Mr. Jobs [..] insisted that Disney build a prototype store to work out kinks, a costly endeavor that most retailers skip.

Most retailers skip the prototype step for store redesigns?  Really?  Then how do they know the full rollout, which is much more costly, will work?

What is this, advertising?  (ba dum tchhh)

• a second on-board OS (Linux) and subsystem for instant-on computing:

“Some users Dell surveyed spent 70 percent of their time working in the instant-on mode. Microsoft is sure to take note of that figure. Windows has turned into a clunky, cup holder.”

(Then again, this sub-system is not integrated with the main system.  Different OS, different file system, different apps.  It’s like having a cheap netbook hacked into your laptop.

This all points to the still-unmet need of a truly instant-on system.  I still await the time when our main laptops achieve the instant-on performance of the 1983′s TRS-80 model 100.)

• a docking without cables, including inductive charging (is that energy efficient?),
• wireless USB (sweet!) and:
• wireless display interface (beat Apple to the punch)
• a super thin enclosure (Zzzz)
• an interesting black cherry finish (ooh aah)
• “the right side of the monitor acts as a sort of touch-wheel, letting you scroll through application icons and start applications just by rubbing your finger along the edge of the laptop.”

  It reportedly doesn’t work well in this incarnation, but the idea of having more touchable surfaces has potential.  (Wouldn’t it have been more convenient to reach along the edge of the base rather than the edge of the display?)

• a few other minor innovations

Good for Dell.  These premium innovations can be perfected, reduced in cost, and trickle down over time to their lower end hardware.

Take this as a sign that the world is finally learning Apple’s lessons.  Consumers will be better off.  Product companies better be prepared for more intense competition.

My big question: did Dell pull all of this off in-house?  Or did they enlist the help and vision of an external innovation agency?

If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em, and then either grow ‘em or eliminate ‘em off the market.   It’s a common tactic for the big guys who have trouble growing breakthrough products in-house.

The problem is, it’s too risky to be a reliable strategy.  A competitor might snap up the company first.  It could start a bidding war forcing you to overpay.  Bad acquisitions will happen, as with any huge investment.  (I’ve seen too many).  And the upstart may refuse to sell themselves to you for inordinate greed or non-business reasons (such as, you are Microsoft).  You have to be among the fattest of cats to be able to absorb this risk.

Intuit has struggled to invent substantial new products.  And the Quicken business was slowly dying off (even Microsoft exited the business).  Intuit got a great deal by buying the disruptive Mint.com for a mere $170m.

Apple said “emphatically” that it did not believe in fixed keypads for phones, since the touch screen provided more flexibility for alternative keypads and for various App Store offerings, and that it is portable across geographies and languages, providing significant scale economics.

There is something Apple is not getting, which is that having a physical keyboard is not just another design choice like making a bezel brushed or polished aluminum.  Barring the thumb keyboard from iPhones cuts out whole usage scenarios from the iPhone product vision.

The evidence is in plain sight.  Today, heavy texters think twice about going with the iPhone.  Those with stubby fingers are annoyed at having to type on-screen.  Blackberry crack addicts give up on the iPhone and return to Blackberries.

You can prove to yourself using the hallway usability test I conducted with a friend.  On your mark, get set, transcribe two sentences from a newspaper simultaneously, one of you with a Blackberry and the other with an iPhone.  Even experienced iPhone typers must double-check the work, override the iPhone’s auto-correct feature as necessary, and make corrections.  Experienced thumb typists on the Blackberry never have to look back beyond the last letter or two.  For an on-screen keyboard, the iPhone’s is excellent, but it’s significantly worse than a real-life, tactile keyboard.  No onscreen keyboard has yet to outperform the best thumb keyboard.

Most existing iPhone users won’t consciously miss the on-screen keyboard.  They just won’t be typing as much as they would were the device to do it well.  (Here, as fan boi of both Apple and the iPhone, I speak from personal experience.)

An Apple ban on thumb keyboards matters because it confers a massive strategic freebie to Apple’s competitors.  The others, like the Palm Pre can trumpet their legitimate superiority at sending texts, emails and blog posts.  (It was sad to see Blackberry buy into the Reality Distortion Field and stumble with its keyboard-less Storm.  A Blackberry without a keyboard is like a lollipop without a stick.  The thumb keyboard and it was an advantage, not a liability.)
There is a chance Apple has something up their sleeve.  Part of Apple’s design modus operandi is to try and think beyond the current generation of a technology, and implement that.  They could, for example, conclude that the thumb keyboard is inelegant and below them and been done, and that the underlying need — for efficient text entry — could be served better (and with more patented Apple PR pizzazz) by, say, voice-to-text.  Instead of texting your message, just dictate it and send it.

This is not unheard of: there exist today of human-assisted services for phones that will transcribe your utterances to text quickly and pretty accurately.  The voice-recognition approach has great promise for some scenarios, but is not without the usual downsides of voice recognition.  Responsiveness and immediacy suffer.  Dictated text demands proof-reading for accuracy and correction when there are errors.  And whereas texting your message is discreet, speaking it out loud is as conspicuous.

Another “out” for Apple is to make a great physical keyboard as a separate object that snaps onto the iPhone.  ”Haha, see?  We didn’t desecrate our beautiful device with a ‘fixed keyboard’.  It’s removable!”  (This do-it-without-doing-it solution would be analogous to Apple finally providing the highly demanded left-mouse button on the mighty mouse by not providing it: instead of a second button, it’s a separate touch-sensitive zone.)

Apple could, of course, be lying about banning the keyboard.  They have been known to misdirect in the past.  Let’s hope so.  As the  Palm Pre demonstrates, a slide-out keyboard and a touch UI can coexist beautifully.

—

Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones.  To follow him on Twitter click here.

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