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The only thing that might improve it would be the sound of the howling winds…

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Vain though it may be, tonight I looked in on my own past posts on the Vook. The writing was better than I remembered it, just exactly my kind of fun with words, but I do think I have been overly… forgiving… of this sleazy little… not vampire, even writ small… this skeezy little mosquito of a wannabe undead bloodsucker left over from the last century.

I am told that my swats at that mosquito incite much trashing and weeping amongst the very-publicly-aggrieved in the twitset — expressing, it would seem, the vitally-important necessity of brazenly butt-bussing besieged billionaires — but the plain truth is that I have not derided and denounced the Vook with anything like the rigor and vigor that this kind of epistemological emergency demands. One more way in which I feel myself blessed to have had the iPad to think about, this past week, is that thinking about the iPad and what it can and will do illustrate pellucidly what the Vook can’t and won’t do.

What the Vook actually does is lame and stupid. And while everything it does is fundamentally unnecessary, nevertheless, everything it does is very simple to design and to program. I do not know of anything the Vook does — neither the I-think-discontinued dedicated device nor the inevitable-fallback iPhone apps nor the “simulated” scenes of same found on the Vook.tv web site — that cannot be done on an ordinary web site. Easily. By anyone. With no programming or Javascript, and serving only as the broker in the embedded Flash video client/server transactions. In other words, if you can manage your own WordPress site, you can make “video books” that suck just as perfectly as a genuine Vook.

The sublime truth is, you can undoubtedly make much better Vooks than Brad Inman can, not alone because, if you have resolved to make the effort to Vook what you know, you’re going to make the effort to make your Vook — your gnuVook? — riveting and unassailable. That just by itself is tremendously exciting to me.

Now imagine every passion-driven web site out there re-envisioned as an iPad app. Not just text and video, but taking full advantage of the hardware — audio, video, text, touch, motion, all integrated with everything else on the web. How about semantically integrated, with the app and the iPad working together at every launch of the app to maintain the best and most useful outbound links. This will all start to happen now. Slowly and clumsily at first, but we are on the verge of iPad authoring tools that are to the iPad what HyperCard always wanted to be to the original Macintosh. This is so cool I could freeze solid right now!

Meanwhile, Brad Inman (along with every vendor of crap products) thinks you’re an idiot. He doesn’t think he needs to get as close as he can come to doing a perfect job. He doesn’t think he even needs to do a proficient job. He studied under the world’s great carney barkers, from P.T. Barnum to Andy Warhol, and he is convinced to the core that pigs — that would be you, the consumer — will eat anything. Worse, that pigs will beg and plead for the opportunity to waste their hard-earned money on reeking, festering, nauseating garbage.

Yes. I agree. I am making a mountain out of a molehill. But it happens that we all of us have until lately been stranded on a vast, barren mountain composed utterly and entirely of uninterrupted molehills. The Vook is near to hand — and dear to my mind in its almost-perfect upfucktitude — so I think it does us well to examine the underlying epistemology and psychology of the business model. But that underlying epistemologically-psychotic psychology is everywhere. Or was until lately, and, we may hope that its waning waxes on forever. There will always be con-men and the sly lazy liars who are their natural prey. But the outrageous failure of the Vook is something we all can take pride in. At least we are not complete suckers!

Even so, the things I have written about the Vook, while not nearly harsh enough, seem to me to be ripe with pith — rich in truth and portentous in their marketing insights. I found — if I might be indulged in my outsized, awesome humility — that revisiting them repaid my effort. I’m not the Vookish type, but I’m thinking that if you read, think about and quarrel with the marketing arguments I am making, at the very least you will come away with a better understanding of what I think marketing is and should be — even if you disagree with everything I’m saying.

But: Even then: When Brad Inman takes to the pages of the New York Times to insult my intelligence and yours and everyone’s with a bucket full of unconcealed, uncongealed carney crap straight out of Machiavelli (the Vook, not a real book) — kissing his boo-boos and kissing his ass are the very last things on my mind. And while swatting at mosquitos is not itself a wealth-producing action, it is the preferable stop-loss. It’s disgusting to squash a cockroach — or a scorpion — but much more disgusting to make yourself its slave, its minion, its underling, its toady — its stooge. And it must be true that Brad Inman has no friends if I am the only person on this earth who told him that his swan-song brain-fart is useless and idiotic and cravenly cynical — irrelevantly redundant and fundamentally corrupt.

But even then: My take is that to have read me on the Vook and the iPad is really to have read something — this being the most-perfectly Roman sentence I have devised in my brief career as a Latinist. To write is to think, to read is to rethink, and to engage a thoughtful mind — in silence and solitude — when that mind has the time, the inclination and the courage to think the unthought — the unthinkable! — this is but the shadow of what human communication can be and will be as we grow into our fundamental, unavoidable, inescapable, gorgeous and glorious solitary self-responsibility. The lazy liar needs the con-man and the sucker needs the carney barker. But we stand on the threshold of the world of man — of true humanity — and we each of us need nothing but the human mind — each one invisible to all the others — and the vast riches we can unearth by using the mind.

So: Indulge my indulgence, if you choose. Or don’t. But my final thought is this one: This essay is proof of its argument: I may be very far from being wise, but I am wiser for having thought this through — by having written about it. Your mind is your own business, but my mind, at least, is improved.

Try doing that with a Vook.

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I don’t know if I’m ready for this yet, but I need to get it out there where I can take a look at it. Discursive prose is thinking, first, not communication, and this is a big idea. It’s possible I’ll have to return to it again and again to make it completely pellucid, but I promise to do my best today.

So: One of the events the introduction of the iPad foretells is the death of mediocrity in the marketplace, and, along with it, the death of the kind of endemic contempt for the consumer that results in mediocre products and services.

Why would this be so? We’ll get to that, but indulge me long enough to discuss what is — the world as we live in it now — before we take up what is to come.

Why doesn’t the caps-lock key work properly on any Windows keyboard? When you have the caps-lock key down and you then type the “a” key while holding the shift key down, why do you get an “a” instead of an “A”? Surely when you typed shift-”a”, what you wanted as an “A”, not an “a”. Why has this always been broken on all Windows machines, and on all DOS machines before that?

The answer to those questions is quite simple. It’s because Microsoft has never once cared enough to get this right. It’s been wrong for decades in Windows, right for decades on the Macintosh, but no one in authority at Microsoft ever thought it wise or prudent or beneficial to fix an obvious, bone-headed error in one crappy version of Windows after the next.

Here’s the real truth of the matter: They thought you didn’t know any better. They thought it didn’t matter much to you if you did. And they thought you had nowhere else to go in any case. That one little bug, one among thousands in the Windows world, was just a tiny little expression of contempt for you — for your time and your money, and for the satisfaction you had hoped to obtain by investing your time and your money in Microsoft’s flagship product. Close enough was good enough — and if you don’t like it you can go have safer sex with yourself.

Why was the Vook doomed to failure from the outset? Why is the iPad going to do the very things the Vook could have and should have done? Why is the Vook stuck with a lame-ass video-with-text design paradigm when the exact same hardware could have done so much more?

Brad Inman told you, on his LinkedIn page. I drew attention to his confession of mediocrity at the time:

Premium content does not sell because it is not premium content. Something new and different will sell.

That might sound pretty tame, but to decipher it you need to think like a dinosaur. Witness: “We used to hustle the rubes by standing athwart the chokepoint and charging a toll. But now everything we used to sell is available for free. To succeed at hustling the rubes now, we’re going to have too cook up a new gimmick.”

Brad Inman said, right out in public, for all the world to see, that he thinks you are an idiot and that he can can take two things you can already get for free and, by slapping them together in a shiny new gizmo, he can hustle you out of your money.

And that’s the kind of shit that always used to work, isn’t it? How many times in your life have you parted with your money only to discover that what you bought is nothing like what you thought you were buying. We’ve all heard of and studied the Zig Ziglars and the Tom Hopkins of the sales training world, but the driving force behind sales and marketing in the United States, since World War II, at least, has been the carney barker. The whole point and purpose of marketing in corporate America has been to hustle you out of as much money as possible while delivering as little value as possible. Microsoft and Brad Inman are convenient targets because they’re near to our lives, but the whole economy has been driven by gonophs just like them for a long, long time.

Guess what? It’s all over. The demise of these dinosaurs will take a while — but not nearly as long as they will want to believe. But among all the many other things it is going to do, the iPad is going to kill them off.

Not the iPad itself, perhaps, but the marketing paradigm it is ushering in with it. The sine qua non of the close-enough-is-good-enough product or service is shine-it-on marketing, baffle-’em-with-bullshit-marketing, schmooze-’em-as-you-fleece-’em marketing. And it will not work any longer.

The heavy lifting is really being done by the internet as such. The iPad is just the lever that will tip the balance. When I say that privacy is an artifact of inefficiency, I am not exhaustively describing the consequences of inefficiency. Hustle-and-jive marketing is also something that can only persist where the cost of overcoming information asymmetries is relatively high. If I say, “100% Organic Chicken!” and you don’t have a fast, cheap way of discovering that there is no such thing as inorganic chicken, then I have put one over on you.

No longer. You can still hustle fools out of their money, but you cannot hustle any consumer who is determined not to be foolish with money. And the iPad is the computer for the rest of us. Apple’s new tablet computer is going to open up the world of the web to the tens of millions of people who have so far missed out on this revolution of pure, plain-spoken truth.

Here is a sad fact: Virtually everyone in the United States is uneducated. Late in the nineteenth century, education as an institution was taken over by ideologues hell-bent on enslaving Americans in the name of “progress.” If you were blessed to know anyone educated in America prior to World War I, I expect you were amazed at how much that person knew, compared to you — this assuming you had had enough schooling to comprehend just how badly you yourself had been schooled. (And if you’re having trouble unpacking that sentence, you are proving its validity.)

Americans have been easy to snow, until lately, because they have never truly learned how to think. I hope you don’t regard yourself as having been insulted. I am speaking for myself, as well. I can see just enough of the world to know that I am peeking through a keyhole, and I know that I will never, ever compare in intellectual power to an ordinary high school graduate, circa 1880 or so. But the internet gives me and you and everyone the power to amend at least the most critical of our deficits of knowledge. We may never understand the world as Socrates did, but we can use Google and Wikipedia and resources more exacting to discover the truth when we suspect we are being lied to.

And the implications of that simple fact — the internet balances all information asymmetries — are truly revolutionary. If they want to be, consumers can always be on an equal footing with vendors. Even better, when a vocal consumer (someone like me, for instance) catches a half-assed vendor (Brad Inman leaps to mind) trying to bullshit the public, that consumer has the power to make the true facts available for anyone else who might wish to avoid being sold a box full of crap.

This is an amazing thing. After ten millennia or more of being herded and hassled and hustled and robbed by the powerful, any single one of us has the power to fell any Goliath in the marketplace.

And in just a year or two, our numbers will double, thanks to the iPad.

What are the implications of these remarkable events?

Stop lying, for one thing. Your customers will tell you when they think you’re full of shit — unless they’ve seen all the way through you already. Once they do, they’ll be working with honest vendors forevermore. And, for god’s sake, up your standards. If you would find your product or service unsatisfying, don’t expect me to buy it. Close enough is not good enough. You either did the job or you’re trying to hustle ignorant people into trading their hard-won money for your lost-cause crap. Those days are over, or they are soon to be over, and none of the stunts that always worked for you in the past will continue to work in the future.

If you’re already with me on all of this, so much the better. The world is ours to win. The Inmans and the Microsofts of the world hate the human mind, because it is the human mind that discovers — and reports, at full voice — that their products are crap. The iPad will massively magnify our voices, even as it provides millions of consumers with a first-hand experience of a product built by people who love the human mind.

Thanks to the iPad, as the precipitating agent, at least, mediocrity is dead. Contempt for the consumer is dead. Hoke, smoke, hustle and jive are all dead. And pure, plain-spoken integrity — the integrity of Socrates — is ascendant in the marketplace at long last.

My toast to this new epoch is simple: To the truth — undiluted, unaugmented, unalloyed, unshaded and unafraid. To the pure, plain-spoken truth!

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Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman is in Scottsdale today and tomorrow for the MLSCOVE Conference, a gathering of MLS executives from all over the country.

Glenn made time for Cathleen and me this morning, buying us breakfast and regaling us with stories of the not-always-smooth path Redfin is traveling.

In real life, the man has a sweet and gentle — even beatific — nature. We saw this when he spoke at the first BloodhoundBlog Unchained event, winning a hostile audience over with a quiet, unaffected honesty.

That shone through again this morning, and, allowing time for Glenn’s son and our pets, we spent most of our time talking about real estate marketing issues: REOs versus short sales, new builds versus resale, the prospects for recovery, etc.

It’s funny, actually, to talk this way, because Glenn Kelman is a star in the real estate firmament, but in person he is fun and personable and very empathetic. Whatever our past differences, I respect and admire what he has been able to achieve with Redfin in such a short time. It was an honor to be able to spend some time with him.

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I’ve got more to say, but I’m running out of Sunday. Here’s what’s next:

The iPad is the first move in the disintermediation — disintegration — of dozens of well-established institutions in our society.

Vendors of mediocre crap like Windows computers and Android cell phones are done for. Established on-line retailers are finished. Broadcasting in the spectrum is kaput. Best of all, the union-organized ignorami called schoolteachers will be put out of work.

In a circumstance such as I describe, what would you expect to happen?

My answer? Rotarian Socialism.

When the mediocre feel threatened, they pass laws. When the established face disestablishment, they pass laws. And when the ignorant get organized, they pass laws.

If anyone besides me could clearly foresee what a disruptive influence the iPad is going to be, they would already be clamoring for protection from the awful consequences of free choice.

Here’s the good news: Almost nobody can see what is going to happen. They might be myopic, but at least they’re very proud. They will insist — one may hope until it is too late — that Apple cannot be doing what it clearly is doing.

The bigger threat, in the near term, would be the Antitrust Laws, which say that your company can grow as big as it wants, as long as it’s really mediocre like Microsoft. But if you’re growing because you are satisfying — ecstatifying! — consumer demand, the Feds have to come in and bust your company up.

Here’s hoping that everything that matters in this revolution of the mind will have happened before the Rotarian Socialists can marshall their defenses.

And on that note, I will shut up.

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Oscar Wilde said that, the best kind of philosophy — bonum, verum, pulchrum — the good, the true and the beautiful.

I don’t hate it that we are monkeys biologically, genetically. But I hate it when people act like monkeys. Despite everything else that is going on, last week we caught a glimpse of the fully-human life. The prospect for an iPad-like device to take over education is cause enough to celebrate.

To the unchained human mind!

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Here’s a true fact: I’m pretty much disgusted with the RE.net — which denomination I quarried with my own hands, back in my early days on the apellation trail. By now, just about everything looks to me like hoke, smoke, hustle and jive — smirking vendorsluts and the clueless suckers who can’t stop themselves from pridefully posturing about having procured their own plundering. I know that’s not fair — or not entirely fair — but it often seems to me, lately, that everything I have ever hated about the real estate business is successfully infesting the on-line world.

This will fail, all of it, in the end, and I’ll say why in detail when I get time. But for now I persevere by holding my nose and holding my ground. Whether it is the seemingly harmless simian chatter of net.monkeys desperate to prove their ape-titude to all the other net.monkeys or the craven schemes of hack vendors looking for just one more gullible fool to make their month, I’m well sick of it all. I haven’t looked at a feed-reader in many months, and my Twitterverse consists of my Best Beloved, Cathleen, and Teri Lussier.

The rest of the net, however, is a different thing. I’ve been following Apple tablet posts for months, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog is the only blog other than BloodhoundBlog whose client I have on my iPhone. On and off last week, and in greater earnest today, I’ve been looking for decent iPad posts from the RE.net.

Not hard to foresee, but Agent Shortbus doesn’t get it. Typically insipid kibitzing with no real understanding of the revolution the iPad will bring to the entire universe of commerce.

But, alas, the Shortbus set doesn’t have the vision to come up with a truly idiotic argument against using mobile devices to market real estate. This honor was earned by Rob Hahn, an attorney in New York City who doubles as a vendorslut consultant or a consultant to vendorsluts or some bizarre combination of the two. Realtors follow his musings religiously, apparently because they confuse being an attorney with being a Realtor, and living in New York City with living in a normal real estate market.

In any case, “The Inglorious R.O.B.” insists that smartphones won’t work for real estate marketing, first, because the cops might not like it, and, second, because he bought a lame-ass smartphone. As a matter of courtesy, in case you are laboring under the false impression that these arguments are not totally absurd, let’s dispense with them:

First, people obey anti-texting laws just about as religiously as they obey speeding laws. And, on the off chance that a cop is not tied up with a real crime or a bloody traffic accident, it seems likely that the uniformly-disobeyed law he is most likely to enforce — if he’s already topped off on donuts for the day, that is — would be the speed laws. If you’re not getting pulled over for speeding all the time, text away. Nobody cares — except for “The Ignominious R.O.B.”

Second, good smartphones have good batteries — and the iPad will have a great battery. I think trying to use a smartphone to shop for real estate in New York City would be beyond stupid, but, as it turns out, people in the rest of America not only have cars from which to illegally use their smartphones, they also have a smartphone charger plugged into the cigar lighter. As I have mentioned, my car has three cigar lighters, but I use two of them for 330 watt 120 volt power inverters, thus to power my own laptop and my clients’. The horror! Not just smartphone use on wheels, but actual flagrantly criminal laptoppery! There oughta be a law, dammit!

And surely I am being unfair to “The Ignorable R.O.B.,” but it’s sane to argue that “mobile won’t matter in 2010″ for one reason only: Because 2009 was the most important year for mobile real estate marketing. This is why we talked about it so much here last year. Even so, I’m prepared to argue that the iPad could still win the year — but with a more interesting kind of mobile real estate marketing.

And: To hell with all that. Let’s talk about people who are getting things right.

Here is a wonderful post from TechCruch, speculating about the iPad the day before it was announced. The author manages in a few paragraphs to document everything the Vook could have been if Brad Inman had the kind of respect for his customers that Apple has.

The online buying model for newspapers and magazines isn’t going to save the publishers, any more than iTunes Music and TV downloads have been saviors for their respective content owners. Will consumers benefit? Absolutely. But they won’t be willing to pay a premium for content they can access on the web for free. And if old media shifts to a pay-only model, consumers will just switch to free online alternatives. There will be exceptions — publishers with high quality, exclusive content (say, the New York Times) will likely benefit. But the majority of newspapers and magazines? Not so much.

But what about this promised land of revolutionary hybridized content — won’t people be willing to pay for that? Thing is, that’s going to be time consuming and expensive to make. A handful of very large publishers, like the NYT, may be able to scrap together some compelling content on a regular basis. But it’s going to be difficult to quickly integrate additional supplementary material in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on.

So Who Will Benefit?

Textbooks. Guides. Biographies. Novels. Pretty much anything that has previously been offered in book form, but has been handicapped because it was restricted to paper. Few of these have ever been ported to the web in a rich media form, because they’re lengthy and it just isn’t fun to read a book on your computer screen. And even when textbooks have been digitized (like for the Kindle DX), they didn’t bring anything new to the table. But there’s so much room for improvement.

Imagine a biography of Abraham Lincoln that allowed you to pull up photos of every person and place mentioned with a single finger swipe.  Flicking the top of the screen would bring down an interactive timeline of Lincoln’s life, making it easy to get your bearings. The hybrid book could include comprehensive references for each person mentioned in the book. Not just a Wikipedia article, mind you, but information that is contextually relevant to the moment you’re currently reading about. The experience wouldn’t simply be one of jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink. All of this supplementary material would naturally flow into the reading experience, while you never left your place in the primary text.

There are plenty of other potential applications. Picture a chemistry textbook where you could freely rotate any molecule, tapping on a chemical bond to learn more about why it behaves the way it does. Or a Shakespeare play (in text form) where you could tap a piece of dialog to hear it spoken aloud, or perhaps even played in a video. Tapping a sidebar at any time would bring up a roster of characters and their allegiances, lest a love triangle leave you confused.

There are infinitely more possibilities ready to be unlocked.  Many of these things could be done were this content converted to a rich webpage, but up until now there hasn’t been much benefit to doing so because there was no way to comfortably consume it.

Read it all. That’s your Deep Think homework for the day. Here are some lighter bits:

The PC officially died Wednesday. So says The New Republic, and of course I agree with this evaluation. It will take a few years, and the die-hards will surely die hard. But the die is cast.

Mashable insists that the great eBook war aas already begun. I’d say it’s already over, but, as the article hints, dinosaur forces could be brought to bear. More from me on the latter later.

The Photography for Real Estate blog raises an interesting point: If your real estate marketing is Flash-dependent (that would be in your virtual tours, etc.), you’ve got some thinking to do. Your photos already aren’t making it to the iPhone, and soon they won’t be making it to the iPad, either. (Just in passing: engenu uses Javascript, for two reasons: Flash don’t travel and Flash don’t search. Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech.)

And Geek Estate has a nice post on the iPad as a Realtor’s electronic amanuensis. I talked about some of this stuff on Wednesday, but Michael LaPeter came up with some ideas I missed. Like this:

Build a fun, interactive signup sheet for visitors. You could let them choose to subscribe to various value add lists right there, and depending on what you use it could put their info right in your list/ database, no tedious transcribing later.

That’s brilliant, as is this:

Take notes directly into your online CRM/ organization software, with no risk of losing them and no tedious transcribing later.

Ignoring “The Inexplicable R.O.B’s” inability to understand the immense and accumulating power of mobile technology as a real estate marketing tool, the iPad is the perfect replacement for the Realtor’s portfolio, that classy-looking notebook you’ve been carrying around so you can pretend to take notes. Now you can take notes — and keep them forever in your CRM database.

There’s more out there, I’m sure, but I haven’t seen it. If you’ve spotted a particularly valuable iPad post, weigh in with the link. As much as I enjoy spanking idiots, I’d much rather see people working hard to improve their understanding of the world.

Linking frees slaves — I love that joke — but only if the slaves want to be free. I do. How about you?

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I give away a lot of killer marketing ideas here, but I never worry about the competitive implications.

For one thing, I believe to the core of me that it’s raining soup, that wealth is pouring out of the skies and almost none of us is smart enough to reap that bounty.

But, second, I have learned through years of experience that, no matter how good my ideas are, almost nobody will ever follow through on them. We learned to sell, most of us, from people who believed to their cores that real money comes from laziness and lies. My way of marketing looks too much like work, I surmise, for people to adopt it in big numbers.

So much the better for me, I guess, although, to be frank, I would rather see Realtors doing more to earn the business — and the trust — of their clients.

In any case, here’s a way of thinking about marketing my way, a style of salesmanship based on integrity, transparency, follow-through and client satisfaction.

So: Start here: Build an iPhone/iPad app for your business. (See there? I just lost almost everybody!) The app has to be mission-critical and laser-focused on what your clients really need. Not — with emphasis — more idiotic self-promotion. If you’re not delivering something of value — in the estimation of your target-marketed end-users — you’re wasting your time.

Then get it on their iPhones and iPads. It ain’t easy, so you have to do it relentlessly. Ideally, everyone who can be expected to use you in the future — and to refer you to their friends and family members — should have your app on their iPhone or iPad.

Now you have the perfect means of staying in contact with those folks going forward. I’m not talking social networking, and my thinking is that drip marketing is probably a waste of effort. If they don’t unsubscribe, they’re going to ignore you except when they need you. It’s a pull-based marketing world, and your clients only really want to hear from you when they have a real estate need — not when you have a need for attention.

But you can draw their attention to you again and again, with one simple marketing tactic. What is it?

Upgrade your app.

If your clients have your app on their devices, the App Store will tell them when you’ve upgraded. Not only will they refresh their copy, they’ll go in to see what’s new.

Implication: Only upgrade when you have something that is not only new, but is also of demonstrable value to end-user. Cry wolf and you will end up deleted.

But this is not only a way of delivering real value to your clients, its a way of reminding them that you are working assiduously, constantly to deliver real value to your clients.

That’s my kind of marketing…

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This is from an email exchange with Teri Lussier:

Here is the computer for the rest of us:

Imagine that civilization has collapsed. It’s happened before.

Now imagine a computer something like the iPad (but durable enough to have survived and solar-powered or whatever).

The ideal user-interface could be put to use by whomever finds that computer, with zero assumptions or expectations about what that person does or does not know about conceptual volitionality.

It will be babies (crawlers, not toddlers) who will tell us — by their interaction with it — if the iPad is there yet.

(FWIW, this is one of the things I’ve been waiting for all my life, a computer that can train its end-user literally from scratch — from nothing — from the complete collapse of all abstraction-based learning. If civilization ever does collapse again, a computer like this will deliver a much faster renaissance to the survivors.)

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Real life at my house: We actually like to watch television, if watching TV means watching DVDs (lately almost entirely Netflix DVDs) or watching selected cable shows. This usually happens very late in the evening, usually when we’re pretty much exhausted.

But: TV at home used to be TV with laptops. Now it’s TV with iPhone. In six months, it will be TV with iPads — or just iPads on the sofa.

Take careful note:

Broadcast television is dead, as is broadcast radio. Let’s free up the bandwidth now. The iPad is the ultimate perfect television. On-demand. Stop and start at will. Goes with you when mom says you have to go to soccer practice. The iPad is the perfect entertainment-consumption device: Personal, portable, programmable — and infinitely extensible.

As was inferable from my first observation in this series of posts, the annual Christmastime frenzy of cheap-shit electronic children’s “educational” toys is dead. Anything that anyone in your home does while laying stomach-down on the carpet will be done on the iPad.

As I pointed out the other day, Microsoft, Amazon and many, many other hi-tech vendors are dead. (I have a quality/integrity argument to make about this, as well, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.)

Despite the iBook store, books are dead. I love literature and I love the drama, but you don’t have to spend seventy-five bucks a head to discover that the audience for live theater is dying. Books have it that much worse: The honest audience is dying off and the dishonest audience — thoughtless people who buy way too many non-fiction books out of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt — are able to capture much better information for free on the internet. Words-for-sale is as meaningful, by now, as air-for-sale.

And despite the hopes and the hype, magazines-as-we-know-them are dead. There is a future for magazine-like content, but it will probably require a revolution among publishers. The current doofuses think their job is to assemble a collection of readers — people with a shared interest in expensive stuff — so that the publisher can betray them, over and over again, to the advertisers.

The new magazine business model — I’m guessing — is being pioneered by unsigned rock bands. To get attention and build an audience, bands are releasing their content as iPhone apps. It’s give-to-get, and with Facebook and Twitter hooks, it’s social. The magazine of the future will be a real community — no betrayals — much like the relationship between striving young bands and their fans.

(This goes for every kind of marketer — including Realtors and lenders: If you’re making friends just so you can sell them out, you’re screwed.)

(I have Big Ideas on the marketing power of iPhone/iPad apps, but I may keep them to myself.)

I tweeted this last night: “If Apple and the data processing industry get this right, the iPad can become the first truly universal remote control device.” I hate the remote controls for electronic devices, and one thing we should insist on, going forward, is that every wired device in our lives should be IP-addressable and fully-controllable by internet connection. But the iPad is the perfect device for controlling any device or system — anywhere! — that can be driven through an internet connection. Let us all look forward to the day when we can chuck every useless, impenetrable remote control in our homes, at work, everywhere!

(On the subject: A useful remote control — useful for any purpose — will be context-sensitive. Instead of a sea of maddening little buttons, each one unreadably-labelled, you will have only those controls — big bright readable virtual buttons — that are appropriate to your current context. If you’re playing a DVD, you don’t need to worry about, wonder about or accidentally hit the buttons that switch you over to the cable-TV set-top box. (And death to it, too, as soon as possible!))

(One of the missed opportunities of the iPhone was the web-based, server-side service. Apps are really clients, like your mail client, and the app serves as as the client/server user interface. This makes for good static vertical market tools, but what we know from the web is that dynamic data is hugely valuable. The bigger screen on the iPad may result in more web-based services that look like apps to end-users. This gets the iWorld back to the constant-beta idea of Web 2.0: Web-based services are infinitely and instantly upgradeable. Combine that with social effects, and you can have sites that self-construct, on the fly, in response to user interaction.)

(And: So far we are not even taking into account the impact of simulated realties, which are right around the software corner, as it were.)

What else is dead? A lot of stuff. Dedicated devices as a group. Your daily schlep is down to a phone — doesn’t even have to be a smartphone — and your iPad. The iPad has the potential to become the universal interface to everything else, so why carry anything else?

What else? Home control. All those wicked-stupid little red LEDs, useful only — admit the truth — for telling you when your power has failed.

Here’s something you may not have thought of: Your wallet may be dead. Do you carry photos any longer? There’s is an app available that will mimic all of your frequent-shopper cards. Why not your credit cards, too? Why not your car keys, for goodness sake?

That stuff might be a few hardware/software revisions out, but consider this: Your sales resistance to the iPad will drop to zero. Wait for Version 2? Why? Let’s just buy a new iPad every year. If we get tired of the old ones, we can leave them in the guest bedrooms. That’s the completely-personal computer completely taking the place of the television, at the very least.

This is an idea I have discussed at BloodhoundBlog Unchained: The geeks have inherited the earth. From pay-per-click advertising to social media to the ability to suss out any marketing hustle, the world is being transformed into a place that makes sense to INTJs.

Here’s the social trend to watch: Will the proportion of INTJs go up over time?

Meanwhile, integrity selling is all that’s left. Hoke, smoke-and-mirrors, juice, jive, hype and hustle are all dead. The dinosaurs of lies will still be with us for a little while, but their extinction is already assured. If you find yourself mourning them, it’s because you’re one of them. Amend your ways or you will lose everything.

I’ll have more to say about this, but the essence of my case is this: What happened this week was the premonitory death rattle of every business model based on laziness and lies. The iPad is not the efficient cause, it’s just a precipitant. But the demise of every-sure-fire-gimmick-that-always-worked-before commenced this week.

Don’t know about you, but I could not be more delighted.

 
Further notice: Amending this in light of my third observation:

The implication of a computer that can train its end-users how to use it is that teaching as a profession is dead. All teaching, at all levels. Just imagine what the iPad could do for you if you really wanted to learn a foreign language…

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Cathleen bought her mother an iPhone just lately. Aloma Collins is 88, and her health is slowly failing. She’s in an awful spot, unable to do much and yet bored to tears.

The iPhone has become a bright spot on her horizon. Cathy loaded it with some apps, and Aloma has since figured out how to add others. She’s big on email and card games, so far. I don’t know if she’s surfing the web, but you can be sure she will be in due course.

When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, it was advertised as being “The computer for the rest of us.” This was true at the time, when DOS was a ubiquitous zombie wraith afflicting the earth like the undead Unix. And Windows has sucked so perfectly, over the years, that the Mac segment of the computing marketplace has always had ample gloating space.

But what about Aloma? What about my own mother, who has so far managed to reject two EZ-to-use computing paradigms?

The iPad is the answer, or the first step toward an answer. For everyone who gets frustrated by the arcane modalities of the PC world, the iPad offers instant results, instant gratification, instant satisfaction.

Many of our ideas about computing are based in a puritanical reading of Dante’s Inferno: “How can you hope to enter data processing heaven without first having trundled your way through data processing hell?” This is hugely satisfying to many of us living the wired life, especially Windows and Unix geeks, and most especially Microsoft Certified Cash Sinks or whatever the reformat-that-hard-disk cadre is called.

To whom is it unsatisfying? How about the 50% of America that has so far managed to resist the wired life? How about Cathleen’s mother, and my own? How about your Nana? How about her grandchildren? The iPad is the computer for people who do not want to have to be told how to use a computer — the computer for the rest of us.

I’ve been thinking about and arguing about this idea for days, but the iPad is igniting a scenius all across the net. Here’s a post from Fraser Spiers making a similar argument:

For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that’s because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won’t work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

I’m often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they’re thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what’s happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there’s no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn’t have any windows open, understand what’s happening here.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They’re demanding access to software. they’re demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

It’s fun to watch the high-pontiffs of punctiliousness dismiss the iPad as a toy. If you tune your radio back to 1975, you can listen to the computer experts of the time saying the same things about micro-computers. Skip ahead to 1984 and it’s the aborning Macintosh, pictured above, that is taking all the haughty, well-informed abuse. But — as we will discuss in my next observation — even the squeaky-clean will cling to this computer made for the unwashed masses, once they’ve gotten their hands on an iPad.

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Nothing more needs to be said. You’ve got money. I know: For now. Even so, there are children, homeless and helpless, who need your help. Click the button and clear away a little bit of the devastation.

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How are we ever going to top this?

Oh, yes. It’s real. Mrs. Buyer said, “I don’t even want to think about what happened in that room.” My risposte? “Nothing happened in that room!”

But: Even so: It’s an interesting real estate problem, isn’t it? It would be $500, at most, to repaint that room. And yet every buyer who has seen it will have been revolted. What’s the cash value of that revulsion? At least $15,000 off the comps — and it’s still not selling…

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Here’s the question that will appear in the deep-think mainstream media analyses of the brand new Apple iPad:

How can hardware vendors answer Apple’s new tablet?

Guess what? It’s a dumb question.

Slightly brighter lights might ponder this, instead:

How can Amazon compete with the new iBook store?

And: Yes: It’s another dumb question.

Here’s why: With the iPad, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has managed to double-suss the entire hi-tech marketplace. After 30-plus years of being ridiculed by nerdy dipshits like Bill Gates, Apple is poised to take over everything that matters in the new economy.

And, as far as I can tell, no one so far has even figured out what they’re doing.

Why is it that all of the supposed iPhone killers have fared so badly in the marketplace? Because the iPhone is not a cell-phone. It’s a software experience packaged as a cell-phone. Phone vendors can compete well enough with the actual phone, but they have nothing at all to offer as a software experience. Wannabe iPhone clones only have apps at all because iPhone app developers port their products to BlackBerry, Palm and Droid devices.

And if you’re about to get huffy about hardware or performance or open-source or whatever, stand down. We’re not done yet.

The true fact is, the iPhone isn’t a hardware product, and it’s only a software experience from the point of view of end users.

What is the iPhone, really? It’s the user-interface for the iTunes App Store. For iTunes generally, of course, but mainly for the App store.

So what is the iPad, really? It’s portable retail store-front for everything sold at the iTunes store.

Apps. Movies. Music. Books. And now newspapers and magazines.

The iPad is not a tablet computer, so all of the supposed iPad killers that will be introduced in the coming months will fail, just as all the iPhone killers have failed. Hardware vendors will kill themselves eclipsing the iPad’s hardware in every possible way — and they will fail dismally in the marketplace.

The iPad will be a great hardware experience coupled with the typically-superb Apple software experience. That goes without saying. But none of that will matter.

Here’s what matters: The iPad will be the means by which you will acquire all of the digital content for sale at the iTunes store — and all those wannabe iPad killers will not. Without the iTunes connection, the iPad will have no competition. None. Zero. Never.

That’s half the genius of the iPad. Here’s the other half: Amazon doesn’t have the iPad. Apple understood the Kindle the way no one else did: Not as an eBoook reader but as a retail store for eBooks. And with the iPad, Apple has stolen the real product from Amazon, leaving it with warehouses full of useless Kindles and charging Amazon a premium to become Apple’s partner in the eBook retailing business.

The iPad is a truly frolicking brilliant move by Apple. It can’t be beaten as a hardware/software device, and it can’t be beaten as a retail Point of Purchase for digital content.

Apple has not only just killed the desktop, laptop and tablet computer category, it has also killed the digital content marketing category. The iPad is the future of for-pay digital content. The only future, eventually, for content creators who want to get paid.

And here’s the killingest thing of all: Apple isn’t even going to own much of its own content. It’s not a retailer, truly. It’s a broker — a consignment store. Apple will take 30% or so from book, newspaper and magazine publishers in order to make their products available through the iTunes store. Similar deals for music, movies, software applications — everything. If it runs on an iPod, an iPhone or an iPad, Apple will broker the content and take a big split on every sale. The risk remains with the content creators, but Apple will keep a cut every time the cash register rings.

And the device itself, if it is an iPhone or an iPad, is the cash register.

The world has bitched forever about the cost of Apple hardware, but it seems likely to me that the iPad and the iPhone would be immensely profitable even if Apple gave them away for free!

This is a brand new way of doing business. It’s wrong to say that Apple invented it. Amazon did, with the Kindle. But Steve Jobs understood what no one else did: Great hardware is not enough. Great content is not enough. But marry the two together and eventually there will be nothing left for anyone else.

This is big news, bigger than anyone can understand as yet. The iPad will get lots of gushing coverage tonight and tomorrow. But the real news is here: Steve Jobs and Apple today announced the eventual demise of both Microsoft and Amazon, among many, many other hi-tech companies.

The iPad is not a category-killer. It’s a category-cataclysm. Whatever our congenital hall-monitor of a President says tonight in his State of the Union speech, this is the big news of the day, by a huge margin.

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