One place though where this seems be to actually, sadly, true is in the rise of bloatware on Android phones. Having worked for a couple different Windows based computer companies, I was always amazed and dismayed at the power partner marketing groups within these companies had to force software and sometimes hardware onto machines.

It’s one of the things that turned to me to Apple.

My guess, and it’s nothing more than that, is that if Google wants to avoid some of the pitfalls that have plagued Microsoft as a brand, they’re going to have to do what Microsoft never did: own the hardware. Obviously the Nexus One was this, but it seems like Google didn’t, or doesn’t, have any long term vision for this product line in the way Apple has had for the iPhone. Without that, it seems like increasingly, the Android experience is going to be what carriers or handset manufacturers want it to be. At this point, I’m not even sure you can differentiate between the OS and the hardware it runs on. To have a coherent experience, I think you’d need to recognize them as intrinsically tied.

In larger sense it points out, for the millionth time, that if you want own your brand experience, you have to own it top to bottom, no matter what you do.

update
Microsoft doing what Microsoft does with these things: After spending a lot of time redesigning Windows Mobile 7 in an “authentically digital” UI, Microsoft had said they would not allow manufacturers to modify it. I thought this was a great move. While still not as good as MS creating it’s own hardware, at least they’d have some sense of what the end user experience would be. Then I read this today.

Oh well.

The bad thing about a dictatorship is that once the leader looses it, the whole thing starts to come undone. And they always lose it. There’s always something, some person, some event, that starts to place seeds of doubt and in the end, that single point of vision becomes a tyrannical mess of paranoia and irrational behavior. It’s clear Jobs hates Google. Not in a competitive way, but in some deep, personal and increasingly irrational way. For a guy who seems to have never made much of a bad decision, this target fixation has seemed over the last months to begin to take him off his game.

iAd is, for me, the first real manifestation of this unraveling.

Thursday morning, I tried to get out of the house early so I could stop by Voodoo doughnuts on my way into the office. One of the advantages of having your own agency is that you can declare any day that Steve Jobs is on stage as a company holiday. I had made it known early in the week that we’d be taking the morning off and taking over the conference room to project various tech blogs, eat doughnuts, and talk about Apple magic as it happened. For most of the presentation, for 6 “tent poles”, thats exactly what we did. Then came tent pole 7, iAd.

Here is my fundamental problem with iAd: It’s make no sense from a brand strategy point of view. It’s irrational, and philosophically counter to nearly every previous decision Apple has made under Jobs. To be clear, it’s not crazy in the way that most people will ever notice, after all, most of us have spent the last 15 years being trained to expect display advertising as just a way of life. But advertising is fundamentally user hostile. That’s the core nature of it, it’s why it works. It makes you stop whatever you were doing and look at something else that you didnt choose to. While it probably seems histrionic to take something so seemingly small and blow it up to this size, I do believe this marks a fundamental change in motivation for Jobs and Apple.

What Id like to do is agree with people like John Gruber that Apples motivations are to preserve the overall user experience of the iPhone, and honestly up until iPhone 4, that has always been what I believed. But iAd negates that premise on fundamental level. This is the first time I can think of Apple has chosen to make money at the direct expense of it’s customers product experience. People can, and have, argued for a long time that those of us supporting Apple and its draconian control of it’s platforms we’re just begging for this to happen. But I think it’s critical to consider that until iAd, the goal was to create a specific notion of quality user experience. For many of people, it wasn’t the experience they wanted, but that it was customer focused is hard to deny.

Of course there are already ads in applications so it could be argued that iAd doesn’t really change much. Or, to Jobs’ point in the presentation, this is a chance to make those ads better. This line of reasoning doesn’t seem to hold water though either. For a company allegedly so focused on preservation of good user experience that they’re willing to through Adobe under a bus, why would they invest so heavily in making intrinsic to the iPhone experience a system that would invite what is arguably the worst aspect of user experience on the web into their device? I can’t think of a reason. But the real difference here is that with iAd, Apple has actual financial motivation to have the iPhone/App UX degraded. Previously, Apple could take no position on in App advertising, but now, with a 30% cut of each ad, the more ads that go out, the better Apple does.

One could argue that Apple introducing iAd is better for their customers in that it allows more developers more opportunity to create applications and make a living off them. And this is true. But if Apples motivation were bring more developers into the fold, why on the same day they announce iAd would they choose to proactively lock out Flash as a development platform. Gruber’s take on this, as it has been from the start, is the Flash is simply not capable of producing a user experience at a level Apple feels is on par with the overall device. Fair enough. But if UX is the central issue, it’s hard argue that in app advertising, ads Apple will not be vetting, produce any better UX than Flash. After all, iAd gives huge amounts of iPhone user experience control to ad agencies, people with no track record of being able to produce anything other than bad UX and no motivation, monetarily or otherwise, to do anything other than throw away work.

Rather than spending their time and resources to update the App Store, something thats been asked for from nearly day one, iAd seems to be an investment by Apple in a race to the bottom. Tying application developers’ livelihood to the same display ad system that has left huge parts of the content creation industry on the web in shambles. Why not instead invest in making structural updates to the actual purchasing process to help elevate the developers doing the best work, and then help them find a way to actually charge a living wage for their work? Why not take the same, revolutionary approach Apple always has and find a way to free developers from having to find ad real-estate in their applications so they can focus on continuing to make their, and Apple’s, products even better?

The only logical answer is clear: To beat Google.

But given that a company whose name has always been tied to changing the game, such an investment in playing someone else’s game leaves me wondering: does Apple have the cultural and organizational underpinnings to manage a system that is both open to outside development and the clear frontrunner in a category, while maintaining their history of a clear focus on user experience? If iAd is any indication, the answer is no.

With Mac, Apple has always been able to be the contrarian second place. Making huge profits while catering to a smaller, but vastly more loyal base of fans. The iPod on the other hand is clearly the industry leading platform, but it’s closed. Apple has always had top to bottom control of everything that goes it save for the music. iPhone is something different though. It’s neither the plucky niche product of Mac, nor the highly controlled iPod.

In Apple’s seemingly desperate effort to control this rapidly expanding system, the strains on the dictatorial system are becoming evident, and it’s not clear Apple has the systems in place to stay sane. In fact, it would seem this new found position has resulted in increased paranoia and a fixation on beating specific competitors in specific ways rather than making revolutionary advancements. That they would try to lump iAd in with other user focused features is either completely disingenuous, or evidence of increasing detachment from reality. For whatever reason, Jobs has decided his mission now is to beat Google first, beat Adobe second, everything else comes third, including Apple user experience.

This isn’t to say that Apple will stop making good products, they’ll likely continue to for a long while. But as a post-Jobs Apple moves nearer, the questions of what drives the company without him become more important. iAd is a strong signifier of the kind of brand confusion that I think is beginning to emerge, and without Jobs in place, the “do what it takes to make money” path is now just viable as the “make great products” one. We’ve all seen “money at any cost” Apple of the 90′s, and it wasn’t pretty.

The good news is this: if you do manage to punch the monkey, you’ll win an iPad.

The iPad is Apple’s reconceptualization of what a computer is to a regular person.

Therein lies the challenge of todays event, and one of Apples two biggest failing with the iPad launch. First off, in the iPad, I feel even more strongly than I did Monday that what Apple has on its hands the 2010 vision of the 1997 iMac, or the 1984 Macintosh. It is basically the computer most people should own. It’s Apple’s first computer in a long time targeted at regular people with average computing needs, and the price really drives that home.

But that was also the first hurdle they needed to get over that they didn’t. Today’s event was the first time in a long time that Apple has launched a product that not just not targeted at core Apple customers (the kind that watch these events), but actually the type of product that the core would be predisposed to both not understand and not like. If you work all day making videos, working as a photographer, making websites or designing products, the current interaction models for computers either works pretty well, or you’ve invested so much time in learning it, that it’s hard to see another vision of a computer. But for most people, the metaphors a lot of us take for granted are not just non-obvious, they’re downright confusing.

As I pointed out Monday, something as seemingly basic as the file system is a total mystery to most people. And forget keyboard commands. For the vast majority of computer users, keyboards are for typing and nothing else. In the iPad, Apple has a product that addresses the idea that in 2010 everyone has – or needs – a computer in their lives, but almost all of the interaction models we have are based 30-year-old concepts of keyboard and mouse as primary input devices. Why? Keyboards are, again, really about making words, and a mouse is a legacy pointing device that is mostly not ideal.

So, Apple has this device, this “new” computer.

This fresh way of seeing the world.

This third option.

And what do they do?

They spend the entire presentation NOT saying that.

This was, without a doubt, the single worst product drop I’ve ever seen from Apple.

I came into this morning so clear on what the iPad could be, and by the time the event was over, all I could think was “Jobs did everything he could to make this sound like a giant iPhone.” In my mind, what he needed to do was come out, explain the issues surrounding computers in 1984 and how the Macintosh overcame them. Talk about the issues facing computers in 1998 and how iMac overcame them. Talk about the issues facing computers in 2010, and then spend the rest of the presentation explaining how this is the new Mac, pounding the message: “if you need a computer for your LIFE, this is the one.” The price should have come much earlier, and should have been much more tied to the product’s reason d’etre. “Thinking about buying that shitty Acer laptop for $700, let me show you this Apple for $500.”

This needed to be an event about the concept of the iPad, not the specific features.

Maybe he’s been pitching to fanboys for too long, I don’t know, but this is most assuredly NOT a spec sheet device. From that point of view, it is basically an over sized iPhone. But in re-concpetualizing the computer, size matters. Simplicity matters. Access to both content and software, easily, matters. iPad is about the computer in your life, just like the Macintosh, just like the iMac, and I feel that Jobs totally failed to bring this concept home.

Literally nothing else mattered…

…and he missed.

He set out to reintroduce a product category – the computer designed for home life – and he failed to bring that single point home.

What makes this critical is that while you can rev the hardware and software feature set, as we saw with the iPhone, you can’t rev whether or not people believe in the idea. The brilliance of the iPhone introduction is that while people could and did rip on the initial features, or lack thereof, every single person knew exactly what the iPhone meant conceptually. That didn’t happen today, and I’m worried it may be fatal. If the average person – not the person who watched today’s event, but the person at whom this device is targeted – can’t understand why this for them, they’re probably not going to come back to it. At the very least, that is a profoundly more steep hill for Apple to climb than explaining or revving the object specifications.

The second huge flaw, and single point that broke my heart about the device itself, is that for everything I just stated above, Apple seems to also view this as an accessory. What this needed to be was a computer. A new, better, more relevant computer, but a computer. That Apple expects people to sync this to another computer is either profoundly short sighted, or just stupid. Neither of which feels like the Apple I know. By positioning the iPad as peripheral, Apple took what should have been a really cheap, amazing computer in a world of terrible cheap computers, and instead positioned it as a really expensive toy.

My mom, my dad, Megan’s mom and step-dad, they all want Apples, but always felt like they were too expensive. To be fair, you have to either buy into the Apple aesthetic or understand computers in a deeper than average way to justify a $999 13 inch MacBook in a world of $700 17 inch Toshiba’s. But with the iPad they have a chance to charge right into that space. It’s the exact same price point, with a totally different, and in my mind, clearly better experience. That concept has been severely damaged by leaving the Mac as the center of the Apple universe. Im guessing that you may not need to sync the iPad, but it says a lot about how Apple will position this and it feels like a terrible choice: it reduces the importance of the device, and again, muddles the ecosystem for the average person.

Anyway, it’s done with now and we’ll see how things shake out. I still love it, and I’ve talked to a number of people who are genuinely excited by it. At the same time, I can’t help but feel that today was a critical day for iPad, and what should have been easy, breakaway slam dunk, instead put up as many obstacles as it took down.

NOTE: I feel I should take this opportunity to point out a small, tiny, insignificant change in this deck compared to the one I presented. If you were in the audience you heard me say that there are 600 million mobile operators in the world. This is not true. Though it would really help this economy if it were. There are in fact just 600 mobile operators worldwide. While making numerical errors in the range of 6 orders of magnitude are nothing new to me and well within my own personal margin of error, I’d like to apologize to both my audience as well as the 599,999,400 imaginary mobile carriers I just put out of business.