Apple is a marketing company. Flash edition.
[9 November 2011: Brian: Cheers for Brian, no? I wrote this barely 2 weeks ago. Now Adobe has killed development on Flash for smartphones. I told you *from the beginning* that having Flash on your device was *absolutely not* a selling point. A few Android fanboys argued otherwise. What say they now? Listen to Brian, all.]
It's the iPad! Only better! Cause it has flash!
Probably the nicest honest thing you can say about the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet is that sales have been underwhelming. Despite creating a device that *borrows* extremely heavily from Apple's iPad.
And runs on the (more popular) Android platform.
Which is open!
And has Flash!
I've detailed the reasons why (pre Kindle Fire) no one will buy a tablet that is not iPad and why no one should buy a tablet that is not iPad. No point in going over this yet again, particularly after having been proven so completely right.
Rather, I will talk about flash. Or, more specifically, about those who talked up flash as a selling point. Which was dumb. And because Apple so publicly dissed Flash, the Apple haters became all the more fervent in their demand that flash be included in non Apple tablets.
And the weak, possibly dumb people running marketing for Playbook and Xoom and Galaxy Tab and others, charged with determining market requirements, fell trap once more to the grand fallacy that the Apple haters proffer:
that they are a market that matters
Steve Jobs and Apple have famously said they don't do market research. This isn't entirely true. Steve Jobs and Apple have famously said that they build products that they want to use, and not products based on what a bunch of people tell them. This is mostly true. The late Steve Jobs and the present Apple Inc. rarely talk about what they are doing. This is both true and good.
Because, I suspect that if they started talking up what they were doing, planning, working on, thinking about, then there would be no end of loud-angry demands to include or not include feature X and service Y and techology Zed. Which would probably do nothing more than throw Apple far off their game, just as it has thrown the also-rans off theirs.
My mother has used an iPad. She has zero knowledge what Flash is or does. I have let children, who have never heard of 'Flash' use my iPad.
It works. Great. Easily. Powerfully. Just as Apple said, any benefits of Flash would be far outweighed by its harm to the overall user experience. And Apple continues to sell iPads by the millions. Meanwhile, Tabs can't be found, Xoom appears to be offering a buy anything get one free special, and Playbook, like the TouchPad, is soon to appear in the bins along with the $5 DVDs at the WalMart, I suspect.
Because these companies listened; only, not to the market, but to a very small group of haters and fanboys. HOW DARE APPLE NOT INCLUDE FLASH! CLOSED! BAD! MARKETING! ANd rather than building the best product for the market -- or for a market that did not quite yet exist -- they built a product to satiate the rapatious demands of a tiny tiny group of buyers who, let's face it, weren't going to buy the tablet anyway.
Apple haters my be loud. They may take to social media and find an echo chamber, but they are a blip on a niche market. Listen to them at your peril.
Bet against Apple, sure. But I wouldn't bet on the haters. They won't make you any money.