The Emperor, the Artist, and the Fish

This is a parable I heard in art school, which was a long time ago, so the details may not be what anyone else would remember.

Something of an Allegory

The Emperor commanded the court Artist to draw him a fish. But, he commanded, it must capture the fish's life perfectly, render the essence of the fish so precisely as to be almost alive itself. The Artist went off, and set to work.

Some time passed, and the Emperor inquired after the Artist's progress. The Artist sent word to the Emperor that the work was proceeding as it should. The Emperor was mollified for the time being.

More time passed, and the Emperor again inquired after the Artist. This time the Artist came before the Emperor to say that things were still proceeding as they should. The Emperor was less satisfied this time, but commanded the Artist to return to work.

Still more time passed, and the Emperor lost all patience. This time he travelled, unannounced, with his entire retinue, to the Artist's studio. The startled Artist invited the Emperor in, and gave him a brief tour. Enough of this, said the Emperor, where is my fish?

The Artist quickly took a fresh sheet of parchment, a brush, some ink, and in front of the Emperor's eyes, painted the perfect fish, so lifelike its scales seemed to quiver and breathe, its muscles tensed as if to flick its way to the surface of a river.

Startled, the Emperor asked, If you could do this in a moment, why have you taken so long to deliver on your promise? The Artist walked over to the corner, opened a cupboard, and was awash in sketches and drawings and paintings of fish. Your majesty, he said, I had to make these first.

A Process Towards Computer 3.0

One point of this story, to borrow a line from Admiral Kirk, is that we learn by doing. My own combination of experiences (some would call them biases, and they wouldn't be wrong) as well as informed and uninformed observations of the current phone and tablet scene suggests that everyone other than Apple launching a tablet this year is more than just a bit like the kid behind you who copies your answers on a math exam: he may even get away with it on this test, but because he hasn't learned anything, he can't go beyond your answers, and is effectively hosed on the next (or if you put just a little more space between you and him).

Organizations learn by doing as well as individuals (if they're lucky and smart and open to the possibility, which, let's face it, many aren't). One could make the perhaps paranoid argument that Apple has been working on the iPad for over a decade now, with each step in the way preparing us for what is essentially Computer 3.0 (1.0 being the enormous mainframes and ENIACs of days past; 2.0 being the very personal computer revolution they helped usher in almost 30 years ago) — a device utterly unlike almost anything else to come before it, in that it is most assuredly future-looking, with no admission to legacy ways of doing things.

But another way of looking at Apple's success is to see the iPad as one pinnacle in a long process of learning. By doing certain things, the company learns what it can also do.

Let's play "connect the dots", but rather than look at each milestone as a technological accomplishment the way they're usually seen, I want to think of each as both the culmination of what a company would have learned by doing it, what they both might now learn having done it, and what an audience would have learned by participating.

iTunes Takes Control (In A Good Way)

In some ways it start with iTunes, in January 2001: unlike the previous Mac CD Player app, which we all used in the labs in design school, iTunes (and, sure, lots of similar apps at the time for both Mac and Windows) made it possible to collect an entire library and listen to things in a new way (I had a 5-disc player at one point, and listening to a selection of discs on shuffle mode was nothing like the opportunity offered by the 10,000+ song library on just one of my current computers). So now users are beginning to manager their media in a way I can't remember any other apps doing at that time, which tended to be more for editing user-created material of one kind or another. iTunes didn't allow any content creation, just managing, so it was more like a utility than something like Word or Photoshop.

And maybe most subtly at the time, but important now, iTunes acted as a replacement for the Finder, further distancing the user from the actual file. Once a song (or, increasingly, movie or podcast) was imported into iTunes, you didn't have to care where it was in the Finder, because you'd never need to. If the file was within iTunes' "domain", it could rename it, move it, make it fit an internal pattern that would make it easier to locate if you needed to, but you could just as easily set up iTunes to import your cd library and never ever look at the actual resulting files.

Retail Stores Allow Enchantment

Retail stores first opened in May 2001, and have continued ever since. Apple famously built a full scale prototype of the store, so they could learn about space and flow. Apple builds the store with generous room around each product, with lots of products on display to touch and try out; the streamlining of the product grid makes a lot of sense in this context (among others), as a whole table can be devoted to multiples of a single product. No confusing options, no loud yellow price stickers, no messy boxes (I don't know about anyone else, but I've found pretty much every electronics store in the last few years to be increasingly grotty).

From a user's point of view, the famed "Genius Bar" is pretty sweet, an opportunity to get whatever help you need with either hardware or software. But for Apple, it's a tremendous learning opportunity, a chance to see how people are actually using their products and how those same products, both hardware and software, could be improved. Even if Apple's investment in the stores didn't compensate for the inevitable loss of sales through other retailers, it strikes me as a brilliant move by Apple, and one they're now reluctant to let go of (as they want to hold all the user data through the iTunes and App stores), as they now have this kind of data that no other manufacturer is going to get from third party retailers.

The New Mouse

The original iPod was first announced in October of 2001. (Stopping right there, that's a hell of a ten months.) Steve Jobs, in announcing the iPhone nearly six years later, looked at the scroll/click wheel as being the second of three "revolutionary" interfaces, with the first being the mouse with the original Mac. But with a visual interface similar to familiar menu systems, it seems like an ease-in way of introducing new navigational methods. Worth remembering is that the iPod was Mac-only for nearly the first year, keeping its appeal admittedly limited.

Micropayments At Last

In retrospect, it's hard to picture the iPod and iTunes without the iTunes store, but they got along just fine until April of 2003 (over a year later in Canada). But just as revolutionary as the original iTunes in removing the user from the actual filesystem, the store makes the move the digital media complete: no longer is iTunes "format-shifting" from one medium to another, it's encouraging users to go directly to the end result. This is, to my knowledge, Apple's first drive to build a large, one-click purchasing system similar to Amazon's, where they hold the user's credit card number to make a purchase as easy as possible (and given the instant gratification, it's in many ways better than Amazon's). Because iTunes already manages its own files, you don't need to know or care where these magic files are going (which can make backing up dicier, especially if you follow Apple's original advice and back up to physical storage (ie, cd or dvd) every so often, as they don't permit redownloading). In some ways, buying albums and single songs is small potatoes for what comes next, as 99¢ songs get people used to an until-then-elusive micropayment system.

Then with the original iPhone in January 2007, things get interesting. Jobs claims this moment has been in the works for two and half years, putting the origins of the phone back to maybe summer 2004. One of the great moments from the introduction is the way Jobs spins around the "Three revolutionary products: an internet communicator, a phone, and a widescreen iPod with touch controls" (loose quote there, but worth noting that he said "widescreen iPod with touch controls", not a phone with touch controls: the emphasis for touch was on the iPod, something everyone was already familiar with at that point, and something that often gets overlooked when discussing the iPhone). Jobs also emphasized that OSX powered the iPhone, which is worth thinking of as laying the groundwork for the iPad: floating OSX down to a phone makes it easier to bring it back up to the iPad three years later, something Android may be struggling with, as it's growing (or being pushed) far beyond its original design.

Because no one (at that time) really thinks of a phone as a computer, maybe it's easier to introduce something revolutionary in a product that's partially a phone and partially a bit of a toy (just being honest), a marriage of the critical and the whimsical that offers just enough of each to be accepted and successful. The user experience with mobile phones up to this point has been pretty dreadful, about as dreadful as digital point and shoot cameras: lots of features that no one can use because the interface is so bad.

Opening the iOS App Store a year later builds on many of the mechanisms already in place in iTunes: micropayments, one-tap purchases, and instant gratification (not to mention no file management or app launcher required).

And So

Then the iPad launches in January of 2010. Almost immediately starts the rumour that this is what Apple was building all along, but decided to do the iPhone first. I haven't yet come across any actual evidence to this, but I like the narrative for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I like the idea because it plays into what John Gruber says about Apple: they roll, but on a large scale as well as a small scale. They iterate individual products, but in this version, the iPhone could be seen as an iteration of a larger project, Computer 3.0: a way to slip a truly revolutionary device in through the back door.

Second, it presents a larger case for business and design decisions that shape how we interact with products. If any of the key steps had been overlooked, the very same iPad launch could have joined the G4 Cube as mis-step at best, if not outright flop. But because these steps were part of a larger process, it's hard to see how Apple could have even gotten to the iPad without them.

Last, it makes an strong argument for the user experience as key to understanding a product. There was a strange sense of deflation when the iPad was first announced: it was "just" a big iPod Touch, which on the one hand is more or less true, but on the other hand is completely wrong, because it gets used in different ways. An iPhone is thoughtlessly easy to take wherever you go; my iPad rarely leaves my house, but it moves from room to room with me. The iPhone replaces a phone and a camera; the iPad replaces 90% of my desktop computer, and 75% of my tv (which, as my iMac replaced my tv five years ago, was actually a pretty easy transition).

Just as likely, though, Apple did plan for the iPhone first, and then saw what else they had, and where it could take them.

Clearly, without iTunes and the management it offers, a tablet would be far less convenient to sync files with.
Launching a touch tablet in a world of mice and keyboards might have ended up going the way of the Newton and Palm (we might see the stylus as a temporary measure that Jobs pretty easily killed back in 07, although the had been on the way out for a while). But with the iPhone and iPod touch to pave the way, users had learned to literally trust their fingers to be the interface for them.
Without the retail store, it would be harder for people to touch, try out, and yes I'll say it be enchanted by the device. Doesn't happen in Best Buy; doesn't happen in cramped mobile carrier's outlets.

And Then

One question from all this is for all the iPad competitors out there: what would we find in their cupboard, if they even had one?

Another question for them is this: what are you going to do next?