Innovation vs. advertising

There is often a thin line between a real innovation and a lot of advertising talk.

Case in point?

iPad.

As a certified Apple fanboy I, like the rest of the world, expected an iSlate or whatever to be announced. There were two options: a big iphone with a killer business model behind it, or a next-gen game changer device.

When I saw the keynote and the product video, I was very much underwhelmed. My initial thought was, “yup, that really is just a big iPhone.” Dave Winer explains it all really well in his prognostication piece and follow-up: “Ridiculous product. Absolutely completely ridiculous.”

Ouch.

So, not exactly ‘magical’, cf. “when something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it somehow becomes magical. And that’s exactly what the iPad is.”

I can easily make the exact same case for your average €250 Dell laptop. Or canned soup. Most of us don’t know how it got to be or how it works, but that don’t make it magical. That’s just spin.

Why is this important?

Well, to come back to my initial point: it is hard to discern between the two. Because what you say means one thing to this person and another to someone else. iPad is no big deal for the geeks, but it just might be the best possible computer for your mother.

So it really isn’t the question “what’s an innovation”, it’s “who are you talking to?”

Think about this next time you stand to make a pitch for a new product or idea. (This post was actually inspired by my spending some time writing copy for some new products.)