iPad observation #8: The death of mediocrity and, along with it, the death of contempt for the consumer

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from February of 2010, when the iPad had just been announced. In another of the posts in this series, I wrote: “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…” Technology is giving us the power to disintermediate vast numbers of state employees. No telling if we will actually do it, but it is by now eminently doable. This essay addresses that kind of disruption in the Rotarian Socialist marketplace. –GSS

 
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 to 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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