Per Karlberg

Since Steve Jobs finally revealed his tablet, four days ago, I've read tons of articles and blogpost, and I've given the gizmo a lot of thought. Some things I've realized are:

• if I was a competing tablet supplier, I'd be scared by the iPad's software
• if I was a competing tablet supplier, I'd be scared by the iPad's hardware
• as a pure reading device, it was not as impressive, conceptwise, as e.g. Mag+ by Bonnier
• Instapaper + Readability + Google Reader + delicious will be awesome on the iPad. An integrated alternative or a mashup, anyone?
• the first was iPhone was cool, but not super impressive. Everybody knows how that evolved. This is iPad 1.0 after all...
• an hour after the presentation, my impression was: meh... Now I know I will order one ASAP
• multitasking is inevitable, it must be.
• the missing support for Flash will likrly drive adoption of html 5

Among everything that has been written so far, Joe Hewitt's post (he is the man behind Facebook for iPhone, among other things) stands out as the most insightful by far:

"Anyone who feels underwhelmed by that doesn't understand how much of the iPhone OS's potential is still untapped."

"The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors [...], if you're a developer and you're not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind."

"The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app "closed" is that it lives in a sandbox, [...] In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.[,,,] If you want to invent a new scripting language or background service or something, you're still totally free to do that, but you're going to have to run it on a web server. If you want total freedom on the client side, then write a web app."

I can't wait to see how this pans out...

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The whole discussion seems to be built on a very strange misunderstanding. A lesson I learned from reading about cloud computing and intellectual capital is: there is not always a definite need for a strict definition. Let broad concepts be broad and learn to treat them as an adjective. The latter is especially useful for cloud-related discussions but makes the venture to define "open" very strange. It is already a perfectly useful adjective to start with...

Google's Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP of Product Management started things of with his manifesto of openness Meaning of open, simply declaring that "open systems win."

Others have joined and built upon the discussion and to some degree objected to the self-declared dedication to openness. Many have noted that while Google is certainly not the worst, the firms bisggest successes (search and advertising) is definitely closed.

Gartner's Brian Prentice (gartner.com > Brian_Prentice > The truth of open) notes that "the truth is that closed systems still win. Open systems, practically speaking, are basically good for making others lose".

Harvard Business School Professor Tom Eisenmann shows his work investigating open platforms (platformsandnetworks.blogspot.com):

Chris Dixon (cdixon.org > google should open source what actually matters their search ranking algorithm) sees Google's openness as “commoditizing the complement" and their closed search and advertising algorithms as "security through obscurity".

The sometimes harsh language aside, this a very interesting subject: what is the lock-in of the open-source software era...

Also read: techcrunch.com > google open when convenient

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