Happy Birthday, iPad! Reflections on Product Development
Posted by Vovici Blog on Fri, Mar 11, 2011
The iPad 2 comes out today, and the original iPad will turn 1 on April 3. Happy first birthday, tablet computers!
Except tablet computers are actually old enough to drink.
It was 22 years ago that GRiD released the GRiDPad. It was the first of many pen computers, as tablets were known then. By the mid-1990s, Microsoft had released Windows for Pen Computing so that PC makers could create their own tablets, IBM had prototyped a ThinkPad tablet computer and Apple had shrunk its tablet computer concept down to create the Newton. Nor did the idea of tablets go away despite the lack of success of those early products – Microsoft replaced Windows for Pen Computing with Windows XP Tablet PC in 2002.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent developing the tablet computer market before the iPad, with little to show for it. It would be fashionable to blame this on poor market research; indeed, a common factoid is that 80-85% of new products fail, and it has become cliché to blame MR for that failure rate.
Ray Poynter, commenting on a Research article making this point (“Why So Much Segmentation is Rubbish”), asks:
How many new product launches do we think can be successful? In the figures above 4,500 new products are successful: is that close to the maximum the consumer and the channels can handle? If there had been 60,000 new product launches, would 85% have failed and 9,000 been successful, or would we still have seen about 4,500 winning through?
Market research is at best only about improving the odds; it does not deliver certainties.
Ray is right: Products succeed and fail for many reasons, from engineering, to distribution, to service. And sometimes, simply, the timing isn’t right.
Yet new products do also fail because the firms that created them misunderstood consumers, and that is a failure of market research. The assumption with early tablet computers was that handwriting was more natural than keyboards and would therefore be more successful. The blame for the failure of early products, including the Apple Newton, was that the handwriting recognition technology just wasn’t good enough. I think those assumptions are wrong: after all, you could purchase a highly accurate handwriting recognition tablet for your desktop PC today, but keyboards are more productive than writing by hand, so you don’t. Once you’ve learnt how to type, you’re not going to give up the keyboard. Apple reframed the tablet computer from the metaphor of the pen to a multi-touch interface instead: manipulating virtual objects with our hands with gestures is much more natural than using a stylus.
Another research failure with early tablet computers was not understanding how they would be used. They were initially designed as devices for creating content. I keep a copy of aha! Inkwriter on my bookshelf as a reminder of product failure: “the simplicity of pen and paper, the power of word processing”. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and InformationWeek all loved Inkwriter: “retains much of the speed and ease of use of pen and paper, but with the power of computer word processing,” wrote the Times. In fact, tablets are devices for consuming content. What’s been the sweet spot of tablet usage? Web browsing. According to Business Insider, 38% of time spent using an iPad is on the Web, 24% is on email or social networking apps and 12% is watching video. No wonder early tablet computers failed. There was no content to consume – little or no web usage, little email usage, few videos.
Steve Jobs has confessed that the iPad was actually conceived of before the iPhone (which was released in 2007) but that he thought the market was bigger for a smart phone. Had he released the iPad first, what would have happened? I think on this, like many things, Jobs got the timing right. The early iPad would have had no apps and few consumers trained to use the Web on a mobile device. By waiting, there were millions of consumers who wanted a bigger device for using the Web, a complement to their smartphone.
Yes, the majority of new products will always fail, but I continue to hope that market research will produce more accurate insights into consumers that can lead to a greater success rate. Kim Dedeker of Kantar Americas urgers MR to spend more time on the innovation and co-creation stage of new product development and less time on evaluation, where 80-90% of the effort is spent today.
Happy birthday, iPad!
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