phones.

The beauty of this for Google in particular, as developer of Android, is that although we’ll upgrade our phones every couple of years, we are increasingly loyal to one operating system. It’s not just the way the OS works and our getting accustomed to that; we are effectively locked in by the ease of transferring data, contacts, photos etc. between handsets using the same OS. The flip side is that as phones become smarter, and the amount and importance of data they contain increases, the hassle and risk of switching OS increases. The value of this data, plus the opportunities to capture more and us it to target advertising is the obvious overall benefit to Google.

Once we’ve ‘bought in’ to a particular OS the way we select a handset becomes more and more of a lottery influenced by brand advertising and the advice (possibly determined by commission level) of the sales assistant.

So, will the mobile device market go the same ways as that of computers: manufacturers churning out clones of a standard spec at low margin whilst the software developers reap the benefits? The signs are there, as noted above. However, there is still plenty of room for innovation. Phones are increasingly multi-tasking devices, but have retained a form factor similar to the ‘traditional’ mobile phone albeit more screen-centred. However, there could be numerous other options – depending on personal use and preference.

Almost a decade ago I saw a reference design by a company called IXI Mobile that deconstructed the ‘phone’ into a selection of individual devices that communicated via Bluetooth. At the heart was a GSM device the size of a matchbox that contained the SIM and acted as the hub of a personal network of devices. Depending on your needs you could use it with a headset, a flat screen, a keypad or several other devices. Each worked singly or as part of a cluster, all communicating through the hub. I don’t know what happened to IXI, but it seems to me that the time is ripe to break away from the generic clones and re-think the mobile handset.

How do Digital Leaders Use Social Media?

Broadcast and national media coverage still lead the way in building reputations – even in the age of social media.

MHP recently supported the Media Momentum Awards, hosted in Barcelona by GP Bullhound, a leading international investment banking firm. As part of this I was given access to senior influencers in the fifty, fastest growth digital media companies recognised by the awards. I was interested in how these leaders in the sector used and regarded social media as a tool to manage reputations.

As my white paper “Reputation Management in the era of social media”  shows social media is now, to quote one of the participants,  “[no longer a]choice, but rather a given – a hygiene factor.” However, although significant percentages agreed that most social media platforms were important, and likely to become more important channels of communication, they also cautioned about the credibility of information found through them.

For example, whilst over 50% felt that Facebook was relevant to their business communications a similar percentage also agreed that information found on Facebook could not be judged to be credible – seven per cent felt that it was not credible at all.

When it came to generating reputation traditional media won hands down.
Broadcast coverage was felt to have huge or significant impact by virtually all our respondents - 93%, whilst coverage on influential blogs was seen as hugely significant by 23% and significant by 50% - beating the impact of trade coverage, but lagging behind national newspapers. Perhaps surprisingly, considering the recent controversies over its role, Twitter fared even worse with the majority reporting that it had little or no influence.

Given that the people we spoke to were all entrepreneurs in the digital space we believe that they can be seen as good exemplars of current practice - and their insights make interesting reading. There are a number of pointers towards best practice as well as some ‘blindspots’ from which even they seem to suffer.  The Reputation Management in the era of social media report can be downloaded by following the link.

 

Building Digital Counter-weights

With over 600 million members and a valuation of $50 billion Facebook is undoubtedly the internet phenomenon of the moment. Whether it is worth the price tag and realise the profits it implies is another matter. But as a global space in which conversations, opinions, comment and views can be exchanged it is unequalled. Although a glance at the most popular pages, which can be found at SocialBakers, shows that the majority of this conversation is driven by games, celebrity, music and popular culture it is clear that consumer brands definitely have much to gain from using it to build engagement with their customers. But what about b2b organisations? I'd suggest that these too need to get familiar with Facebook and what it can do for, or perhaps to, them.

There has been much written about marketing on Facebook, and indeed it is now one of the biggest advertising sites online. In addition, many brands, as diverse as CocaCola and Fiat are building Facebook into their marketing plans. But if you are not selling to a general consumer population then it is unlikely that wallposts, shared video and viral games are really going to influence sales.  For b2b players it's not about fans or likes or even having a lot of friends. But that doesn’t mean they can afford to ignore it. For all organisations Facebook can have a significant impact on reputation. The real challenge is building advocacy amongst Facebook users that may be needed later. It is about creating a digital counterweight.

The world of Facebook is a world of emotion. People share what is important to them, what interests them, their thoughts and feelings. They do not, generally, share detailed facts or balanced argument. This makes Facebook a very dangerous place for b2b brands. The social graph of Facebook creates an emotional frame through which news opinion and commentary is viewed. These frames are fragmented and self selecting (you tend towards those that reinforce your own views). People will ‘like’ views and pages that reaffirm their own views without necessarily judging the veracity of the claim, or indeed any motives of the person expressing the opinion. Search and popularity then conspire to further promote the views of those that shout the loudest.

So opinion quickly becomes 'crowd-sourced' and viral which means that evidence and the wider perspective can quickly be lost. Single issue groups can concentrate and polarise opinion irrespective of facts.

What this means is that, especially at times of crisis, brands can suddenly become very famous for the wrong reasons. Emotionally charged responses to crises quickly frame the argument and can colour the way brand is perceived not only on Facebook and online but also beyond in to wider media and other ‘off-line’ commentators and influencers. What’s more, these damaging opinions can surface from the most unlikely places – not always in reaction to a ‘real’ event or incident, but often from a perception – perhaps a rumour about poor working conditions at a supplier-firm, or anecdotal evidence of fault in a key component.

Once these comments have metastasised and spread across Facebook it is often too late to try and influence the conversation. People will see engagement at this point as a defensive sticking plaster and will doubt the authenticity and credibility of the effort to join the conversation.  

Corporations cannot hope to sway the opinions of the extreme antis, but they can provide a counterweight that may balance the argument for the moderate majority if they invest in creating their own narrative ahead of crises.

Transparency is celebrated in our wikileak world and companies should invest in demonstrating it before they are forced to. Having a presence on Facebook and using it to provide information and updates that present a more open and human view of the organisation than the corporate website, perhaps using individual stories, examples of community relations, helpful information etc, can establish a factual counterweight to more emotional commentary. In addition, not being on Facebook is increasingly seen as a crime in itself. If you are unwilling to engage and share then you must have something to hide.

Investing in this presence now in peace time as it were, means that you do have the platform and some credit should hostilities breakout. Creating these ' digital embassies' is not easy and requires thought and commitment, but it is important and may be the difference between succumbing to an entirely emotional and negative conversation and having some chance at influencing it with some rationality.

Reputation Beyond Product

It is an often repeated truism that technology is now mainstream: what is less frequently discussed is how this alters the range, reach and content of communications through which technology companies should engage their audiences. Technology PR used to be a distinct discipline with a specialist set of skills largely focused around the promotion of products through media channels. Now many technology and telecommunications firms, however large or small, and irrespective of whether they sell to consumers or other businesses, find they need to work to develop consistent, clear and positive reputations with a wide range of complex influencers. Defending and developing reputation in this environment needs a joined-up approach to communications that creates compelling stories that rise above products and work across channels.

In today’s world of contested communications it is important to know who you need to reach and to ensure that all audiences get a consistent (although not necessarily uniform) view of your organisation. These audiences could be as diverse as regulators and government departments, consumers, financiers, suppliers and partners, social and environmental groups, activists and single issue pressure groups. They will communicate and respond in widely different ways and through many different channels. Building the right narratives, getting the correct emotional register and using the right communications skills and channels, whilst maintaining consistency is essential if reputation is to be protected and enhanced so that it becomes an asset and not a liability.

Using communications to build a robust reputation beyond that associated with your products and services has both proactive and defensive benefits. By effectively creating platforms and points of view that resonate with prospects, partners, customers and influencers we increase your opportunities to communicate with these audiences.  Championing issues that are important to your audience fills in the gaps between product news and create more consistent profile. It also helps shape thinking and perceptions at a much earlier stage in the buying cycle.

With credible opinions and insights resting on a strong reputation you can engage with senior decision makers and help them to understand how you add value to their organisation, rather than wait for them to discover that they have a problem which you can solve. Finally, reputation-building provides a wider set of reference points that ultimately shape decision making – it informs buyers of your wider corporate vision and values, your environmental credentials and even the ‘personality’ of your brand.

Defensively a strong corporate reputation, well communicated, can protect you if things do go wrong. A recent article by Stephan Shakespeare of YouGov showed how BA’s generally good reputation allowed it to quickly bounce-back from the negativity surrounding industrial action. Whether it is bad news, or an underperforming product, a good corporate reputation will help you weather the storm and come back quicker.

Few would disagree with much of the above – but achieving it is increasingly difficult. No one influencer has control over your reputation. The digital explosion and the interconnectedness of a global marketplace for technology means that reputation must be managed over a complex and ever-shifting network of influence. So the first step in any reputation campaign is to correctly identify and then research and understand those audiences that influence or could influence your reputation. As noted above, this could be anyone from a government minister to an activist blogger.

Identifying and mapping all the influencers that can impact your business requires experts on those audiences, rather than people who are expert in your sector. Our role as consultants is to advise on tone, channel and messages that will have the desired impact with each audience. Understanding what make them tick, what their immediate and ongoing concerns are and which issues they relate to is the essential first step in planning a reputation building campaign.

MHP builds multi-discipline teams because we believe that siloed approaches run the risk of confusing messages and undermining reputation. Bringing audience knowledge, advice and expertise together into a single team to collaboratively create stories and messages that are able to engage with the important audiences not only ensures consistency but  informs both the challenges and the solutions from a 360-degree perspective. It also allows individual disciplines; public affairs, corporate PR, CSR and internal comms for instance, to work together and deliver campaigns that feed off one another to deliver results with real business impact.

For example, for one green tech client we are combining consumer promotion of a device through national media and blogger relations, with a trade campaign promoting the service and management of data to utilities, and a public affairs programme to engage with the government departments responsible for planning the UK’s Smart Grid. All of this is delivered by one team for one fee and with one consistent theme of changing consumer habits – rescheduling as well as reducing power usage.

Technology PR is often about sales support and of course it’s essential that organisations meet sales and profits targets – whatever sector they are in. PR is a cost effective way of making sure customers know about new products, services and enhancements. It is also excellent at demonstrating how real organisations have benefitted through the use of your products. But, we believe it should do more and work harder. By building reputation, with all relevant influencers, that goes beyond your product portfolio we can help create new opportunity, defend against detractors, and add value to all your sales and marketing efforts.

Battle of the Trade Shows

A few years ago it was all about CeBIT. The global technology show where every client and every journalist wanted to be. Three days of trekking across the vast expanse of the Hanover Messe trying to link the two groups together!

Meanwhile, a small niche show in Cannes called The GSM Conference and the CES show in Las Vegas were establishing themselves on the media agenda. Both started out smaller and more niche in their appeal, GSM focusing on mobile telephone technology and CES on consumer electronics, whilst CeBIT covered a wide gamut of technologies.

However, over the past few years, as the chart below shows, both general interest (as measured by web searches) and media coverage of CES has massively overtaken CeBIT, even MWC is now attracting more media coverage than CeBIT (see 2011 chart)

Red = CeBIT / Orange = CES / Blue = MWC

So what’s happened to CeBIT? Perhaps it is more a case of what’s happened to CES and MWC. Both have undoubtedly profited from the consumerisation of IT – with more technologies now immediately targeting the general public as well as or instead of the corporate. Also the mobilisation of technology – and the increasing ubiquity and functionality of mobile devices has made MWC in particular of wider general interest than before.

In addition, there have been some key moments that have added to the fame of CES and MWC – the launch of Blu Ray technology at CES in 2004, Bill Gate’s famous ‘Blue Screen of Death demo of Windows Media Centre at the same conference in 2006 – even Apple’s decision to launch the iPhone, not at CES but at MacWorld a week later in 2008 all helped build the fame of CES.

For MWC – the move to Barcelona in 2006 and the name change to Mobile World Congress (from 3GSM) the following year, plus a series of high profile keynotes from chief execs of industry bell weathers like Cisco, Microsoft, Nokia etc helped cement the date in media and market minds.

So what does this mean for CeBIT? Well this year’s news included launches by Intel, Samsung and Asus which underlines its importance to the tech marketplace – especially serious, back office, enterprise class systems. Over the past few years these have been out of vogue, but perhaps they are poised for a return to the front pages (at least of the tech media) and CeBIT will return to its time in the sun.

We're all 'appy now!

At the Westminster eForum meeting this week and interesting dynamic was explored. High profile speakers from the likes of RIM, Microsoft, Skype and O2 were debating the impact of smartphones and tablets on the mobile industry. Apps and the explosion in their use was obviously a key topic, but for many there was also the return of the mobile internet. Although the phrase has been sullied by its initial association with poor WAP-based implementations that were neither very mobile and certainly not the Internet, it is now seen as ready to come of age.

The central theme seemed to be that apps were developed expressly to deliver internet-like (or internet-lite) experiences to people with restricted bandwidth, low processing power and relatively small screens. Many of these constraints are now being removed. Although the 4G license (LTE) auction in the UK has been delayed, it will happen, and the newest phones have quite breathtaking computing power. Tablets and emerging alternative formats, even large-screen smartphones are also increasing the viability of viewing regular web pages on the move. So will the mobile internet rise again – and if it does what will be the impact on apps?

There were three contrasting views expressed on apps in particular. O2 unsurprisingly was in the Apple camp, celebrating the download of over 10 billion apps and the choice of hundreds of thousands of apps for almost everything. RIM was more circumspect, both focusing on fewer apps of higher quality and which helped consumers with the tasks they most regularly needed to do, and thinking forward to the symbiosis of Apps on a smartphone and the mobile internet on a tablet. Microsoft was pushing its Windows Phone 7 product with its concept of ‘hubs’ – using pre-loaded apps to pull together related content from the device and the web to make it easier to use, share and interact with contacts, photos, music etc. Finally, Google had a foot in both camps – not only pushing its own Android Marketplace, but also the relevance of search as the core of the mobile internet.

This all served to illustrate that there is no common view of where things will evolve to next. The apps market looks healthy and buoyant at the moment, and is generating significant revenues (although as noted in the Forum, mainly for Apple and Google), but few seemed willing to bet that it will last. There is also no common platform for mobile. After years of consolidation and standardisation on the desktop we are now faced with a number of strong operating systems in the market (RIM, iOS, Microsoft, Android).

The internet was successful because of its open nature, anyone with a browser can view any site. Apps are flying counter to this currently, with different implementations needed for each OS and even individual devices and dedicated stores catering for each. A mobile internet would return to standards-based approaches that are easier and cheaper to manage. However, apps get branded real-estate onto people’s personal devices in a way that web pages never will.

I’m not going to weigh in with predictions when those much more intelligent and better placed than I ducked. But it does seem that we are entering a mixed economy of approaches where apps and mobile web access with work alongside and together. Much of the difference will be due to preference and to the objective of the content provider. Angry Birds works as a downloadable app, but with good network coverage, a fast processor and a decent screen, why would you use a Facebook app instead of visiting the site itself?

14 cents - the new price of news?

Yesterday Rupert Murdoch and Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of internet services, launched The Daily – another iteration in the online news saga. Available only on iPad (and only in the US for the moment) this new digital newspaper will, Murdoch hopes, get consumers into the habit of once again paying for their daily news.

The price of The Daily is just 99 cents (about 60p) a week which compares well with the £2 per week for the online version of The Times? Why the difference? True, for £2 you do get online access as well as various mobile versions of the paper, including an iPad version, but is The Daily’s pricing setting a new benchmark for the price of news – in recognition that most people are not paying the £2 a week to get through The Times’ Paywall?

It was also interesting to hear Rupert Murdoch justify the low price by listing the production and distribution assets (“no multi-million dollar printing presses, no trucks”) that he’d not need for The Daily. But surely this undercuts the true value of a good newspaper! People generally don’t consider the costs involved in producing a physical paper when they buy it. What they do consider, and importantly, VALUE, is the good journalism, writing and opinions that they find on the pages? Murdoch’s new App threatens to cheapen the work of the 100 journalists that he’s hired to write his new paper.

Which brings me to what I believe is the most damaging aspect of The Daily. By throwing his lot in with Apple, and selling The Daily only via the iTunes App Store, not only has he cast the die for all other subscription-based services for the iPad (this is the new model – complete with 30% revenues to Apple) but he has reduced news to just another app. Will The Daily be competing with the New York Times or Angry Birds? Even Murdoch admits that it is a commuter paper. This is to reduce journalism to mere entertainment, an impression only accentuated by The Daily’s carousel page selection (and even random story ‘playlist’!!). Also revealing is that each issue will have a ‘Top Apps’ section that will review other iPad apps and CONNECT Directly to the iTunes App store!

Newspapers undoubtedly do have a problem in the online world. News will be free, but considered opinion, well researched and well thought-through analysis, access to primary sources and the ability to ask searching questions are what differentiates journalist from mere reporting.  This is expensive to produce, and as yet there seems to be no clear answers as to how to get fair recompense for this investment. However, reducing newspapers to cheap, transient parcels of digital entertainment is surely a step in the wrong direction.

PS – although only 14 cents a day I suspect that many subscribers may well end up paying more. All the video and interactivity included in The Daily does not download with the main ‘paper’ but is downloaded ‘on-the-fly’. People will need to be cautious when and where they consumer this additional content if they are not to run up large 3G data bills from their network providers.

Keeping up with the natives

This week I received a letter from my daughter’s school announcing a scheme to equip every student with a laptop to use in lessons and at home – my daughter is seven.  The letter was interesting in many ways – not least in that in our new era of austerity parents are being asked to pay £20 per month for a two-year contract to lease the computers - £480 for a bottom of the range notebook!

However, what was more telling was the Q&A that the schools sent out with the letters. It showed an interesting mix of what could be termed ‘modern’ concerns alongside more traditional worries. So questions about how privacy and online behaviour would be monitored sat alongside those about impact on handwriting and reading skills.

The crux of the argument for the scheme was that children were ‘digital natives’ and needed to access computers and the internet as an integral part of their studies, rather than as a separate lesson in the ICT lab. I wholeheartedly agree – in fact I was a little surprised that the old approach of wheeling kids into a dark room with 15 PCs to share once a week was still current.   And I do agree that even at seven children can and do benefit from using technology – my daughter already uses our home PC to access the school’s learning platform, as well as playing games and watching iPlayer.

However, what jarred for me was the understanding on one hand that kids are the digital natives, whilst on the other palming them off with a low-end PC. Deloitte Consulting’s predictions for 2011 reveal that over half of the computers sold this year will not be ‘computers’ as we know them, but be smart phones, tablets or other devices. Children today find the PC’s and laptops that we all use day-in-day-out as archaic as cassette recorders or CD players. They are the iPod Touch generation, used to intuitive, highly visual, instant and touch-sensitive ways of finding and controlling content.

Parents often marvel at the technical aptitude of their young children, but much of this is surely to do with the massive improvements in usability of technology. We all joke about having to help our parents programme the VCR – but that was a complicated task compared to recording something on Sky+. I imagine my daughter would struggle with creating a chart in PowerPoint, but she can edit and save a photo on her iPod quick as anything. It’s not that she’s super intelligent and brilliant (although obviously she is), but just that the iPod is a brilliantly easy device to use, and there is a wealth of excellent apps that she can easily find  and use to achieve whatever she wants to do.

So, why equip the digital natives with a device that is quickly becoming obsolete, and will certainly be so by the time they enter the workforce?  Why not bite the bullet and give them tablets, or even iPods – select software from the hundreds of excellent (and usually free) apps available, and really invest in understanding how they use technology, rather than try and bend them to the awkward and unfulfilling text and keyboard based world of the PC?

So why are they called Paywalls?

Today the Westminster Forum ran an interesting event on Payment for Content 2011 at which MB Christie, Head of Product Management at FT.com made the plea to stop using the term paywall. Her argument was that when we buy milk or any other physical goods we just called it payment – so why the ‘wall’ when it comes to digital content?

I’d argue that paywall is actually a very good and apt term the use of which sheds light on some of the other issues discussed at this morning’s event.

Firstly, a paywall is a barrier designed to shield content. Content is hidden and secure and access is controlled. After all it has been actively interposed between a consumer and a product with the explicit motive of restricting access to what was recently freely available. Whether you agree with them or not and whether they are effective or not, Paywalls are by their nature barriers.

Secondly, as Bryan Glick, Editor in Chief of Computer Weekly and another guest speaker at the event, pointed out, they are also the first thing that you encounter as a consumer. Unlike a checkout – be it physical or online – which comes after you have browsed and made your selection, you must negotiate the paywall first. You can’t see what you are going to buy until you’ve overcome the barrier. In this respect an analogy of a night-club is perhaps better than that of a corner shop – you don’t know if it’s any good until you’ve paid your entry fee.

Obviously brand plays a role here. If you know and like The Times as a newspaper then it’s a good indication that you’ll like what’s behind its paywall on any given day. However, you could argue that the more that is behind the paywall the harder it will be to maintain the visibility, reputation, influence of that brand with those that are on the outside.

This is different from buying the physical newspaper in a number of crucial ways. We all know that the front-page story will determine for many which paper they pick up – so to some degree they have sampled and committed to the content before purchase. Also, buying a paper is a one-time commitment, if you don’t like it you can buy something different the next day. And, by the very fact that you’ve picked it up and taken it to the checkout you have made a behavioural commitment to reading at least some of the content.  Even with subscriptions (and possibly with iPad apps) the product is actually delivered, making it more likely that it will be consumed. And when those magazines pile up still in their plastic wrappers we quickly decide to cancel the subscription.

For me the biggest problem with a paywall is that it seems that publishers are asking consumers to pay for the right to access their content – whether or not they actually consume it. With a paywall newspaper publishers are asking consumers to commit to a long-term relationship that they pay for even if they never read an article online again, and without necessarily any indication of what sort of content they will get (other than that suggested by the brand).

Clive Gardiner, SVP of digital content at music streaming service we7,  made an excellent comment that the ‘digital natives’ that are increasingly dominating online activity prefer terms such as ‘200 plays’ or even 5MB to terms like subscription. I think this confirms the same point – people are happy to pay for digital content, but they do not want to enter into long-term, open ended commitments where it is not obvious exactly what they are getting in return. Which really is not that surprising – who in the physical world would pay a regular fee for something without knowing whether they will use it enough to get value (the obvious exception being gym memberships!), or even if they will actually like what they do consume. A per-use micro payment arrangement, or even a pre-paid amount that allows a fixed number of views over an extended period would seem to be much more of the internet and digital psyche.

Unfortunately, I do feel that paywall is a very apt term as the publishing industry struggles to defend itself against the onrush of the digital world.

The Tab Habit

Until recently the only tabs that were habit forming were the ones that came in boxes of twenty. Now several technology companies are betting that their sleek new tablet devices will be just as addictive. Based on the experience of Apple, which sold a million iPads in the first 30 days and is predicted to sell over 21 million more in 2011, the signs appear to be good. The epithet ‘iPad-killer’ has already entered the tech-jargon just as ‘iPhone-killer’ was adopted 3 years ago, as Samsung, Dell, Blackberry and many others launch competing products.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab – predicted to be the device that gives the iPad the best competition is due to launch on 1st November in the UK, presumably with the expectation that it will find itself under the Christmas trees of thousands of (wealthy) digitally savvy early adopters. The Blackberry Playbook (interestingly avoiding the tab/tablet/slate/pad nomenclature) launches just after Christmas, perhaps signalling its focus on the corporate market and more business-orientated users (playbook being US-business speak for strategy).

But, as Geoffrey Moore pointed out in the early 1990’s, getting the early adopters is relatively easy – ensuring that these devices go mainstream is the real challenge. And we’ve been here before. There have been many attempts to produce a portable, multi-functioned device both for business and leisure users. The Palm Pilot created the category of Personal Digital Assistant – but was little more than an electronic diary, Apple itself failed with the Newton, Microsoft launched and then retired a version of Windows for tablet computers and over the last couple of years mobile networks heavily promoted netbooks as the connected device for mobile data and applications. Even smart phones, in the early majority segment now, thanks to the iPhone, took over 10 years to get there!

So what prevented many of these devices ever really becoming mainstream and can the ‘tab’ overcome them? In some cases they were inhibited by the technology itself, but often, and more difficult to overcome, it is the behavioural issues that stunt the uptake of new technologies.

Even in our digital, always-on world much of what we do is still quite segmented. Computers both at home and in the workplace are still mainly for ‘sit-forward’ activities; things that need to be done and need focus. It could be shopping, communicating with friends, homework or research. For ‘sit-back’ relaxation activities we are still more likely to open a book, turn on the TV or plug in an iPod. 

Bridging this gap, crossing the chasm between expensive toy and essential tool, between technical capability and personal requirement, is the challenge faced by all of the tablet players. Getting it right requires the perfect combination of price, content, technology, service, utility and marketing. Whether anyone, even Apple, can master this, will determine if the tab becomes habit forming and changes us, or whether it falls by the wayside like so many other techno-addictions.