Are you wondering why iPad apps, especially news reading apps like Flipboard, Wired and WSJ, keep getting so much praise and media attention? Well let’s do a head-to-head comparison of The Wall Street Journal iPad Edition and Online Edition (WSJ.com). Why do you think users prefer the WSJ iPad app?

WSJ iPad Edition (click to enlarge)

WSJ.com Landing Page (click to enlarge)

When put in these terms the choice should seem obvious. It actually is. Most websites overwhelm their customers with far too much information and far too many choices. If I simply want to read the morning paper (the primary WSJ use case), the iPad app is better-suited to doing that, even independent of the specialized iPad hardware. Consider how many words, links and pictures there are on the WSJ.com Online Edition. If you studiously read every word and studied every picture, how long would that take you? Of course users don’t read every word, they scan, but you are forcing your users to do far more work to find the information they do care about.

I also believe despite its “lack of features” the iPad Edition is just about as functional as the Online Edition. Most of what most users are looking for most of the time can be found in the iPad app. That’s who you should design for, your majority. Design for the majority of a specific target customer with a minority of features. My rule of thumb is the Pareto Principle: 20% of your features deliver 80% of your product’s utility. Do not design for the corner cases, especially at the outer layer of the onion (ie the first part of your product customers interact with). WSJ.com was designed by committee and designed by feature creep. It was designed by “Hey why don’t we throw in XYZ feature!” I am not opposed to WSJ.com containing all the features they have, but they certainly shouldn’t all be on the landing page. In reality, though, it can be difficult for a company to force discipline and simplify. I’ve seen it before in the real world. Why? Because somewhere in The Wall Street Journal‘s offices a coversation such as this would take place:

Product Marketing: Our data says that many users find our website confusing and overwhelming. They prefer the simplified iPad edition. Let’s start simplifying. Why don’t we move the Personalized Stock Quotes off the landing page?

Web Manager: Oh, no we can’t ditch the Personalized Stock Quotes. They get a good number of clicks. Do you want to lose all those clicks?

The problem with this conversation is that it takes a fixed pie, zero sum approach to product design. This is not how the world works. Removing a feature doesn’t mean you “lose.” This viewpoint doesn’t even begin to account for all the clicks lost / never had due to a confusing and overwhelming website. In fact, a simplified site could enlarge the pie and drive more total clicks to the things you really care about.

I am telling many of the startups I advise to conceptually “design for the iPad, not for the web.” It’s too easy to create an overly chromed-out website from the get-go. The iPad is a great design tool in that it forces trade-offs. (Unbeknownst to most people, trade-offs are actually the critical factor that drives the greatest innovation and the best products. It is the iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard that makes it great, even though that makes it harder to type on.) Apple understands trade-offs. Products that try to be everything to everyone usually fail. They fail because they don’t have a target customer in mind and thus have to keep adding on extra features to accommodate every possible user and use case. In the end you, you wind up with Windows Vista.

So why are iPad apps such as Flipboard and WSJ getting so much attention? It’s because they are easy to use. They make reading the news what it should be, fun, as opposed to work, which is what WSJ.com feels like. They look nothing like most of the crap we put up with in HTML. Some of this can be attributed to the natural product value advantages of the iOS SDK over HTML (as I’ve previously written about) and some of this can be attributed to the great design decisions and trade-offs the iPad is fostering.

Please subscribe via RSS! (Ironic enough for you?)

Given some of the reactions out there on the blog-o-sphere, I thought I would clarify a few points regarding my post on RSS.

1) When I say “RIP RSS” or anything like it, I am being totally 100% tongue-in-cheek. I would not sanely call a technology that is deployed on nearly every website on earth (proudly including this one!!!) dead without employing large doses of humor and irony.

2) My larger point is that given how widely deployed RSS is on the publisher front, I believe it still has very low awareness on the consumer front, especially among non-technical folks. The folks I am referring to check email, have Facebook accounts, use Google and, by the way, are the majority of internet users. However, unlike you and me, they’ve never read Slashdot, don’t know what PHP is and didn’t have to hack their WINSOCK.DLL to get Mosiac or Netscape working with AOL back in the day. Go out and see for yourself. Ask a bunch of folks who are not technical and have jobs that are not in tech, ages 30-60, what RSS is and whether or not they regularly use it. Do the same for email. Compare and contrast. Is that a high bar? Yes, but I believe RSS has that sort of potential which is why its low awareness frustrates me.

3) I am an avid RSS user. I need RSS to keep on top of things (mostly Achewood, Kottke.org, HackerNews and DF). I have no less than SIX paid and free RSS clients and utilities on my computer, iPhone and iPad. But the fact that I need to email my blog updates to my family and friends is a sign that something has failed. However, I might have misspoken. Perhaps it’s not RSS’ fault. Maybe the problem is that the world has never seen an easy to use, consumer friendly and viral RSS reader and link sharing client. As my commenter KidMercury pointed out, RSS is great at being a backend technology, so maybe the issue is that no one has taken RSS to the next level as a consumer-facing technology.

4) It’s all about potential. The use case for RSS is so simple, ubiquitous and awesome that nearly every one I know needs it from ubergeek Unix admin to luddite. So how should we judge whether or not RSS is being as successful as it should be? I think it should be almost as ubiquitous as email or at least close to it (30%-50%?). with daily usage.

5) You also need to understand where this blog is coming from. I should probably rename this blog “In Defense of Normals.” All of my posts try to look at things from a decidedly non-geeky POV despite being a geek myself. One commenter asked if I also consider Linux a failed technology. Using the same criteria I used for my post on RSS, the answer is “No, Linux is not a failed technology insofar as it wasn’t meant to be a consumer tech, but Linux & Unix on the Desktop (ie in Wal-Mart) have been disasters precisely because they were meant for consumers.” But consider OS X which is kinda like a skin for Unix. Now, that has been a success.

You might think of it this way: RSS has been a huge win on the backend (kinda like Linux & Unix on servers and workstations, etc.) but has failed to capture the public’s attention and imagination (kinda like Linux  & Unix on the Desktop) as much as I think it should / has the potential to. What I really want is something brave and new. I want an RSS client that, like OS X, takes an awesome underlying technology and makes it consumer friendly.

REVISED Edition (I wrote the first edition in a bad mood)

RSS is a failure as a consumer-facing technology. That’s right, despite the fact that you can’t live without Google Reader, RSS is an utter, horrible Kin-tastic failure. You should be embarrassed to use it. Your usage of RSS makes you look as outdated as a dude rocking a Rio Diamond 600 for his MP3 player. (Hopefully you can tell at this point that I am being tongue-in-cheek.)

I put RSS in the same ranks as the JooJoo, Palm Foleo and Clippy. No, strike that. RSS is a worse failure than Clippy. Clippy was ambitious. Clippy was designed to possess human-like intelligence. Now’s that a goddamn challenge! RSS was designed to tell users when a website has been updated. If that’s not a fucking simple task, I frankly don’t know what is.

RSS has failed us. How do I know? Normal people have never heard of RSS. FAIL. I don’t need to actually execute a $1,000,000 marketing research survey to tell you the results. RSS users are hairy-ass, geeky tech dudes. RSS hasn’t crossed the canyon because it’s afraid it’ll get sunburnt if it steps outside of a temperature controlled server room.

Really Simple Syndication–if it’s so simple why do I need to email my family to tell them when I wrote a new post on one of my blogs. If it’s sooooooo simple that six year old cats can use it why did I spend a Saturday morning wasting my time installing an email subscription feature on this blog? (BTW, MailChimp seems to be the best solution I have found so far and it still is 1000x too complex to install on a blog for that purpose.)

The time, my friends, has emerged for something to replace RSS. Something that works. Something that will climb that Mount Everest of engineering marvels: letting me know when a website has been updated. And that chosen technology will be so utterly radical both women and men will use it.The ideal solution should making sharing news and following a website both easy and natural. Users shouldn’t have to deal with an RSS unread count that regularly exceed 1,000+ (useless) or be bothered with understanding the differences between HTTP and RSS (complicated). All a user should have to say is “Yes, please!” If it’s not that simple, it will fail.

I stand uncorrected: branding and advertising matter in mobile. TechCrunch speaking to a luddite:

I asked him, “why the iPhone?” His answer? The commercial.

Per my earlier post, it appears that babies do trump useless HDMI ports after all. Android and Droid are royally screwing up their marketing.

Did you guys hear? OMFG! The new Droid X has an HDMI output! H-D-M-I OUT-PUT!!!!!!! Magic cakes!!!!!!! Isn’t that a useful feature!

Oh, hey there Grandma! I know you’ve been jonesing for HDMI output on your phone because you totally know what that means and spent the $80 a normal retailer charges for an HDMI cable. And what’s that? You even bought the hard to find mini-HDMI adapter? Radical! Oh and I bet it’s easy, like falling off a log, to set up. Ohh nooeess!!! It’s notttttt?!

This is what using HDMI on an Android phone is actually like according to the tech savy, professional gadget blogging CNET:

After spending some time encoding various file formats and sizes, we found that MP4 movie files performed the most consistently. Also, files rendered closer to the Evo’s native 800×480 resolution worked best as larger videos stuttered and would not play properly on-screen.

Well, don’t worry about that Grandma! It’s a good thing we bought you all that file conversion software and that new Alienware gaming rig to convert your huge video collection to MP4 in your codec of choice. But wait! What’s that Grandma? You were actually hoping to show photos of your kids over HDMI? Well F*CK, apparently Android phones CAN’T do that. They can only use the HDMI output for the bundled video player and/or YouTube, so no luck. But don’t worry Grandma! You can still brag to all your friends that your phone rocks because it’s like totally open!!! Yay!!! And don’t be scared of that creepy robot eye either Grandma!

BUT OH WAIT. What’s this? The iPhone 4 has BABY-DMI Output! Oh SNAP! That phone just made a goddam baby! It’s miracle! Hallelujah!

And that dude is downloading the baby on his iPhone! Double snap!

No, I was wrong. That phone didn’t make that baby. That baby made that phone call. You can call MUTHAF*CK!N BABIES OVER VIDEOCHAT on the iPhone 4. And it’s so easy babies can make video calls.

Now’s that what I call a useful feature Grandma. So which would you rather have Grandma, the Droid X or the iPhone 4? Your call.

[Ed. Apologies for the uncharacteristically foul language in this post. The script demanded it.]

So a guy walks into a a fashionable barbershop for a haircut. The barber is a cute young lass. She asks her client who is a wearing a suit and tie if he’s on his lunch break. The young man replies, “No, I was interviewing for a job.” The barberess follows up, “What sort of job are you interviewing for?” The young man says, “I am interviewing with AppliedTechno Corp for a programming position translating backend database protocols such as…these protocols…” STOP.

That is the truth. That’s all quite truthful as delivered [Ed. Please excuse the stereotyping] by someone with an engineering mindset. Lots of detail that doesn’t take into account the mindset of the receiver of the information. Factually correct, but not necessarily suitable for the audience, suitable for a clone of himself. He might feel as if leaving out some of this info was incorrect or it just might not occur to him to do so.

This exemplifies the difference between “telling the truth” which is something scientists and engineers often feel compelled and obligated to do and “marketing.” Individuals with an engineering mindset often think of there as being some epic battle between the truth and marketing: good vs. evil, straight men vs. spin doctors. This isn’s the case at all, at least with good engineers and marketers. I believe engineers and marketers would be better off and more productive if this misunderstanding were cleared up and technologists, scientists and engineers trusted marketers more and saw them less as “evil spindoctors trying to shove crap on an unwitting public” paraphrasing my Kellogg Prof. Julie Hennessy. (On the flip side, marketers also need to learn that engineers are not all socially awkward introverts who look like Bill Gates circa 1978.)

Marketing is not lying anymore than engineering is creating superhuman robots hellbent on taking over the earth. Marketing is telling a story in such a way that your audience can digest and appreciate it. Marketing is the man replying, “I am interviewing for an engineering position at a local startup.” This is truthful. It’s delivered in a concise way that the audience likely understands and appreciates. It’s also much more likely to incite follow up questions from the audience. The woman may have asked “What type of engineer?” or “Which startups?” or “What did you do before?” We call this a dialogue or engaging your audience.

As soon as you can get the brain of your audience to interact with your message, they are much more likely to be interested and remember it (and resultantly use, buy, etc.). She may have had a great conversation with the engineer and then established a relationship for future visits. Instead, she smiled and nodded awkwardly after his geeky sililoquy. They stopped speaking to each other after that.

PS- Who get’s their haircut after an interview. And, yes, this really just happened before me: State Street Barbers in River North, Chicago.

Recently, I had a conversation with a startup  around the concept of making it easier for customers to adopt their product. The question is how you reduce the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) for customers around not just buying but integrating your product or service. I’ll demonstrate this by way of example.

EXAMPLE: I am sitting on a Southwest flight last night from LaGuardia to Midway. I am engrossed reading a Wired article on my iPad when a loud noise startles the crap out of me. But oh, it’s just the wing flaps extending in preparation for landing. But are they normally that loud? Everyone besides me is looking anxiously around as well. Maybe it’s just because I am sitting over the wing? For a few seconds, a wave of fear, uncertainty and doubt crosses my mind.

Keep in mind. I am an experienced flier. At one point, a United pilot on the JFK-SFO run would call me by my first name. Yet, my experience on my flight was soured by a few seconds of panic. Even though flaps successfully deploying is a good thing and Southwest didn’t do a damed thing wrong, Southwest’s brand was subconsciously tarnished in my mind and all the folks around me who were looking nervous.

When designing products we often spend an incredible amount of time on the tangible and visible. In the airplane example, I am sure product designers spent lifetimes of effort making sure the seats are comfortable yet safe and space efficient, redesigning the engines in multi-million dollar wind tunnels to make them 5% faster or more fuel efficient. Why do all this again? Oh yeah, to serve your customers better and thus make more money. Sometimes to improve your product you need to get inside the head of your customer and understand the underlying psychology.

To make the product better, start with the customer, find the psychological insight and then go back and tweak the product.

In this example, my customer insight is that people are afraid of flying. In a post-September 11th world where there are crazies trying to blow planes up with their freaking shoes, this fear is even more pronounced in the public psyche. This seems like a fairly intuitive insight and it is, yet I don’t see a single US airline addressing it. The difference between good and great products (and companies) is operationalizing these insights.

Many flights already have personal television displays on every seat with a channel that shows your flight status on a route map. In the short-term, how about another channel that tells you in simple and reassuring terms what is going on and prepares you for it?

“We are 25 miles from the airport and have begun our descent to Midway. In approximately 60 seconds you will hear the plane’s wing flaps start to deploy as the pilot slows the plane down to a safe landing speed…Next, you will hear the plane’s landing gear deploy beneath you…Midway Air Traffic Control has instructed us to circle the airport for 20 minutes. The plane will be banking to the left as we circle. Our approximate planned flight path for the holding pattern is: [map].”

This is just one example of how to address this customer fear. I am sure there are better ones out there. But the point is that if you were to make every person who ever shot a nervous glance around an airplane 25, 50 or 100% more comfortable, you’d probably boost revenue more than many direct “product” improvements which would likely be more costly. Customers would find flying more relaxing, less taxing and would have better memories stored in association with the brand of airline on which they flew. This increases customer loyalty and turbocharges profitability.

How do you take these lessons and apply them to your startup or company? Perhaps the reason more customers aren’t buying or using your product is not because of the lack of features X, Y and Z (even though they explicitly ask for them!) but because they fear setting it up, figuring out when to use it in their daily life, because your claims seem too good to be true based on their prior experience with crappier products or because they fear they won’t get enough post-sales support. There are a million possibilities for customer FUD. All it takes is some careful research and an open mind to find these barriers to purchase/usage and transform them into competitive advantage.

Oh the irony. Apple's emerging PR threat comes from a command-obeying robot. (See Apple's famed 1984 ad.)

When you’re number one, everyone is a hater. As Chris Dixon recently tweeted, “Let me get this straight: some guy speculates he could hack the iPad hence major business mag reports it’s insecure??” Indeed, when you’re el numero uno (officially as of 5/27), the media and your competitors are on the hunt for the slightest whiff of anything negative to slam you with, even if it’s it untrue or doesn’t make any sense.

The memes of Apple as “closed” “restrictive” and “arbitrary” are potentially the most damaging to the brand. These gibes have been around for a while but it is Android has truly brought them to the public’s attention. I cite two arguments for these being the most damaging: 1) Apple’s historical brand equity is built upon the concepts of “creative” “freedom” and “individual”—the very antithesis of “restrictive.” (See Apple’s famed Super Bowl ad, “1984”.) 2) Apple’s modern resurgence is based upon Apple’s brand defeating the reality and perception of Apple as “incompatible.” Consumers only bought Apple products en masse once they believed and experienced true cross-platform compatibility, embodied in the iPod, iTunes and Intel Macs (see Kellogg Prof. Julie Hennessy’s case on Apple and the iPod).

So given this particular reality, what is Apple to do? How can Apple defeat the memes of “closed” “restrictive” and “arbitrary”?

1) The New “Open” App Store Takes a Lesson from Amazon

Much of Apple’s brand’s greatest ire stems from Apple’s 100% control over the App Store. However, as Steve Jobs has directly argued, control is necessary to keep the App Store within brand and grant “freedom from programs that steal your private data” “freedom from programs that trash your battery” and “freedom from porn”. So how can Apple reconcile this tension? I believe the solution is by offering a first-party App Store as it is today (analogous to products “sold by Amazon.com”), but also offering a gate out of Disney World to third-party affiliate merchants (think Amazon Merchants) whose veracity can be approved by Cupertino and also continuously rated by customers (think Amazon Merchant star ratings). These Merchants would of course be limited in number and scope, but ultimately the effect would be that the App Store is no longer perceived to be directly under SJ’s thumb. This could be structured in such a way to create distance between Apple’s brand and the Merchant’s experience and goods. It’s all in the execution.

In conjunction, the other half of the equation would be that Apple would need to develop more clear guidelines for the app approval process (as John Gruber has previously argued).

2) Requiring Flash to Reach Goals, not Saintdom

Steve, I fully concur with you on every point you raise in your “Thoughts on Flash,” but the issue from a PR perspective is that it comes off as a crusade against all things Adobe since you pose problems that seem to have no solutions. Instead of indentifying the issues in such a way that they appear intractable, you should have simply set out specific and explicit hurdles that Flash must clear before being allowed on iPhone OS (even if you don’t believe some of them could ever be accomplished). For instance, “Cannot drain battery more than Quicktime and H.264. Must be fully touch compliant as approved by Apple’s HI team—we can help you on this. Must be open source.” I believe this would have been much better received. And yes, I did throw that last one in there—my point is that by publicly issuing a challenge for Adobe to open source you could have won major PR points rather than reinforcing the perception of Apple as closed by “shutting Adobe out” which I believe “Thoughts on Flash” is widely perceived to have done.

3) From MobileMe to OpenMe

If you really want to deflate the (Android) zombies out there who think Apple is “closed” and “restrictive,” open and free MobileMe. As my buddy Sachin has argued, start off by making MobileMe $0. Next, give people a whole bunch of free cloud space (5GB? 10GB? 20GB? 100GB?) and see what they do with it. Let them be creative. Allow music and media streaming. Cache iTunes purchases in the cloud. Open up an API. Go wild. Surprise us all and blow our minds. You know, think different.

I recently penned my own six “Soft Spots on the Apple.” Today, the WSJ tried their hand at this whole writing about Apple thing too with their “Seven Reasons Apple Shareholders Should Be Cautious”. Whereas my criticisms of Apple (which were decidedly from a branding POV) were smart and cheeky, the WSJ’s criticisms were cruel and tragic. The WSJ article proves my point that “Being #1 puts a big red X on your back.” The press is already clamoring to dethrone Apple. The WSJ raises seven points which are in bold and my responses are in italics.

1) Apple’s good—but not that good. It’s just that the competition is so bad. Really? You’re making this argument? I am pretty sure third graders have thought twice before making this argument. You know what? Fuck it. Brett Arends you are correct. What Apple does is easy and Apple isn’t that good and Usain Bolt isn’t fast either. It’s just that every other goddamn human who has ever lived is slow as a fucking three-legged dog. But what would I know. I’ve just actually worked at hardware and software companies that make devices before.

2) Apple fatigue. You-Brett Arends-you’re a sneaky one! By writing this article you are making this one come true! You sly dog, you!

3) The share price. Really hard to see how you can count this one against Apple. Are you saying high share prices are unequivocally bad or that Apple is overvalued? Maybe we can get together this weekend and compare DCFs. We’re probably using different perpetuity growth rates. Or maybe my discount rate is slightly different than yours because I am using a different set of comps. Or, then again, maybe it’s just because your entire argument on valuation boils down to “No one knows the future.” Indeed.

4) Steve Jobs’s ego. I don’t care how much of a genius he is: Nobody is perfect. Wow. Remind me not to make friends with Brett anytime too soon. Apparently he sets a very high bar. He’s taking the man whose initials are substituted into the acronym WWJD and calling him out on his imperfection…wow. Your wife is a saint, sir.

5) The cellular networks. At what point will they stop giving away the store? This is an interesting point. It is possible that AT&T could demand a larger slice of the pie from Apple. Although game theory would suggest the exact opposite outcome, since Apple is likely to introduce additional players into the market (Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. at some point in the medium-term) and each player will have decreased leverage over Apple, at least this point seems to have some underlying logic. For the time being, I’ll assume you cribbed this point from someone else.

6) Apple backlash. Umm…so this is just #2 again, isn’t it, huh? Perhaps it was a typo or maybe it’s subtly emphasizing your point…and emphasizing my point too.

7) Steve Jobs’s health. Here we agree! This is a big deal and Apple needs to be much more clear about succession planning.

Ed: I hope Brett has a sense of humor. I actually love the WSJ and think he’s a fine writer. We may need to sit down together and work on his valuation skills a bit though.

Fruit rot or just a little bruising?

What concerns do I have about Apple’s medium and long-term strategy from a brand perspective?

1) Finding Steve Jobs’ successor. Right now it’s confusing. Is it Oppenheimer, Cook, Schiller, Forstall or Loverro? Gosh darn it. Steve Jobs is the embodiment of Apple. Apple is all about minimalistic, singular focus. Apple needs one person to replace SJ and he needs a strong voice. The sooner that person is passed the scepter, the better. Otherwise, the company risks degenerating into fiefdoms and discoordination. SJ’s successor needs to figure out how to carry on Apple’s brand without necessarily being able to embody it like SJ.

2) No company is an island unto itself. Some of Apple’s recent strategic moves including the PA Semi acquisition could piss off big partners like Intel (and if Apple purchases ARM that would go a step even further…) That’s not good. Apple needs a healthy and happy partner ecosystem to survive. If this no longer holds true, Apple could once again be perceived as “incompatible” to the world.

3) That little old thing called the World Wide Web. Apple treats it like a red headed step child. It might be OK for Apple to treat certain market segments as non-target such as Enterprise, but you can’t treat the Web, as non-target. That would be like Ford saying that its cars aren’t really great for highways. Ed: Ford’s cars aren’t great for highways.

4) Being #1 puts a big red X on your back. It causes your competition to focus, aim and fire at you. Evidence of this includes how major press outlets are eager to publish “news” citing the iPad’s “wifi problems” when in reality the problems are very minor, geeky problems easily addressed through a software fix and are not at all newsworthy. For evidence that being #1 is hard see the Gizmodo iPhone 4th generation debacle and see Goldman, Sachs & Co.

5) Open vs. Closed: Apple is losing the PR war on this front. Apple needs to figure out a way to be perceived as more open, even if they don’t actually open up. This perception as “closed” concerns me because traditionally (pre-2003) Apple’s major brand constraint was “incompatibility” and “closed” feels mighty close to it. This has the potential to alienate developers and eventually consumers. It’s hard to judge the relative importance of this issue, but it’s certainly a negative.

6) App Store policies. I won’t go into it too much as I think Gruber nails it pretty well, but Apple is very good with product design but not so good with business process design. They need to figure out a better business process for approving / denying apps. The process needs to be as clear as possible with less of this murky crap where Pulitzer prize winners get denied for political cartoon apps.

Note I stopped here at #6…giving myself some space to add on a few more at a later date…