Slate Wars

Feb 2 2012

David Kelley, Principal User Experience Architect at Wirestone, is back to talk about “Slate Wars”. David shares many reasons why he is excited to see Microsoft enter this market (again). He also makes predictions about how competition in the tablet space is about to heat up, in general.

Links referenced in the show:

The music in the show, Have Mercy — Big Walter Horton, was provided by Mevio’s Music Alley.

Transcription

David 00:00:23

So my name is David Kelley. I’m the Principle User Experience Architect for a company called Wirestone. We’re a digital interactive agency. We design everything from interactive touch experiences, touch walls, kiosks, marketing campaigns, things like that. We did part of the Microsoft retail store, the Nike Touch Wall in New York City, and all kinds of other cool stuff like that. I’m a Microsoft MVP and today we’re going to talk about the coming slate wars and how it’s going to affect us as developers and the market.
Ryan 00:01:01

Cool. I’m looking forward to this. Long-time listeners will remember that David was on here before and I had a lot of fun just talking UX with him. And he’s worked on a lot of really cool projects. And I guess the big thing is I agree with you a lot so I like to talk to you about certain things. So, like, what’s important and what isn’t and this is going to be a lot of fun. I think that some of the podcasts recently have maybe been a little bit like medicine, you know. These are things that are good for you and I think that this one’s going to read a lot more like candy.
David 00:01:31

You know, I kind of have a sweet tooth. I like to talk about the stuff that’s fun and let the boring stuff be for, well, someone else.
Ryan 00:01:42

So this is going to be great. So you say “slate wars.” Now this isn’t a term that I hear around a lot. So what do you mean by that, like, when you’re talking about this?
David 00:01:51

Well, I guess I tried to coin it. I don’t know if I actually am the one that coined it, but I did a series of articles over the past couple of years and it really comes from what I think the market will go to when we start seeing kind of a new class of device come out that’s kind of beyond where we are with the iPad and how it’ll affect the marketplace when there’s lots of competitors with this new class of device. And so as that heats up, I think it’ll really be clearly a slate war.
Ryan 00:02:27

Yeah. It’s interesting because you hear people talk about, well, when the iPad first came out people said it’s like a big iPod Touch, right? And that was like a damning statement about it. But it turned out to be kind of what people wanted, right? Like, the simplicity of it seemed to be a big factor. So now you’re saying what’s going to make it interesting is when these things start getting more complicated, right?
David 00:02:51

Yeah. When you start having something in the form factor of an iPad but more powerful than my uber-computer that’s on my desk it’s a new class of device. I mean, really, Apple kind of set the bar, raised the bar. They do the best industrial design in the world and they built something that’s just cool. It’s fun to play with, fun to use. And what was really important over slates that had come out previously is it was designed around that metaphor of touch interaction. You know, if you look at previous versions of Windows and put them on a slate it’s just terrible. Absolute terrible user experience and that’s why those devices, and I know there’s been devices like that for the past decade, they never got off the ground because they’re just too cumbersome.
Ryan 00:03:43

I had one -- gosh, at this point it’s probably at least eight years ago because I had it in college. So it’s probably closer to nine or ten and I thought it was awesome. Like, it was so much -- like, the potential of it was great except it was really just XP with kind of this cobbled on keyboard that it really wasn’t well-thought out. There were a handful of apps that I could go in and the interface would be, like, it was designed just for this, a couple of drawing programs, note-taking apps. And I really saw the potential but it made it all the more frustrating when I tried to do anything else, right?
David 00:04:17

Well, yeah. Exactly. And that’s what Apple really did was took some of that potential and really showed the marketplace what could be done if you wrap the entire experience around that device. And that’s what really I think is starting this “slate war” that we’ll start to see pick up over the coming year.
Ryan 00:04:40

I think it’s interesting how, you know, Google’s coming at it from a very similar approach as far as this is closer to our phones than it is to, you know, computers that they don’t make, right? And even when they try to get on a laptop-type setting, they’re doing something totally different with chromebooks. But Microsoft’s coming at it from a different angle saying, you know, “We’re all in with our computers. This is the future of computing; everyone says that. And we’re going to go ahead and make that happen right now.” And it’s very touch-centric. Like, the whole -- the context shift of how you’re going to use this thing. Like, they’re kind of, “If you’re going to upgrade and you’re going to buy a new device, you’re in the whole brave new world now.”
David 00:05:20

Yeah. It’s part of probably a long-term trend towards ubiquitous computing. And with Amazon and Google and Microsoft and Apple and all the other competitors heading kind of in the same direction with their own takes or perspectives on it, it’ll really become exciting when these devices are really cranked up so they’re no longer, you know, like an overgrown iPod like the iPad, but they really become powerful computing devices that are less and less obtrusive and they’re easier to use.
Ryan 00:05:56

Now, I mean, it easy to get a little hung up on, like I do. I think, you know, if they go and they try to say this needs to be everything, right, like, Word needs to run on this great, we need Outlook to work on this great, and then we also want it to be, like, this fun way to play Angry Birds or whatever the big thing is, you know, later. Like, the thing that’s all about touch and playing with it. Like, that’s hard. Like, that’s a big, broad goal to hit. So, you know, I’m anxious to see how that plays out.
David 00:06:23

Well, it will. It’ll be fun to see how that plays out. And I think when Windows 8 comes out, I think they’ve really kind of hit the ball out of the park when it comes to that.
Ryan 00:06:36

Yeah.
David 00:06:36

The Windows 8 kernel is, you know, twice as fast and half the memory. It, you know, like, the one I have is just a little bit different perspective than an iPad, but it can run Visual Studio and all my uber-apps and at the same time, when I’m sick of that, I can go into use it just like an iPad, but it has that Metro aesthetic. They’ve spent years and years developing this doing user studies. And they’ve really been careful in bringing not just the device and redoing the kernel, but the whole metaphor to the table. So when they do enter the market with a Windows slate, that it’s competitive. And I think, based on the prototypes and the stuff I’ve worked with, they’ve really -- they’re going to raise the bar just like the iPad did when it hit the market.
Ryan 00:07:34

Yeah. As a Web guy I’m really excited to see, you know, the way you can make native apps with HTML. I want to play with that. I was really excited about the promise of Web OS but, like, what you alluded to; the hardware wasn’t there. Like, it wasn’t enough to drive the software in a smooth way. But if they really, you know, put some first class hardware behind this thing, there’s no reason why that doesn’t work.
David 00:08:00

Yeah. With coming out this year when we see the iPad 3 and we get a quad-core processor in that. And the prototype slates already are quad-core 64-bit machines for Windows 8. You know, we’ve really got some real computing power behind them instead of these, you know, low-power, trimmed down devices that you’ve seen previously. You know, I think 2010 there was an article in ZDNet about the death of the one-trick reader. And that’s where, you know, we started to see these devices that kind of have evolved into what we’re going to see coming out into the market this year. For me, it’s really exciting. And I think as that stuff really hits the market and people get into it, I think you’ll probably see the death of the laptop. Or maybe not the death, but the laptop and desktop computers are going to fade away.
Ryan 00:08:58

Yeah. It seems more like an evolution than some kind of complete, you know, death of something.
David 00:09:03

Exactly. It’s not like, you know, we’re never going to get away from servers or big iron computing entirely, but that stuff will fade into the background. It’ll -- computing will be ubiquitous. You know, even with slates, after the slate becomes the dominant platform in the marketplace, I don’t think it’s permanent. We are going to see something better eventually come out. You know, like, DARPA’s working on these, you know, contact lenses that project the image onto your, you know, into your eye. When you have stuff like that and the computing power quadruples a few times and you shove it into the size/form factor of a cell phone, you know, maybe the slate will be dead. You never know.
Ryan 00:09:46

Lasers projected into my eyes. What could possibly go wrong?
David 00:09:50

Yeah. There’s a lot of things that DARPA works on that are, you know, what could possibly go wrong with that idea? The point being that it’s never going to be a static marketplace. You know, what we’re seeing now is it’s an iterative evolutionary step and that’s how the market’s been for the past 50 years. It’s evolutionary, not necessarily revolutionary. Like when the iPad came out, was there any one specific thing that had not been done on the iPad?
Ryan 00:10:21

No. It just…
David 00:10:22

Exactly.
Ryan 00:10:23

Other than the context and kind of being very aware of the, kind of, the emotion of it, right?
David 00:10:28

Right. And that’s that evolutionary UX-focused sort of appeal of it. When you want to get mass consumer adoption it’s got to be evolutionary like that. We perceive it as revolutionary because it’s finally clicked with the consumer, but it’s really an iterative evolutionary process and that’s what we’re seeing. We’re going from, you know, now it’s cool and everyone’s getting into it. And now we’re really going to start seeing the power of that device (for that form factor) over the course of the year when you have all this cool stuff coming out and competing against each other.
Ryan 00:11:06

Yeah. Right now we’re still at that place where it’s kind of a tough sell, right? Like, there’s -- I don’t know too many people who really could only have an iPad, right? They might only have a laptop. Well, if they already have a laptop, this is like this extra thing. It’s decadent. But when you’re going out to buy your laptop and you say, “Do I want the one that, you know, kind of has this nice touch interface or, you know, do I want, like, the old clamshell typical laptop thing?” At that point I think anybody could walk into this market, right? Whereas now it’s very tightly niche, right?
David 00:11:37

You’re also seeing stuff -- it is tightly niched now. It’s a -- I like the word “decadent” sort of thing. But with those new devices you have, like, the snap-on aluminum shells. You can have, like, I saw once this aluminum snap-on thing for an iPad. It fits in; it looks like a laptop, but it’s still very, very thin. You pull it out, it snaps together, and now it looks like an iPad in a case, which it was. The case happens to also be a keyboard. And when those kinds of devices are out there but now you crank it up so it’s more powerful than your laptops ever were, it becomes practical for the regular consumer and that’s one of the many factors that I think will drive mass adoption to this form factor.
Ryan 00:12:27

Yeah. I’m really excited to see -- I hope that Microsoft tightens the reigns a little bit like they have with the phone. With the computers it kind of remains to be seen. But if they do that and they kind of hold the experience and kind of, you know, give Metro a fighting chance. I really like the freedom outside of that part that the different hardware manufacturers can take, right? Like, I don’t want these hardware guys putting on this crappy software because that’s not what they do, but I do want them to go crazy with form factors and kind of tweak it and change it because I think it’s a little bit naive to think that we already know what shape they should be. Apple’s really sticking with this 4:3 ratio. It sounds like Microsoft and Google are kind of both doing the 16:9 thing. And maybe one of those is right, maybe neither of those is right, maybe people need both for different reasons, you know.
David 00:13:18

I think it’s a personal preference. I do think Microsoft will probably hold onto the reigns, as it were, much like Apple does with IOS.
Ryan 00:13:27

Yeah. I hope so.
David 00:13:28

But where Windows will still be -- you’ll see lots of different manufacturers and sizes and different kinds of iterations of Windows 8. Where you really will can probably continue to see a fractured sort of market is with Android, where you see all kinds of craziness going on. That being said though, there is some really cool stuff coming down that pipe as well. Like I know -- well, I’ve heard a rumor that I can neither confirm nor deny that, like, Amazon up the street from here is working on a haptic touch screen. So if you’re familiar with an Arc2 mouse, how you can scroll it. Even though it’s a hard piece of plastic, but when you try to scroll it it feels like you’re actually scrolling the mouse. I encourage people to check it out because it’s amazing. But imagine being able to have a touch screen that you can actually feel what’s on the screen.
Ryan 00:14:24

It’s really interesting stuff. Like, I’m excited to see things like that because I do like buttons. I mean, I feel old-fashioned to say that I like having physical buttons, but this could be that way to bridge that gap, right?
David 00:14:36

It could. But you’ll see a lot of stuff like that coming out. Some of it will just be too crazy and fall on its face, but I think overall it’ll just make the more competition, the better for the consumer.
Ryan 00:14:49

Right. Because everybody’s -- we’re still finding what’s the right answer here. No one knows.
David 00:14:54

We are. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s what’s kind of exciting about it. But I do know I’m absolutely convinced that the right answer will be that the slate is going to dominate. At least for probably 3-5 years until the technology is there to just make something so much cooler that we’ll start to move away from that form factor. But for the foreseeable future, I think that that’s the way to go.
Ryan 00:15:23

So let’s, like, kind of circle back and zoom out. You talk about slate wars, right? And we haven’t really talked about who the key players are. I think that listeners kind of have assumptions about who they are. I mean, obviously, you know, Apple, Google, you know, you throw Microsoft in with the Windows 8 so we’re hoping that they jump in and hit the ground running, right, and kind of get into this tablet space. So those are kind of three but, you know, even just to say Google, is that a good way to scope it? I mean, should we be not talking about Google? Should we be talking more about, like, HTC, Samsung? Or how do we even talk about this?
David 00:15:56

I mean, I guess it depends on how you want to slice and dice it. You know, when it comes to Google you’re talking about Android and that gets back to more the manufacturers than anything else. You know, Samsung, HTC, or whoever it is. You know, I think, clearly, the key players are going to be Apple. You know, the iPad is the market right now. It set the bar, it raised the bar, it has the hearts and minds of the public right now.
Ryan 00:16:27

I think it’s safe to say they created the market.
David 00:16:29

Yeah. Absolutely. They created the market. I think Android is certainly out there. You have, like, Amazon has the Kindle Fire, which is really Android under the covers. But if they get this haptic thing working. Then of course Windows 8 they’ve been working on for years in this super-secret black box program up at the Imperial Palace up the street here. And when that stuff -- they’ve really done a bang-up job. And when that hits the market, of course all the manufacturers of Android are going to crank it up a notch. I know, like I said, they’re working on the next version of the Kindle Fire and I think just everyone is going to be -- it’ll be a mad rush. And I know that the iPad 3 and Windows 8 are being released this year fairly close together and that’s when everyone else is going to be playing catch-up to enter the market or just to compete and you’ll see amazing stuff come from Samsung, HTC. Anyone that makes a slate is probably going to come out with something cool.
Ryan 00:17:41

I really like the freedom that Google gives people in theory but, man, I’ve been really frustrated with the products that come out of it, right? Like, right now I’ve got one of the HTC phones and it’s really frustrating. I feel like the freedom that they talk about isn’t actually translating down to the consumer. It’s the freedom for Verizon to break my phone. That’s what it feels like.
David 00:18:02

Yes. That’s exactly the problem with the Android marketplace just in general is the fact that Google has given the carriers the freedom to crush the consumer and squeeze them for more money and make all their equipment outmoded within 18 months so they have to buy new stuff.
Ryan 00:18:19

Right.
David 00:18:20

And that’s also part of what’s causing the problems with this whole apps thing, which has gotten to the point where it’s a figure of speech. “Oh, there’s an app for that.” And with Android, especially, that market is terribly inconsistent. You write something for one device and you have no guarantee that it’s going to work on any other Android device because the controls are not there that you have with Apple and with Microsoft; they’ve done with their, like, their phones. I know Apple’s done the same thing, of course, with iPad and I expect Microsoft to do the same thing with Windows 8 to control those app marketplaces so you don’t have that horrible inconsistency between those devices.
Ryan 00:19:06

So digging into that, I mean, have you heard a lot from developers because, you know, the .NET developers aren’t used to this kind of structure, right? Like, this is what consumers have kind of expressed by buying is what they want. Like, they want products that are consistent and good and high quality and well-vetted and curated and all of those wonderful words that we like to use. But on the other side, you’ve got to please these developers who are pretty used to this being fast and loose. I can do whatever I want, you know? And if someone buys this app then it was successful, but I don’t need to ask your approval before I make this thing or, you know, whether or not, you know, my customers would buy it.
David 00:19:48

So I don’t think that Apple and Microsoft really are so controlling that they determine which apps you write, but I think what they’ve both of them have created (and Android too, but they have the whole fractured thing going on) is that they’ve created a consistent channel that the average developer can build something to. Like, the .NET developer, if you know Silverlight or WPF, it’s so easy to write a phone app and, you know, sell it and make some money. Between iPhone and Phone 7 there tends to be a somewhat different model that you have to take as an individual developer, but it’s not that hard. I know a lot of guys that are making significant amounts of money even with Windows Phone 7. And as a .NET developer, it’s so much easier to jump into that environment. You can whip out an app in a couple of days. Not necessarily that it’s a good app, but you can do it. And as long as it passes QA with the marketplace, it’ll get in and people can download it and you can make some money.
Ryan 00:20:52

I guess I was more thinking about when you step away from the computer model and you become this tablet idea, a lot of times it actually will hinder your business models in some ways. Like, whether or not you are allowed to have free trials, how your demos work, in what ways are you allowed to or not allowed to cripple your software for freemium models. Like, that kind of thing I guess is what I was more hanging on.
David 00:21:15

Well, there’s a lot of freedom though with your apps with that. Like, right now with the Windows Phone there isn’t, say, an in-app framework for in-app purchases, right? You know, but there’s no reason that you can’t do it. And Microsoft doesn’t dictate how you do that stuff necessarily, you know. And they have the ability -- you can have private betas, you can do most of the stuff you said with regard to the Microsoft marketplace just like Apple. You know, they do have some, you know, very strict rules about certain things but, for the most part, the developer’s really free to do whatever they want. As long as it’s reasonable and you’re not trying to cheat the consumer, Microsoft or Apple are not going to get terribly upset about it. So the whole thing with the devices though and the apps, I think, brings up another point that with this ability for not just .NET developers but any developer to build apps, whether it’s in HTML or HTML5, there’s this PhoneGap out, and any number of other ways to deliver apps to the marketplace, it becomes really easy. And there’s more and more developers out there that are starting to make their living just writing apps. And I think it’s almost an emerging developer space is the apps developer. You know, like, with IOS for iPad and Android there’s what? Over a half million apps? And with Windows Phone there’s not even a Windows 8 out yet and Windows Phone is already I thought around 100,000. And when Microsoft sells 400 million copies of Windows but now they’re slates, that’s a huge marketplace. They’ve got the largest developer community in the world and I think those developers -- some of them are going to get rich.
Ryan 00:23:13

Yeah. I think this could be really interesting because, again, like you said, people buy Windows computers, right? Like, they’ve got a lot of market force behind them in a way that they haven’t been able to get that traction with the phones. I haven’t heard people say too many negative things about Windows Phone 7, but they don’t -- they’re not going out in droves, they’re certainly not lining up before one releases, right, like that kind of thing. I think it’s kind of hard to get in all the different markets. Like, you know, the one at Verizon’s kind of like a token model. They don’t have, like, a flagship one offered there.
David 00:23:50

You know, well, the carriers are actively suppressing it. They don’t make as much money. It’s just like the iPhone. You don’t go into a carrier store, usually, and see an iPhone. The carriers are in it to make money and that’s why they push Android so heavily is because that’s where they make more money. And so for Windows Phone 7 what that means it’s going to be a long, hard fight and it’s going to take a number of years for them to really punch through the marketplace.
Ryan 00:24:21

But I could see the tablet actually being that way to kind of sneak it in. Almost the opposite of how the iPhone was sort of the Trojan horse to bring, you know, Macs into a lot of more corporate environments. It seems like almost the opposite way. Like, to bring Windows to kind of this more fun way. Like, I mean everybody loves their Xbox, but for some reason that doesn’t make people want to necessarily have the phone that plays with their Xbox, right? But maybe if their, you know, tablet/laptop, you know, family computer, right? If it’s very Metro-like they might say, “You know, I kind of want my phone to be like that.” I could see that in a very opposite kind of counter-intuitive way working pretty well.
David 00:25:01

And very well that may be what happens. It’s really, I think, going to be exciting to see what happens because I know with the slates the market’s going to heat up, there’s going to be a lot of competition, and it’ll be fun to just sit back and watch.
Ryan 00:25:16

So what are you most excited about? Is it just a new platform or what?
David 00:25:21

Really, I’m most excited about selling 400 million copies of Princess Paper Dolls I wrote for Phone 7. If I could do that I’m going to buy my Lotus and my retirement plan will be all set.
Ryan 00:25:34

Yeah. You know what? That echoes through what I’ve heard from a handful of different interviews of people who do development for Windows Phone 7. They enjoy the environment, they like writing apps for it, it’s tools that they’re already familiar with, they think that it’s pretty, they like everything about it. But they say, “Even if I had a huge percentage of people that own these phones bought my app, it’s just not enough yet, right? We need this market to get bigger.”
David 00:26:03

Oh yeah. Absolutely. The Phone 7 market you’re not ever going to get rich unless you’re a company and you go through Xbox and make the next Angry Birds, you know. So I have, like, Princess Paper Dolls is an example. It’s on, like, .01% of the phones out there and it still makes a fair amount of money. If I’m on .01% of 400 million Windows devices, I’m going to be good.
Ryan 00:26:30

Yeah, you’re set.
David 00:26:31

It’ll be okay, you know. And I have two other apps that are much, much more popular that are on two or three percent of all Windows Phones. And if that translates to 400 million slates that would be awesome; just absolutely, spectacularly awesome.
Ryan 00:26:50

Yeah. I had read a blog post that you had and one of the phrases you turned there which I thought was great was it was something along the lines of you just wanted a new place to put your art. And I just thought that was awesome. Like, that was a really -- like, I wish that more people talked about that. Like, I want to make some things and I want this market to thrive so that I can make some things for people.
David 00:27:12

Yeah. Absolutely. That’s, I think that’s part of what excites me the most. And actually another thing that I’ve gotten into recently that gets me going is doing HTML-based apps. Using something like PhoneGap, I can rewrite my Princess Paper Dolls app. I’ll have, you know, the .01% of Windows 8 slates, but I’ll also be on Android and iPad and anything else out there. And if I have just .01% of all of that too, so much the better. It’s just spectacularly awesome to see, you know, my apps on people’s phones. It’s one of the things that I enjoy the most is when I meet someone who has no idea who I am, of course, and I go and see, oh look, there’s Simon or Tools For Phone 7 or Princess Paper Dolls or Sketched Apps or whatever it is. This is really kind of cool.
Ryan 00:28:09

Yeah. Well, that’s awesome. That’s an immensely positive note to leave off on. David, I appreciate you taking the time and it sounds like you’ve got plenty more to talk about so we’re going to have to have you back in another couple of months, I guess.
David 00:28:23

Sounds like a plan.
Ryan 00:28:25

Thank you.
David 00:28:26

Thank you. We’ll talk to you later.