I had dinner with a friend, last night, and he was very excited to show me his iPad. I told him we had purchased one a while ago but still couldn’t determine a good, practical use for it. He said he does a lot with it and proceeded to show me a slide show from a recent trip. While the slides were interesting, I continue to come back to the question of how to use the iPad in the corporate environment.
At a recent Desktop Strategy seminar we held in Boston for six leading financial services institutions; we surveyed the group as to their plans for the iPad within their organization. Everyone agreed the iPad was going to be a great “consumption” device for senior managers. They were excited about replacing laptops with iPads for this group of users.
Having never heard of a consumption device, I probed and discovered many senior executives simply spend their time reading reports and emails. The output of this process is short emails in response to what they have reviewed. Applications used by this group are all web-based and not data entry intensive.
I can easily see the iPad used as a consumption device. I can also see a new breed of application written to facilitate using the iPad in this capacity. Think about Facebook and the ability to click on a thumbs-up to indicate you like something. Highly productive and delivers a message that is “pithy and succinct.” Besides a consumption device, maybe the iPad becomes an annotation device.
With these two functions, is it possible the iPad, with some well designed applications, could reduce the glut of email we receive every day? Granted, it would simply transfer to other applications, but at least it would get it out of our mailboxes. If this can be done then the “killer app” might be the one that gets the documents and comments out of email.
As time goes by, and I speak to more people, a new vision of the iPad is beginning to emerge. Stay tuned as I continue my quest for the best use the iPad (and no, it’s not the level application).