OK, I’m going to take a break from “to hell with the SEC” long enough to discuss something else. What else? Mobile technology.
So when Google launched the Nexus One, there was – infamously – nowhere to see it in person. There was a Flash animation on the website that you could hold your hand up to (I am 100% serious this is not a joke), but if you wanted to see one in person, your choices were down to either ordering one or finding somebody who already had it. It didn’t last very long, and when the Nexus S replaced the One, Google didn’t make the same mistake again – the Nexus S was available at Best Buy.
Now the second revision of the Chromebook is out – and once again, the same mistake. If you want to see a Chromebook, your options are apparently fourfold:
1) Buy one
2) Find someone who bought one
3) Check one out on the SFO-JFK route on Virgin America airways
4) Visit the Samsung Experience store in New York City
Google has been taken to task elsewhere for this, and rightly so – the target market for these machines isn’t in New York City flying Virgin or throwing $300 blindly for a new gadget. The Chromebook needs to be in Target, in Wal-Mart, in Sears, and yes, in Best Buy – which inexplicably sells them through the website but not in store.
Which in turn leads us to the Kindle Fire, which I finally saw in person on Saturday. Naturally, my first instinct was to test the web browser, so I tapped “Web” which brought up what appeared to be some sort of glasses-shopping website…and a movie clip overlay, extolling the virtues of the browser. And as soon as the movie finished, the Fire closed everything gracefully and sent me back to the “bookshelf” launcher screen.
I tried everything I could to pause the movie, skip it, interrupt it – but there was no means by which I could get to the web browser to, you know, actually use it. And my first instinct is the same as a movie reviewer who doesn’t get to preview a film before release: how big a dog is this if you’re not allowed to field-test it? Make no mistake, the reviewers have not heaped praise on the browser’s speed, despite the back-end proxy that’s supposed to handle everything but display rendering – so couple that with the “demo movie” replacement for actual, you know, browsing, and my first instinct is, red flag. Rightly so, I think.
(Not that it would necessarily help. Best Buy tends to set out a lot of tablets and then forget to make sure the wireless is working.)
Here you see the genius of Ron Johnson (and Steve Jobs through him) in the Apple Store – here’s an environment where you can actually see all the products. Pick them up, poke them, use them. There are messages in the mail client, songs on the iPods, apps on the iPads, live Wi-Fi so you can actually check out websites. Hell, you can pick up the iPhones and FaceTime back and forth.
People can go on a website if they want to buy a pig in a poke. If somebody comes into a store to look at the product, it stands to reason they want to get more of an evaluation than they could get by looking at Flash movies online.