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jewelry retail and the iPad (or Apple, what have you done)

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I came to some conclusions about the iPad via an odd source. An analysis of marketing spend by online jewelry companies.

According to this article, online jewelry retailers are spending a lot of money on the mobile platform.

But check out the bit about returns.

I understand spending in the space to remain visible. I think as far as promotion goes, it's like billboard signs at the side of the road. But that means that all you're accomplishing with the mobile platform is brand recognition. You might as well just spend the money advertising.

And it's this that's led me to think about the iPad.

I'm beginning to think that the timing of the iPad was wrong for Apple. They were just starting to become relevant in the laptop market, and they'd simultaneously defined a new market in buying apps for smart phones.

But I think the iPad will kill the whole concept of buying apps for your smartphone. People are used to spending a lot for their phone, but they're used to getting everything for free on the 'net. The iPad brings that "it's free, it's the 'net" mentality to a mobile-like platform because it's a computer, not a phone. Just when the idea of paying for apps was starting to sink in, this wipes it out.

And as awesome a consumption platform as the iPad is, it's not a workstation and it's not a creation platform. Check this out -- look familiar at all?

Wanna shove all that shit into an attaché case and carry that case around for the first time in your life?

The runaway success of the iPhone is in large part due to the thing being a phone and pocket-able. You can use a hand-held with privacy, speed, and ease. By comparison, you see people using the iPad with some sort of shield in their left hand, or hunched over it to give them privacy. But without the "must bring it, it's my phone" aspect, I suspect that more and more, users will find themselves not bringing it with them as a mobile platform once the initial whiz-bang effect has worn off. The one friend I know who's got an iPad leaves his at home: he uses it only with wi-fi because he's already paying for one expensive Softbank account for his iPhone and doesn't carry a backpack or attaché case.

So people realize that they're leaving it at home next to their laptop, and they'll start to wonder what they need for. Here, obviously, content will make the difference.

But with the high costs of development and the low returns ("gimme free") the iPad could become viewed by corporate marketing types to be a too-costly platform for professional development. So without direct benefits and they may retreat to simply using it as an advertising platform like a newspaper. But just as people didn't want to pay for online newspapers and magazines, someone's going to have to figure out how to make money as a content provider when Apple themselves are controlling the ad channel.

Which leaves the content development in the hands of artists and amateurs. The same people who now have websites and/or produce offline things like music and paintings. Are they going to rush to learn Objective C? They can't use third party apps to develop for the platform, which means they'll have to wait for someone to make something like a content management system for their iPad content, which brings us right back to essentially building a web page. Except this time the open-source community won't be there with their tools.

I think that unless something changes with the way things are developed, the iPad, it's going to be quite some time before it attracts a critical mass of content that exploits the platform properly (e.g. not website-analogs). And meanwhile I think it's certainly going to retro-actively introduce the concept of "free" to the smart phones.