“There are a few similarities between Wednesday’s Apple announcement and the blockbuster movie ‘Avatar.’ They both cost many millions of dollars and took many years to produce. They both required vast amounts of technology to build, and of course they will both make hundreds of millions of dollars for their respective companies. But they will also share another category: too much hype before their launch, and a result that comes across as intriguing and entertaining, yet sadly anticlimactic,” Nick Bilton reports for The New York Times. “If you travel back in time a few months before both ‘product’ launches, there was a tremendous amount of overexposure and bloated expectations.”
“So what happened to “Avatar?” We don’t know if it will change the movie industry forever, but as of Monday, it is the highest-grossing movie of all time,” Bilton reports. “As for Apple, in the case of its iPad announcement, the excess coverage and secrecy went too far… Apple, perfectionists when it comes to releasing products that begin with an ‘i’ and end with ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs,’ let the hype get out of hand. And the iPad left Apple’s investors underwhelmed, and generated questions and disappointment from many technology writers.”
Bilton reports, “If we can put the advance hype aside for a moment, did Apple release a game-changing device in terms of hardware? No, not really — they released a big iPod touch… [but] if we take a step back and look at the software, Apple has released a game-changing device.”
“Just wait until developers dig into the available screen real estate and the capabilities of the multitouch technology. I’m confident there will be games, newspapers, magazines and numerous applications that will wow the naysayers and follow through with some of the features we imagined this device would offer.
“There is a lesson here though,” Bilton writes. “Maybe we, the media, let things go too far?”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ll look back on some of the more pessimistic iPad reactions with incredulity someday soon. Like Bilton, we expect iPad to be a game-changing device that’ll disrupt many industries, from publishing to the PC industry itself. As we warned in the days leading up to Apple’s iPad unveiling: Anticipate Responsibly™. Not many took our advice. The same thing that’s happening now with iPad happened with the iMac, Mac OS X, iPod, iTunes, iTunes Store, and iPhone. We all know how those turned out. Someday soon we’ll look back at the iPad naysayers and laugh.
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