Yes, I am well aware that Jobs is on the record as to Apple's PDA aspirations. But I think the time has come to enter that market and completely obliterate the competition.
1. VALUE/PRICE FOR PDAs SUCKS RIGHT NOW. When I go to CompUSA and look at the PDA offerings, I am UNDERWHELMED by what you are getting for the price. $500-600 to get a glitsy color screen, a frogs-hair more memory, and almost ZERO additional functionality compared to a bargain-bin entry-level Palm. These are the Timex Sinclairs of our generation, IMHO. Apple's design boys could CRUSH what's out there now...
2. THE ENGINE OF INNOVATION--ENTERPRISE. PDAs are business tools. What makes for more productive business and greater volumes of commerce? I'll give you a hint--it has nothing whatsoever to do with having your freakin' schedule and phone numbers on a pocket calculator. A small paper-based day planner can do that for 1/10th the price (and no batteries). Nor does it have anything to do with listening to mp3s, playing solitaire, or viewing grainy pixeled pictures of your kids while supposedly "at work."
The real prize here can be summed up in one word: REALTIME. If you are meeting a client in a corporate setting and he/she wants to place an order, you should be able to flip open your PDA, have a secure connection to your company's inventory system, allocate the order and confirm that all items are in stock, assign a PO#, and have the client sign the purchase order on the spot. Boom. Done. Transaction complete. No follow-up calls and faxes, amended orders, bad back-order status news. No reporting back to the home office on your completed and pending orders for the day--they have them realtime. On to the next client. Oh, and your contact management system, with every detail of your company's 100,000 clients and all their past orders? That is online as well (not stuck in your PDA as a ridiculously huge file in constant need of updating).
Bottom line: you could have a low-res B&W screen, a 12mhz processor and a whopping 8MB of RAM and still have a ridiculously powerful system in your hands if it were dynamically connected to your company's home server. Behold the PDA megahertz/color screen/RAM "myth." Sure, those things make them technically "better," but better at WHAT? Dazzling people in the store? Eliciting the "coolness" vibe when whipped out in front of clients? SHOW ME THE MONEY, BABY!
3. THE ANSWER--PDA/CELL COMBO DONE RIGHT. I owned one of those Sprint-branded Kyocera Smartphones, which was a mediocre phone and a less-than-mediocre PDA--but even I could see it's potential as a sales/ordering/CRM powerhouse if the right OS and applications were running the thing.
4. THE MARKET IS READY. Everyone has commented that Palm, Sony, Visor, et al have clogged the market. True. They have clogged it with misdirected products. And their hold is VERY tenuous, considering that companies tend to refresh their PDA systems EVERY 24 MONTHS and are always searching for maximum functionality for the buck.
5. WHAT WE DON'T NEED IN A PDA. iTunes. Movie playing. Lame jerky video conferencing. Any other stupid add-on gadget or processor-hogging feature that does not make the user immediately more productive. Save the consumer-targeted funky add-on cutesy gismos for the iPod.
The Apple branded PDA/phone combo, coupled with well-developed CRM/Ordering/Inventory software, a better OS, Inkwell, fantastic range and acceptable wireless data IO speeds would be a productivity tool the business world would JUMP on.
SOMEONE is going to get fantastically rich making this kind of product. I hope it will be Apple, because then I'll know the system will be designed with elegance, style, user friendliness, and top-of-the-line hardware/software/OS integration.
1. VALUE/PRICE FOR PDAs SUCKS RIGHT NOW. When I go to CompUSA and look at the PDA offerings, I am UNDERWHELMED by what you are getting for the price. $500-600 to get a glitsy color screen, a frogs-hair more memory, and almost ZERO additional functionality compared to a bargain-bin entry-level Palm. These are the Timex Sinclairs of our generation, IMHO. Apple's design boys could CRUSH what's out there now...
2. THE ENGINE OF INNOVATION--ENTERPRISE. PDAs are business tools. What makes for more productive business and greater volumes of commerce? I'll give you a hint--it has nothing whatsoever to do with having your freakin' schedule and phone numbers on a pocket calculator. A small paper-based day planner can do that for 1/10th the price (and no batteries). Nor does it have anything to do with listening to mp3s, playing solitaire, or viewing grainy pixeled pictures of your kids while supposedly "at work."
The real prize here can be summed up in one word: REALTIME. If you are meeting a client in a corporate setting and he/she wants to place an order, you should be able to flip open your PDA, have a secure connection to your company's inventory system, allocate the order and confirm that all items are in stock, assign a PO#, and have the client sign the purchase order on the spot. Boom. Done. Transaction complete. No follow-up calls and faxes, amended orders, bad back-order status news. No reporting back to the home office on your completed and pending orders for the day--they have them realtime. On to the next client. Oh, and your contact management system, with every detail of your company's 100,000 clients and all their past orders? That is online as well (not stuck in your PDA as a ridiculously huge file in constant need of updating).
Bottom line: you could have a low-res B&W screen, a 12mhz processor and a whopping 8MB of RAM and still have a ridiculously powerful system in your hands if it were dynamically connected to your company's home server. Behold the PDA megahertz/color screen/RAM "myth." Sure, those things make them technically "better," but better at WHAT? Dazzling people in the store? Eliciting the "coolness" vibe when whipped out in front of clients? SHOW ME THE MONEY, BABY!
3. THE ANSWER--PDA/CELL COMBO DONE RIGHT. I owned one of those Sprint-branded Kyocera Smartphones, which was a mediocre phone and a less-than-mediocre PDA--but even I could see it's potential as a sales/ordering/CRM powerhouse if the right OS and applications were running the thing.
4. THE MARKET IS READY. Everyone has commented that Palm, Sony, Visor, et al have clogged the market. True. They have clogged it with misdirected products. And their hold is VERY tenuous, considering that companies tend to refresh their PDA systems EVERY 24 MONTHS and are always searching for maximum functionality for the buck.
5. WHAT WE DON'T NEED IN A PDA. iTunes. Movie playing. Lame jerky video conferencing. Any other stupid add-on gadget or processor-hogging feature that does not make the user immediately more productive. Save the consumer-targeted funky add-on cutesy gismos for the iPod.
The Apple branded PDA/phone combo, coupled with well-developed CRM/Ordering/Inventory software, a better OS, Inkwell, fantastic range and acceptable wireless data IO speeds would be a productivity tool the business world would JUMP on.
SOMEONE is going to get fantastically rich making this kind of product. I hope it will be Apple, because then I'll know the system will be designed with elegance, style, user friendliness, and top-of-the-line hardware/software/OS integration.
