We are beginning to see a fantastic new array of markets and opportunities to show off our design chops and the general climate seems to be one of focused, elegant realism with a dash of textured background. (OK,OK, there is a lot of fluffy hipster white noise around, as always, but I assure you we are in a better place than 2006!)

The dark times are almost gone. The pompous, slow, overly complex and deliberately obtuse flashy Flash websites are making way for the new post-PC web and connected device infrastructure.

Fortunately for us designers, these new canvasses seem to value (or at least tolerate) clean, user-focused design over the frankly horrendous pop-up-flash-banner-ad commoditised SEO overdrive that we got ourselves into in the mid 2000s.

There’s a whole chapter to be said on where the modern web is headed. The value of reclaiming the quality and control of web and app design over the commoditised content nightmare that has hindered the “Google age” and then the “social age” of the web – but that is for another day!

Today, all I want to say is that sometimes you are still shocked as a designer to receive a peculiar retro project.

No, not a 2005 era, completely un-navigable car manufacturer flash mini-site…

I’m talking about the case and artwork for a CD-ROM.

“Wow! So they still exist?”

I’m in two minds about such projects. Part of me wants to SCREAM that we have moved so far from sticking disks in desktops to play clunky multimedia clips and flash content.

But, there are obviously still some markets that may just support such old school media. (Like old Schools perhaps? It was actually a project for the education market).

And then there are ye olde set in their ways businesses – or paranoid, panic-stricken, security conscious internet-less flat earthers, as we might call them. Surely massive markets that are worth developing for in 2012?

Anyway… Designing the CD-ROM artwork all seemed so wonderfully otherworldy. Delicately fashioning the case artwork from some lovingly stored stock brand elements. Carefully etching the CD artwork with a vintage 2 year old version of Illustrator. Then standing back to gaze at the final result (beautifully printed on some cheap 80gsm paper on the shared company laser printer).

It was all so old fashioned and “solid”. Like dry stone walling or thatching for the digital age – it’s a skill, but one that can only really be done by a few specialist craftsmen.

Actually, scratch all that misty eyed rose tinted rubbish!

CD-ROMs were ALWAYS terrible (particularly those horrible wastes of space that passed for educational CD-ROMs!) So, good luck to the client, but really… I mean REALLY, you don’t need CD-ROMs in 2012.

You try to compromise on the form and features and operation of a design to make the best solution possible to a few BIG problems (rather than half arsed solutions to all the little jobs to be done).

Sometimes Marketing, Finance and the politics of the client/organisation will get in the way and demand things – MORE FEATURES to sell – LESS features for cost (or the boss wants it to have a wooden case…) You’ve got to steer a course through these choppy waters to avoid all the pitfalls and at the end of the day, you may have something good!

But the problems start with identifying the features that are important. And who decides? Those decisions made, and the times they are made, completely change the outcome.

Take the new Galaxy S3 Smartphone.

Problem: LTE high speed network and screen take a LOT of power at the moment.
Solution: Bigger battery.

Problem: Bigger battery means bigger device – do we make it a lot thicker?
Solution: Naaa. Bigger screen – that can be a feature…

Problem: Big screens need even more power?
Solution: Even bigger battery, even bigger screen… Features ahoy!

Like calculating the fuel needed to launch a rocket carrying the rocket + the fuel itself into space, you’re deep into a loop of faux techno-rocket science that seems to be getting you places. But you’ve failed to make the crucial compromise at the start of the process. Some of the technology isn’t ready – YET.

So you go on – and now the compromises get weird!

Problem: A bigger phone is a bit heavy and expensive.
Solution: Use some cheaper/lighter materials.

Problem: Big screens demand two handed operation.
Solution: Ignore that one. That can be a compromise. And big phones are, erm… cool

Problem: Big phones are not that “pocketable”.
Solution: Not a problem. People need to get bigger pockets.

Problem: The Apps need to work on this big screen …and all the other smaller screens.
Solution: The devs can deal with that.

And on it goes… That early decision to compromise on the size has led to all sorts of strange decisions and odd deferrals of responsibility to other parties to make your product work. Now you might think about software and marketing:

Problem: What about actual honest to god software features?
Solution: Erm… well… hang on.  Right here we are… i, I mean S-Cloud, S-tunes-Match, S-Play, S-Store S-Express. All great, erm, integrated stuff.

Problem: Marketing wise, the phone does look a wee bit… erm… big and a bit… odd?
Solution: Great! look how it dwarfs the competition (also, we changed it to not look at all like an iPhone – you can’t even get it in black, see?)

I would have LOVED to see SAMSUNG take that last step in the “lets copy APPLE” path and make some ballsy design decisions and compromises with the S3. Smaller but REALLY thin; really high quality materials; no LTE (or a go all out to get the damn LTE chips to be more energy efficient). But instead they make a bleeding tablet phone and throw in some xeroxed iCloud/iTunes stuff. I have never been more dissapointed in a major phone launch.

At the end of the day the Marketing/Finance/Legal Dept. won. A bigger phone is easy to sell. Easy to find a niche among BIG HANDED tech writers. Easy to get out in the shop and dwarf the other phones. Easy to spout the stats and show off this lovely BIG screen, just like a big LCD TV all dressed up with an over BRIGHT and CONTRASTY display to stand out in Comet (but you can’t make the damn phone smaller when you get home the way you can at least change the TV settings!)

With all the iPad wannabee tablets failing so miserably, it seems the only way Android is getting tablet-sized devices to sell is to call them phones and sell them through the usual channels.

Now if they had changed those first decisions… “No, we need to keep this a small and beautiful device; the battery can be better, perhaps not changeable, but still small and we could try new materials; and let’s wait for better LTE chips”
…you would see a completely different and exciting path of product development (that really would have worried the iPhone).

Shame.

(I won’t even try to go in to the different S3 versions, with the model that lacks LTE (for proper-4G-less bits of Europe) coming first, but still being so god damn big – that’s just odd)

It might go something like this:

• You get the project / idea.
• Go and sit at your desk and fire up that PC…
• Google some research and get together some “inspirational” images
• Maybe sketch out some ideas on some paper next to the mouse (but probably not these days!)
• Launch Illustrator on the PC (or similar Vector drawing program)
• Import or scan in your ideas
• Trace / copy / create Ideas using your mouse and LOTS of keyboard shortcuts
• Be creative and perhaps add some Photoshop “sheen” to the final design
• Print some ideas to show people
• Edit your design as needed
• Check it and export for web / print

…and there you go. You may use a Mac or a PC or add a Wacom device to draw on screen, but basically it’s been this way for ages.

The PC always seems to be MANDATORY in the design process, even though it feels like the least creative part of the endeavour. It forces you to sit at an office desk and do everything in that same seat. You have to be a researcher; and then be “inspired” and creative; and then be all technical; and then proof and output your design. There are no real boundaries to the tasks and you have to really concentrate to avoid the tools creating the design, rather than you using the tools for what YOU want to do.

So, I thought I would see just how much you can do on an iPad now. just to ruffle up this staid design process…

…and it was uplifting to find that I could now use a process that only involved ONLY the iPad for a project that I would have thought MUST use a PC – it went something like this:

• You get the project / idea.
• Grab the iPad, go outside or sit on the sofa do some research
• Save some “inspirational” images to the camera roll
• Wander around some more – doing thinking!
• Maybe sketch out some ideas in Sketchpad Pro or ArtRage apps and save to camera roll
• Grab some Tea and perhaps sit at the dining table…
• Launch InkPad, import your ideas then trace / copy / create!
• Show people the design on the iPad screen, then edit, check and export to dropbox for web / print

It was just SO much nicer to design without feeling so restrained by the desk and PC environment. I loved using the iPad for everything, and even though you can’t do some more complex Illustrator gubbins at the moment, I was surprised by just how much I could do – and how much FUN it was.

InkPad also has a surprising amount of pro-level tools too. Transparencies, paths, cut-outs and layers are all handled nicely, and it even lets me load in custom fonts from my dropbox account. Oh, and it costs a fiver. Not £500.

So, for the first time in many years, I was genuinely excited by the design tools and the process I was using, as well as the design itself. These tablets and the cloud are really going to change things for design in the future – and it’s a future that’s almost here, right now!

At first I found it surprising that the Android Market is suddenly GONE. (Surely it was much loved and heavily recognised among the geek elite?) But Android’s relegation to a bit-part feature is actually fairly obvious when you think about it.

From the start, “Android” seemed to be an all too quirky little moniker designed, I assume, to get the geeks and R2D2 fetishists on board during the OS’s difficult entrance into the market.

But the Android path to glory (in the smartphone market share stats, at least) was so quick that it must have taken even Google by surprise.

And now Android has MASSIVE market share, investment, time and geeky kudos. But really tiny profits – and a sea of litigation and burned bridges.

As far as I can see, Google’s endeavours have so far led to:

• A massive fall out with one time friends, Apple.
• An impending case with Oracle about the very foundations of Android.
• One big corporate success – and it’s Samsung, not Google!
• A load of other handset makers all struggling.
• A strange purchase of an old fashioned hardware vendor, in Motorola. Perhaps to fight patents? or look beyond Android?
• Stabbing net-neutrality right in the back, all while getting far too cosy to the incumbent carriers.
• The loss of a lot of good will among some users and commentators.

Now the masses are flocking to get a smartphone or tablet and Google REALLY doesn’t want to be saddled with a mobile services brand that competes using the Android name, not the Google name, in an area that’s vital for future mass market growth. Or looking at it more pessimistically, an Android brand that may crash and burn among the wreckage of patent litigation, fragmentation and vendor mismanagement.

Imagine trying to explain to a mass market how Android is… erm… usually Google services… but is also a catch all term for an Open Source OS that manufacturers and programmers use… and then, in the case of Amazon and B&N, customise and “fork”… and then remove Google services from. Yuk!

To the larger market, Android is the petrol or the tyres you use on your car. Important, for sure, but you never go and specifically look for a Michelin or Shell car. Google wants to at least be a “Ford” or “GM” in the mobile market (compared to Apple’s “BMW” or “Mercedes”).

It definitely doesn’t want to be a geek friendly afterthought lagging behind the phone vendors and carriers in public recognition (with Google’s good name used by these companies to reassure their own financial departments – while they further annoy the big G by futzing around with the Android experience.)

So, instead of having a victory parade for Android and its services, Google suddenly dumps the name “Android Market”, THE connection between the apps and the Android OS – and it covers them in a sprinkling of fresh Google dust with the new name “Google Play”.

There, everyone will now think of Google when getting all their mobile apps, games and videos. Sorted!

But will they? Will Google Play become an iTunes type conglomeration of apps, music and videos that could even make a profit in the future? Or will “Play” become another Google project that runs out of steam?

Make no bones about it, Google is WORRIED about Android being forked by competitors and detracting from the vital Google mass market mind-share. They needed to act quickly and shore up possible future revenue streams and market presence. And so we have “Play”.

I’m sure Google doesn’t want to just serve ads to the mobile market in the future (the main argumanet about Android’s financial viability) – and it must be worried about its continuing reliance on the “fools’ game” that is internet ads. I mean, just look at the state of desktop browser ads: does it really do Google any favours?

Interesting times. But it all looks set for a Google Play Motorola Tablet, and a wider sprinkling of the Google Play brand. It is still a terrible name, though!

“I really don’t know how the Chinese view their engineers. I do know that corporate America has spent the last 15 years trying to make the case that another class of skilled worker, developers, are commodity resources. As long as you have good requirements, the theory goes, any developer should be able to code your application for you. That does not work in practice, in my experience, because developers are not interchangeable parts. One is not just as good as the other and I have yet to see requirements that were so perfect that a knowledgeable developer could not improve upon them by asking the right questions.”

It’s a really good way of looking at the way many businesses have developed in the UK over the last 10-15 years… and it’s certainly not just true of developers!  If you are an editor, a designer, a writer or another creative working in print or digital, YOU are also in danger of becoming a “commodity resource”.

I see the story going something like this:

If you are a business dealing with vaguely creative products or content, you probably see yourself as relying far too much on some unquantifiable artistic recipe for success. You may find yourself with some fabulous individual writers or designers with good ideas, quirks and personalities that have somehow become the de-facto brand for your business.

So what do you do?

You start to panic… “but what happens when they leave?” or “we can’t just rely on such and such to drive the business forward”.

In the modern corporate way, you will try to pin down all the elements that you think makes up your particular creative mixture.  You think you can quantify and specify and generate a process which sets in stone the personality of your key products. It should be a step by step procedure, and it should always work, forever. Then, like any “right thinking” modern business, you can simply fill in the missing specs for a each particular project, dish out the project to your commodity resources, and get them to carry on the good work: quickly, consistently and on-brand.

The problem is that the detailed procedures and requirements you generate for these commodity resources to work at all without constantly stopping and asking for clarification can never be good enough for your people to work as effectively as they can. It’s not just your present: your future is compromised too. Your procedures can never allow for the constant improvements and innovation needed to keep your business ahead, because they are too standardised.

It leads to a a couple of strange situations:

The outcomes of these situations are not necessarily what you wanted…

If you continue to outsource, you will develop a reliance on perhaps one group you can trust (which is odd as you were relying on a small group of creatives to start with, and that’s what made you panic in the first place!)

If you continue to recruit your way out of trouble, you are surprised at the rate of staff turnover…

…and if you still care enough about your actual product, it takes a LOT longer to produce new products. (if you don’t actually care about your product you will simply lose customer trust, goodwill and market share, and miss future opportunities)

I guess this is not really what your business wanted, after all!

But just look at the stuff that passes for enterprise grade tech. these days…

When the Work Laptop (a not-state-of-the-art but BRAND-NEW and faster thing by-Dell) was thrust into my possession for a presentation (or some other mildly tedious exercise), it highlighted just how different the stock business technology experience is today.

It was TERRIBLE. I mean just AWFUL, from every conceivable design standpoint. The touch-pad was ‘stone age’, lacked any semblance of multi-touch and was both too small and somehow in the wrong place. The keyboard bowed and creaked like a old boat at sea. The chasis was cheap-jack-plastic dressed as the bastard son of a gaming laptop and a floor tile. The ergonomics made my whole upper body ache in a way that I still can’t understand (I mean it’s just a flat surface with keys like all the other ones, surely?)

It was obviously all knocked out at a ‘price’ with a barely fleeting regard to the user experience and I can only assume that this particular model exists purely because ‘dinosaur’ IT Departments continue to purchase tired and dated old rubbish to roll-out in the same way they always have done.

I couldn’t wait to give it back.

Even today’s ‘better’ IT Departments have a nasty habit of assuming that employees take scant interest in the quality of their user experience (and will know of nothing better if given a sub-standard bit of kit).

But things HAVE changed.

When I get back home I know I can very quickly and easily check email, news, weather and then write, plan and design stuff (and so much more) on an iPad.

The juxtaposition of using a modern laptop and an iPad was stunning. The iPad is just pleasure to use. Instant, speedy and beautiful with every millimeter oozing in design thought and attention to detail.

I can almost achieve in seconds what would torture me for hours on that hideous Dell monstrosity. (Sure, I will need a ‘proper’ computer to do some tasks – but I don’t WANT to use that PC if at all possible! It is just a specialist tool, like a lathe or a band saw.)

As more and more individuals experience the power of iPads (as well as the ‘cloud’ and other ‘Post PC’ devices), you can sense a wonderful change in our relationship, experience and confidence with technology.

New people are using AND enjoying these devices every single day. They are achieving things they would think ‘impossible’ of themselves only months ago (and without the pre-requisite training and support that has dominated the previous generations of ‘tech’ usage). Such a thing must be anathema to those continuing with the backwards-compatible-training-course minded ‘old’ style of operation.

‘Enterprise’ is no longer the ‘gatekeeper’ to accessing the leading edge of technology. And what a joy this will be for the humble technology users of the future!

The ‘old’ enterprise pillars of security, backwards compatibility and ease of support are crippling some businesses  that really need to embrace the ‘post-pc’ world with its newfangled data ‘clouds’ and the devices that come with them.

The move to these ‘simpler’ (but just as secure and productive) ways of computing IS going to happen, EVEN in the most un-willing of enterprises. Slowly at first, for sure, but it will happen.

But one thing should be true in the vast majority of projects:
Design is a collaboration - NOT a top-down tick-box tutorial!

Any time a project includes more than one person, then you are collaborating! I’ve seen many different beliefs about how creative collaborations should take place (both within a company and beyond) and the ones that work are the situations where individuals trust and respect other opinions and are treated as sensible adults.

“But surely that’s obvious”, you say?

Well you’d be suprised!

A studio or design-led department schooled in a ‘design’ mindset will (or should!) know exactly how to set up that creative and collaborative atmosphere …but outside of these fringe cases there is a tremendous amount of what I could call ‘cluelessness‘!

The problem is this:
A design process led by an administrator, accountant or company ‘secretariat’ will focus on the pure and simple ‘ticking of boxes’.

These folks may tend to revel in their lack of design knowledge (or that “arty, farty stuff”) but are good at having opinions (and as we all know, design is all about opinions… and no one is really ‘right’!)

Perhaps their only first-hand experience of dealing with feedback on creative ideas and ‘collaboration’ will be waaaaay back when teacher marked their work at school. This leads to a tendency to fall back on this bizarre muscle-memory of feedback as ‘marking’ when they approach the design process.

And no relationship that involves you ‘marking’ another fully grown adult’s ideas as ‘school-work’ WILL EVER WORK!

And worse, I’ve seen many a project (even at the early ideas stage) actually taken away by these administrators, discussed in private, and then fed-back via emails and chinese whispers that indirectly get back to the designers!

“Whoooa! You’re kidding right?”

Unfortunately no! Nothing of any worth will come out of a process like this. It will be stifled, bland and adhere to the lowest common denominator of creative thinking. Good ideas will struggle to survive because they are strangled by a deliberately ignorant and heavy-handed tick-box mentality from the very start of the project.

And this is happening in sooooo many of those medium size companies that are both big enough to have multiple departments, but not big enough to give any freedoms to those departments.

“But hang on, a good design process does include some harsh criticism; and boxes-to-tick, right?”

Hell yes!

Design is ALL about feedback, and consultation, and criticism, and bouncing ideas of everyone you can find. And you’ve GOT to get the appropriate sign-off and proofing of ideas and final designs. Just don’t let that sign-off control the entire system. Sign-off should be part of the collaborative process, with sound reasoning and honest, face-to-face converations about where you are headed and what you are all striving for.

Design is the freedom of NOT being afraid of failure and experimentation. Even in the most buttoned-up, confused and straight laced company it can STILL be about the freedom to let a process produce something that is both beautiful, elegant AND on-brand.

1. THE NEW KID: Disrupt and grow! You enter a new market full of ideas and free from the boring business consensus.
2. BELIEVE THE HYPE: You are GREAT and you can ‘Zag’ when everone else is ‘Zigging’… with EVERYTHING you do.
3. OLDER, NOT WISER: You’re continually re-inventing the wheel in a quest to remain on the crest of your ‘zag’. This leads to more gradual growth and a reliance on the disrupted market.
4. NOT BIG ENOUGH: The market evolves without you really noticing. You don’t try anything too new in case it fails. Your new plan is to simply copy some new disrupt-ors and flog things to your existing market.
5. DENIAL: Repeat the mantra that copying is the new disruption… Deny that you ever did anything that good in the first place (particuallry if you weren’t on the board back then). Become as entrenched in your methods and processes as those businesses you disrupted.
6. CLIQUEY OBFUSCATION: Become experts in yourselves. Obsess about embedding your ‘culture’ in the company DNA. Proudly create an HR petri dish ready to grow the finest bullshitters, stooges and yes-men to take things forward.
7. DOLDRUMS: Consult constantly with every single member of your new team. Slowly and deliberately over-think every situation you come across and make sure you change every decision at least 5 times. Believe you have everything set for spectacular new growth, with the right people, the right culture and an inspiring set of new copied products. You can’t fail, right?
8. GONE: Limp on pretending to be relevent. You’re now an encumbent dinosaur in a tired, tepid market. You never got big enough to make a mark beyond your initial success and you’ve squandered the recognition and possibilties that the initial disruption brought you. You’re an expert in a sector that is so irrelevant that no one else even bothers with it.

Perhaps the business will carry on for years… but really it’s just an ego trip for whoever is left with any power. One day it may become a loved and respected tiny specialist firm in a niche so small it can’t be seen by the human eye.

And so goes another promising British business. I hope it’s not you!

However, this is NOTHING compared to working as an in-house designer!

Here, you will never ‘get‘ most of the people working around you (It’s just not possible to think like an accountant or a soapy sales shill) but in return you get a steady wage and no alarms or surprises.

In-house designers come into contact with all the different tribes that form within the organisation, and are directly affected by all of them: whether or not there is any mutual cultural understanding. The problem for a designer, from a career perspective, is that advancement up the greasy ladder of success is directly related to perceived ability to ‘get‘ how ‘business‘ works.

A staff designer in many a medium sized business will hear the beat of the dark heart of the company – beating with variations on the constant refrain “ah, they may be creative, but are they commercially minded?”

Have you ever stopped to think what that actually means and why creativity and “sound commercial thinking” are perceived to be somehow mutually exclusive?

Money Money Money
To be ‘commercial’ in UK business (as defined by a board full of accountants and sales folks) is this: You should be analysing, dealing and straining every cell, to sell (DYSWIDT) more stuff for more money to more people…while cutting all your costs. The endpoint for this approach must logically be “conning as many people as you can to part with all their money in return for virtually nothing (while getting practically no resources to do your actual job)”?

This belt-tightening commercial-con-man approach (as used by insurance, legal and financial services the world over) is trickling down to our smaller companies, and has the effect of replacing a good old fashioned design or engineering foundation is with an accountant led sleight-of-hand (despite the UK’s long and proud heritage in engineering and innovation).

Man in the middle
It’s such a shame to disregard design in this modern ‘commercial’ process (beyond a hideous plinky plonky advert commissioned, outsourced and tagged on the end!) Perhaps designers don’t do the dirty deals, or tick the endless boxes, but a designer is probably as ‘commercially minded’ as any of the other tribes in a business. They design for clients that want to get noticed; they design to stand out and make money; they design for people in the real world! The whole idea of copywriting or Graphic and Product design is to think of great ways to sell stuff, or design great stuff that sells!

But a designer will rarely be given credit for any thought about these ‘commercial’ considerations.
A designer is too arty, too creative and either too god-damned simplistic or too god-damned sophisticated in their approach.

SOS
The management of ‘design’ in many UK medium sized business also has to be seen to be believed. It probably involves training up secretaries on powerpoint to do presentations and brochures – or putting accountants or admin people in charge of the whole design process (people whose climb up to promotional pole is based on box ticking, and who therefore ONLY know how to tick boxes).

The sheer lack of any depth or breadth of design knowledge and experience in so many companies is now pretty worrying. It’s like a simple PR guy and his friends trying to run a country. Terrifying. But that would never happen, would it?

On and on and on
But look at the world and how it is changing. The biggest company (by market cap etc.) on the planet takes design VERY seriously. Other big companies are desperately following suit (or are still just digging up rotten and squashed dead trees from a few million years ago to meet our energy needs). Smaller companies are scrabbling around trying to understand what is changing while still applying their tired old business paradigms.

Short-term-cost-cutting-customer-fleecing bullshit models are still here because that’s what some people think is the modern way to do business. And on we go.

Move On
We can’t stretch out that 1980s ‘American’ business plan any longer. It’s already out of date. The last strain of increased productivity while cutting costs (in other words, get China to do it) is working its way through the system. And then what?

So, to stop the rant… Isn’t GOOD design going to be the thing that gets companies to stand out in the future? Isn’t it time for smaller businesses to move on from the dead years of ‘commercially minded’ zombies to a future of elegant design and genuine customer focus?

And wouldn’t it be great if designers were the ‘accountants’ of the new century? If they were valued for their commercial mindset AND creative ability and were part of a team of many skills that moved a company forward?

For years the PC owning world attributed the words Apple and Design to signify the obsession with ‘looks’ and the unimportant.  Real computers meant building your own system for £20 and running it on hand coded MS-Dos batch files over a telnet server… or something.

Even today, many still see the word ‘design’ and think of it in relation to the ‘casing’. The icing on the cake. Design still means those fancy looking, expensive and unnecessary fripperies.

But for enlightened designers and forward thinking companies like Apple, design is NOT just a rounded corner or an aluminuim casing.

It’s everything.

When Apple say they have ‘designed’ something, they really mean they have designed ‘how it works’ from top to bottom. The hardware, the software and, increasingly, the ecosystem around it.

And design should really mean that to everyone!

Design is about how and where it’s used, the system and modes of operation – and crucially, design is the final compromise that makes designers worth their weight in micro-chips.  It’s the decisions to highlight some things over others. To drop a feature like the Floppy disk or DVD drive to make it smaller. To annoy some people by pleasing others. And as long as your vision is coherent and elegant (and is not destroyed by the evil gods from Mount Finance) then the world will always be an exciting place to be.

Every recent Apple unveiling always covers 2 or 3 key things. A new hardware launch, some OS updates and some nice shiny new software!

Now… Most of the coverage will be distracted by the hardware, obviously! It’s the headline item and dead easy to report. But most PEOPLE will actually be effected by the software.

Software is the visible end result of the product design, hardware, engineering, programming and testing for most people. It’s basically what makes or breaks the device – and the great thing is that new software is usually the gift that keeps on giving!

The iPad 2 launch brought the wonderful GarageBand to all iPads (and eventually to the iPhone). My lowly iPad1 could start using GaragBand over a year after it launched. Suddeny the creative possibilities of my old device were limitless. I didn’t need an iPad2, just the new software. Sure it would be BETTER in an iPad2 – but I was so happy to use GaragBand on the iPad1 that i pretty much made up my mind to get an iPad3 on that day.

So, they didn’t get me to buy an iPad2 – but they do have repeat business from me in the future. Clever!

And that’s the secret. The millions of old iOS users are not discarded and forgotten about. They are treated to updates and new software that will make them come and buy a new Apple device when they need one. They aren’t strong armed (too much anyway!) in to getting a new device. Just kept on board and gently nudged towards new devices when they need them.

So I’m fascinated to see the new iPad – but I’m really looking forward to seeing what titbits of new software they bring with that new iPad – and the older devices too!