For some months now I have had a friendly sparring session going on with my friend Brad. Last October, Brad posted to his blog a piece on iPad and Bumptop that I took issue with. My issue – to be clear – was less with the eventual outcome than with the timeframe. As followers of this blog know, I take a Now Not New outlook on technology and believe that despite the hyperbole and headline writing, the rate of adoption of technology is not quite as fast as advertised.
Clay Shirky wisely measures cultural revolutions (which I’m equating with the popular term ‘paradigm shift’) not by technologies but by enough people modifying their behavior because of them. I do not believe Apple’s iPad, or any tablet device for that matter, can possibly ‘change the computing experience as we know it’ in two years – which is the line Brad drew in the sand.
In a past post, I made note of the actual rate of MP3 player adoption into mainstream culture, noting that while it seemed that suddenly everyone had one, in truth the technology had taken nearly a decade to achieve the current ubiquity it enjoyed (which, incidentally is still less than half the population). Was this game changing? Absolutely. Did it happen overnight or even within two years? Not at all. Paradigms don’t shift, they drift and that presents opportunities and a mandate for calm, level-headed thinking.
Numbers talk.
Back to iPad. Brad playfully swatted my proverbial hornets nest when he Tweeted at me that at 2MM sales, he was ahead of his own schedule in terms of his prophecy.
I decided to do some digging to build my argument:
Apple has sold 2MM iPads worldwide, mostly in America. For arguments sake, let’s attribute ALL of the sales to America.
According to one source, the population of North America was approx. 340,831,831 in 2009*.
(*Its worth noting the U.S. census numbers for the U.S. are lower but that only 72% of people participated in the census in the first place.)
Working from the same first set of numbers above, 259,561,000 of this 341MM were internet users – or 76.2% of the population. That means 1 in 4 people weren’t even using the Internet yet which as an aside somewhat surprised me.
Attributing ALL iPad sales to North America, the 2,000,000 iPads sold are in the hands of approximately 0.58% of the North American population. That’s just a hair over a half of a percentage point. So yes, iPad sold faster than iPhone, and that’s a neat short term stat, but within the perspective of the internet-using population we’re talking fractions of a percentage point here.
As an interesting aside (thanks to my friend Jim for pointing this out) when the government went to switch from analog to digital TV in 2009 anywhere from two million to six million U.S. homes still had rabbit ears on their set top. Ask a techie and 2MM in terms of an iPad is a paradigm changing mass. 2MM in terms of legacy rabbit ears is a fringe minority. Subjectivity is a funny thing.Ok, for argument’s sake, let’s peg a ‘paradigm shift’ at perceptual ubiquity in the marketplace. Per this study MP3 players enjoy a 44% market penetration in 2010. They feel pretty ubiquitous right? They’ve changed entire industries after all and it seems everyone owns one so I’m going to use 44% for now (we can revise later).
Let’s assume Apple iPad sales will continue at pace moving forward, even though some people are beginning to back away from this bullish outlook. I’m feeling generous, so if Apple sold 2MM iPad units in two months let’s give them 1MM in sales per month in perpetuity. That’s fairly liberal I think as the early adopters’ enthusiasm is being assumed as ongoing and applicable to everyone.
By this figure, to be in the hands of 44% of the North American population (150MM people), thereby equating with the iPod in terms of game-changing impact for a significant proportion of the population, Apple will have to sell iPads, at 1MM units/month, for the next twelve and a half years.
Unfair to put the burden solely on Apple when Samsung, HP and Dell are all working up tablets? Okay, let’s double the sales figures per month for tablets. Even at 2MM units per month you’re still looking at 6 years to reach 44% of the population.
Driving the point back to my friend Brad’s two-year plan; to put a tablet in the hands of 44% of the population in two years, you’d need to sell 6.2MM units per month beginning on day one. That’s very aggressive in a new category wherein the market need being met is poorly articulated at this point.
To those arguing with my subjective benchmark of 44% pegged to the MP3 player, this brings us to the definition of paradigm change. First, MP3 players are more appropriate than say iPhone/smartphones because the latter has even less market penetration. Second, the free (mis)use of phrases like ‘paradigm shift’ and ‘change the computing experience as we know it’ and the running-around-with-our-heads-cut-off it creates is precisely what I am taking issue with.
To call something a paradigm shift, which is defined as a fundamental change in approach or an acceptance by a majority of a changed belief, attitude or way of doing things, it must impact the behavior of a larger population than the smart phone (currently about 10% of the marketplace) or iPad do. Not by a little… by a lot. By the definition of the word, even the MP3 player/44% example is not a valid basis.
By contrast, according to this nifty website there have been about 153,073,000 PCs sold in the world this year. That includes laptops, desktops, and notebooks but not handhelds. That’s a paradigm shift in process (that was at its early stage three decades ago). Smartphone and tablets are still at their early stage. Will they take three decades too? Probably not. But they won’t take two years either.
So why am I making such a big deal out of this?
Overcoming NYopia.
My point here is not that the iPad isn’t a successful product by business terms. Apple continues to impact the computer industry and the iPad will effect lasting change on computing. No arguments here. Even more encouraging is the fact that you don’t need to create paradigm-shifting technology to do quite well in business. Hell, the people who reshaped rubberbands, colored them and call them Sillybandz are making a fortune on a very old technology.
The important realization – I’ll say it again – is that paradigms drift, they don’t shift. This gives us time to think and consider. This gives us the ability to make plans, create a strategy and spend wisely. This means we need to take a collective deep breath and think about things a little more.
Yet any time a new technology hits the media hypemachine, businesses (from Wall St. on up) have a collective freakout. Reason goes out the window, everyone begins truncating thought and talking in superlatives. Worse, companies begin allocating a lot of resources and money based on these knee-jerk reactions fed by poorly contextualized information. You can call this jockeying for early-mover advantage but this doesn’t always work. You can shoot from the hip in the name of ‘experimentation’ if you want, but experimentation without a process for learning is wasteful. And yes some companies do these things and still come out on top. But that’s the would-be actors in Hollywood dynamic. For every Tom Cruise there’s 10,000 waiters working for $8.75/hour. Shouldn’t we want to improve our odds a little?
So Brad my sparring partner, I do not contest that tablet computing, like the mouse, modem and microchip, will have a lasting impact on the evolution of computing. I do not, however, believe that will be experienced by the vast majority of people within the next two years. I also believe that it is this vast majority of people that most companies do business with. It might make sense to spend some time looking at how they really live, act and engage with the world.
They say fortune favors the prepared mind. Part of preparation is looking ahead. The other part is keeping your head amid the exaggeration flying around.
Do you think, though, that a necessary part of what contributes to the eventual drift (as opposed to shift) is the pushing and reality-crafting of the true-believers who claim the shift has already occurred?
Which is to say, their pre-calling it as being already manifest is needed to convince others that the adoption is inevitable– even if it happens slower for them?
There’s those bunch of terms they apply to the abstract concept of the “edge;” bleeding, cutting, etc. (Again with the martial/war language! Oh, humanity.) which may be necessary parts of the whole to keep the wheel rolling– the outer edge spinning faster than the inner, but both necessary in their own speed and circuit for the process?
I don’t know. You can call it the tail wagging the dog, but if it does, eventually, then it serves its purpose in either case.
Josh, I do. Opinion Leaders/Early Adopters buy first and feed the media who make the headlines that everyone else reads. These lines leave the rest of us thinking if we don’t adapt/adopt we will be left behind. And so we (eventually) adopt. Where I struggle is when strategic business decisions are made on inaccurate perceptions of the adoption rate and curve. You can chase a lot of rabbits down a lot of holes burning money, time and resources in the process. This, to me, is the danger of drinking that Kool Aid.
Right, I see what you’re saying. I guess the question becomes, when you know the direction the race is running, which is the right horse to back? Most futurists (and betters) get it wrong, because there are usually variables and new players that can’t be accounted for at the time the “bet” is placed.
It made “sense” at a certain point, to think that Yahoo or AOL or MSN were the players to watch, with the race being (correctly) projected as “the internet will be huge, so search engines and “portals” will be important.”
But it didn’t make sense, because history usually shows that a smaller, more agile innovator can (and will) come along and blow by the institutionalized and slower moving entities mired in past practices, using their initial push as a starting point. Oftentimes, the ‘smart’ choice of what will be prevalent or profitable in the future seems ridiculous with a little time past.
Video-game-wise, the inclusion of a modem in the Sega Dreamcast was “smart” in that it correctly presaged the idea of console games being played across a network as being the next step– but it seems like a victorian era automaton-steam-powered robot compared to the eventual culmination of this idea realized, with X-Box Live.
My favorite bits of this sort of thing being concretized in film is in BLADE RUNNER, showing a future where Atari logos are as prevalent as Cola-Cola.
(That, and the Arnie vehicle THE 6TH DAY, which showed that in the future, the world is addicted to the XFL as their favorite sport.)
Josh, that seques precisely into the notion that sometimes being #2 or #5 to the game is better than being the pioneer. Pioneers are a romantic, heady notion. They get a lot of the buzz. They also tend to make the mistakes others learn from. Those others then go on to dominate their respective markets. The whole ‘first mover advantage’ is a bit overrated in my mind. Better to be a third mover with a v2.0 product and big marketing budget.
Corey, I wanted to agree with you, but I think I ended up on the other side.
I think a paradigm shift refers not only to a radical shift in behavior, but to a shift in perception. I think that what the iPad did was convince nearly everyone, even skeptics and cynics, that truly robust, engaging, full-featured, radical computing could also be totally and completely mobile.
I agree that it will be much longer than two years before people are all carrying iPads or other tablet-type devices. But I think almost out of the gate, the game was changed. It is logical and natural that we should be able to have interactions like the iPad provides, not be tethered to a desktop or hampered by the constraints of a laptop. The iPad proves it’s possible, and in a pretty robust way.
On the other hand, I completely agree with you that we need to avoid marketing / hype tunnelvision and act as though tablet computing is the only thing that matters. We must keep our heads.
Still, I’m very excited but what’s next. Just like the first time I saw a truly mobile personal phone back in 1985, and thought to myself, “Yes, this is what’s next, but it will be decades before everyone can afford one,” I think we’re on the cusp of the same thing.
Michael, I don’t think you came out in a different place at all. Sounds like we’re singing from the same hymnal in fact. I’m right there with you in terms of eventual change over. It would be silly to assume that computer evolution would stop at the mouse/laptop combo and I’m hoping I didn’t somehow imply that in my post. It’s the exaggerated timetable of adoption (and the subsequent decisions made today based on this erroneous timetable) that I become frustrated with.
If we’re moving from a wired/tethered era to a wireless/mobile one, then I would say said paradigm DRIFT started a decade ago and the iPad is just one more stepping stone in a transition that probably still has at least a decade to play out before it can rightly be defined as paradigm changing.
I too would include a shift of perception (by a majority) in the definition of paradigm shift (in fact, I think it was in the definition I cited). The issue is determining what the broad majority perception really is. That’s harder to ascertain. Just glimpsing at politics and both parties claiming to represent the majority of Americans on this or that issue underscores the difficulty in defining what ‘most people’ think. I’m not as readily convinced on the tablet perception as you are. It still seems to me that most articles tread carefully between fanboy worship and ‘tablets as a category struggle to find a need they meet’ cautiousness.
I see your point, and I agree…it is a drift. To me, this is a swell in the drift, especially with the news today that the iPad just crested 3 million units in 3 months, and subsequent news that Amazon and Barnes and Noble are significantly slashing the prices of their e-Readers in response.
In this instance, I don’t see Apple as changing the game, so much as raising the ante. Heck, I even listened to an interview with a guy who once helped lead the HP tablet initiative, and he said, “Apple was able to do what we couldn’t: redefine what a tablet can be. We were tethered to the Windows OS, so we were only changing the form factor, not the computing experience, the way Apple has.”
I managed to have a paradigm shift every day for two months!
(Although you’re right that social paradigms take longer to shift; have you read “The Tipping Point?”)
Yes, when it first came out. Hit Blink and Outliers too. Some interesting stuff. As to having a paradigm shift daily for two months; sounds like that would leave stretch marks.