The iPad is coming on April 3rd and with that, thousands of journalists looking for an angle.

Daniel Lyons has a gushing piece in Newsweek about the iPad.  According to Mr. Lyons, it’s another irresistible Apple product that will change the consumption of content and computing as we know it.  He was one of the lucky few that received a sneak peak.  This quote was in the article.

With the iPad, a lot of people are hoping there’s a killer app that we just can’t conceive of yet,” says Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry Analytics…

This brings up the key question - what is the core value (i.e. killer app) of the iPad? The iPhone has a killer app and it’s the phone.  The phone is a critical part of people’s life.  By providing this need well, Apple opened up doors to vastly improve what a phone could be.  What’s the killer app on the iPad – what will make people bring it with them EVERYWHERE?

iPad Core Value Options

1. Commerce – If iTunes can spur people to buy from their mobile devices, which it has proven it can do, why not broaden their goal beyond media to physical goods?  When will we see retailers in iTunes?  In theory retailers could tap into the mobile market by selling their products in iTunes (one of these days iTunes will change it’s name to iShop).  E-Commerce is a key driver behind Google’s growth. This trend is just starting on the iPhone, and potentially the iPad.
2. Video - I’m not sure that the iPhone/iPod has been as successful a platform for video content as much as it is for music and apps.  People don’t consume nearly as much video as music and apps on Apple products.  This represents both a challenge and an opportunity for Apple.  If people just need a bigger screen they’ll have it with the iPad.  A big if.
3. Print Media – Steve Jobs wants to do for print media with iBooks what he did to the music business with iTunes – get people to pay for their content.   There are two models for content creators to get their share – Google’s ad model and Apple’s paid model.  The battle is how will people consume content.  Everywhere.  If the iPad becomes a platform for reading print media, that’s a big win.
4. Gaming - It’s hard for me to speak to this one because I don’t play video games much.  I have doubts about the ability for a top video game platform to co-exist within a broader operating system, but who knows.

I’m not sure what the answer is.  But, I do think that the fact that there is no clear killer app is interesting.

A phone is something the world uses, but how will the iPad make itself indispensable?

In Odyssey, Pepsi to Apple, John Sculley tells his story of working at Pepsi and then as President at Apple. Sculley was at Apple from 1983 – 1993 as CEO.  The book was written in 1988 while Sculley was still Apple CEO.

There is one good reason to read this book and that is to have more insight’s into Apple’s strategy.  This book was written by a CEO that is actually willing to openly discuss Apple’s strategy in detail, unlike their current CEO (in particular see page 387 – 388 for some good bullet points from Apple’s original business plan).   It’s a good read if you’re into management, organizational cultures, Apple, and Steve Jobs as a leader and personality.

The most interesting parts of the book involve, you guessed it, Steve Jobs.  Sculley seems to take pride in his role in removing Jobs from an operational role within the company while maintaining him as a figurehead as Chairman.  Shortly after, Jobs left Apple to start NeXT, taking some of Apple’s best people with him, while Sculley was CEO. In Sculley’s telling, he defeated Jobs in a high stakes corporate drama and managed to turn around the company by making Apple more “business friendly”.

We know how things turned out after NeXT.  Jobs returned to Apple to make history.  Apple bought NeXT and Jobs finagled his way back to the top. In the corporate history books we can be fairly certain that Jobs will have his own chapter, while Sculley is a footnote.  What I found interesting is the degree of attachment Jobs has to Apple – namely, how much he cares.  Sculley frequently refers to how emotional he got, especially when Sculley removed him from operations, with the Board’s approval.

There’s a lot we can learn from Steve Jobs.  He cares about Apple in a way that few, if any, leaders care about their companies.  Perhaps this is an idealistic way to look at it – Jobs has significant stock holdings in Apple and wants to maximize his personal worth.  But I don’t think it’s that simple.  This is simply a human being who cares about what they’re doing.   I don’t know what makes him care, but that doesn’t really matter – he does and that is one reason why Apple is one of the most successful companies in American history.

Other highlights include:

• Sculley creating the Pepsi Generation campaign that vaulted Pepsi above Coca Cola in market share for the first time ever
• Insider accounts of what it was like to be an executive at Pepsi and Apple, two very different corporate cultures
• Sculley’s obsession with the Japanese
• Some good Silicon Valley anecdotes – conversations with Bill Gates, Bill Campbell, Mike Markhula, Del Yocam, and Esther Dyson
• Perspective on how to run an organization and deal with challenging personalities
• In the epilogue Sculley shares his vision for something called “Knowledge Navigator”.  What he talks about is what has emerged as the Web with Google as the dominant search engine.  Good call there, he must have been listening to Alan Kay.

Apple has always stood for the individual.  Sculley tried to steer it towards the Corporation, but since then it has continued to focus on empowering individuals through the use of technology and content.  This book will give you more insight into what makes Apple unique and how the company dealt with the turbulence of the mid-80’s.

Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple… a Journey of Adventure, Ideas and the Future

I’ve just started using Google Latitude for iPhone more.  But there’s a problem I knew about but hadn’t experienced.

My friends who have Blackberries have their location constantly updated on the phone.  I have to actually navigate to the Latitude website in Safari for my location to be updated! This is because Apple does not allow 3rd party apps to run “in the background”, persistently on the iPhone.  iTunes of course runs great, which makes iTunes 1000x more useful and engaging. You can double-click on the home button on the iPhone and go to the next track on my iPod – while still using a different app.

Here are some snippets from Google’s blog post that tell you how Google felt about it:

We worked closely with Apple to bring Latitude to the iPhone in a way Apple thought would be best for iPhone users. After we developed a Latitude application for the iPhone, Apple requested we release Latitude as a web application in order to avoid confusion with Maps on the iPhone, which uses Google to serve maps tiles.

READ: We wasted money on building a Latitude app

Google, like Apple, continues to push for improvements in web browser functionality. Now that iPhone 3.0 allows Safari to access location, building the Latitude web app was a natural next step. In the future, we will continue to work closely with Apple to deliver useful applications — some of which will be native apps on the iPhone, such as Earth and YouTube, and some of which will be web apps, like Gmail and Latitude.

READ: Apple better make up for this

Unfortunately, since there is no mechanism for applications to run in the background on iPhone (which applies to browser-based web apps as well), we’re not able to provide continuous background location updates in the same way that we can for Latitude users on Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Nevertheless, your location is updated every time you fire up the app and then continuously updated while the app is running in the foreground.

READ: Apple is unfairly limiting 3rd party applications from running in the background. Other phones are more open.

So Microsoft bundles their own applications with their operating system.   Apple gives their own applications an advantage on the iPhone – are these two companies really that different?

Update 9/18 – Google has posted their FCC filing on the Google Voice rejection, and touch on Latitude as well. The filing states that the Latitude app was rejected by Apple because:

1. Replaced the preloaded Google Maps app
2. Could cause user confusion since the preloaded Maps version is Google Maps
3. Offers new features not present on the preloaded version of Google Maps

Apple states they don’t want apps that could replace such functionality and confuse users. Maybe the question about why Google wouldn’t just build this into the Maps app is a good one?

I bet Steve Jobs has an image like this in his office.

China would be a big market to enter, but notice the lack of penetration in Africa. I assume the market just isn’t there. The One Laptop per Child Project aimed to bring low-cost CPU’s to the developing world. Perhaps the netbook (or even the iPhone?) is the more realistic device for emerging markets. The idealist in me wants to see Africa fully wired and surfing the web, hence improving the quality of life. But the pragmatist knows that there are many challenges to doing so.

Google’s Schmidt Leaves Apple Board – WSJ.com

“Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest,” Mr. Jobs said in a press statement. “Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s board,” Mr. Jobs said.

This doesn’t sound very amicable. When you start a press release with “unfortunately”, you’re stating flat out that the party did not cave in to what you wanted. In this case, Apple’s request to Google to not enter Apple’s core businesses.  Apple’s core business is software.

Is Google a search company, an advertising company, or a software company?  Does a software company aim to make the world’s information universally useful and accessible?

I think an Internet software company does – Google is a software company.  The right software will make the right platform ubiquitous.  Google search is the right software to make the Internet what it is today.  In the past Mac software contributed to bringing the computer market where it is today, then Microsoft launched Windows, AND opened it up to multiple OEM’s.  The market is changing, and this move hints at the place for software in a web-based world.

“Unfortunately, since there is no mechanism for applications to run in the background on iPhone (which applies to browser-based web apps as well), we’re not able to provide continuous background location updates in the same way that we can for Latitude users on Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Window Mobile.”

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Official Google Mobile Blog: Google Latitude. Now for iPhone.