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By John Sutherland, President, Ennova, Inc.

There’s been much negative press about Apple’s launch of the iPad.  Some commentators have focused on the product’s name.  Yet others have lamented the lack of features: no multitasking, no video, no touch keyboard, to name just a few.

Missing The Point

But they’re missing the point about creating new market spaces. New market spaces evolve when you allow new behaviors to emerge in a target population.  Specifically, if what you offer (the market disruptor) allows people to do something they couldn’t do previously, and if many people want to do it, then it takes off. 

The new behavior disrupts the norm of how people interact with each other and with space and in so doing, new value is created.

The Power Of New Behavior Space

For example, the Blackberry brought us push email.  That allowed us to stay connected everywhere.  New behaviors emerged, not all of them desirable mind you (emailing during a meeting).  This new Blackberry enabled behavior disrupted other phones and organizers (the Palm).

The iPhone utilized the programmable touch screen.  That allowed more intuitive interfaces and a whole array of new behaviors to emerge.  Face-Book, Twitter, traffic alerts, conversion calculators, games, games and more games, etc.  Over 100,000 apps have been created in all sorts of areas with a corresponding increase in new mobile behaviors.

What they and others (the telephone and steam engines to name a few oldies) did was to create new behavior space.  As new behavior space grows, so too new market space grows.  (Behavior space equals the number of people times the frequency at which they demonstrate a behavior.)

The iPad’s New Behavior Space

So what new behavior will the iPad allow to emerge?  When you inspect the core functionality of the iPad through the lens of behavior space you see that it was built primarily for two purposes, both of which currently do not have large “mobile” behavior spaces.

1. Playing games
2. Viewing media content (books, movies, magazines, newspapers, etc.)

Let’s just explore the latter.

Yes, the Kindle and Sony Reader already exist.  However, their adoption rates are small.  They haven’t swept the market.  I suggest two reasons for this lack of explosive growth.

1. Their offering is mostly one dimensional.  They only offer reading.  More critically, there is no obvious path for potential consumers to expand their range of behaviors. Consequently, potential buyers only have one reason to buy.  Do I want to be able to read in a mobile environment?  If yes, they buy.  If no, they don’t.  They’ve hung their hat (mostly) on one behavior.
2. Their business model does not include the potential for rapid evolution of the content experience.  You can buy a book from Amazon, or you can download it.  In either case the book is largely the same.  Where is the capability to change the nature of the book, or magazine to take advantage of the new technology (disruptor)?

Look At How The iPad Value-Disrupts

1. The iPad offers room for growth.  It has both games and media content (including movies) so it is multi-purposed to begin with.  Combine that with the many iPhone apps and the device has room to grow.  People will buy the iPad because there is more behavior capability there, plus there is an expectation  those capabilities will grow even further.  This is especially true given Apple’s reputation.
2. With the app capabilities expect to see all kinds of new media content.
   • Self book-publishers will now publish their books through the iPad.  I worked with a self-publisher, Dr. Alex Osterwalder, on his recent book Business Model Generation.  Now he can publish on the iPad and make the experience far more interactive and rich.
   • Apps will allow successful bloggers to monetize their blogs.
   • The newspaper industry, which is in death throes, will do what the music industry did – migrate their offering to the iPad.  Some have calculated that printing The NYT costs twice as much as sending every subscriber a free Kindle.  With a multipurpose iPad it will make sense for them to build their own apps for their newspaper.
   • Creative magazines and newspapers will use color, 3G connections, GPS locators, video-play and gaming capabilities to develop an incredibly rich multi-media, multi-connected, location-specific experience to the user.  Think about that for a moment from a behavioral perspective.  What will the world be like when you can be at the corner of Main and Water Streets in your home town and point to a building and be presented with a multi-media array of games, news, background information, promotions, etc. all relevant to the entities you are pointing at?  Or, imagine what a New York Times experience could be.  Even better, imagine what a small town paper could do.  Exactly how does Kindle compete against that?

The secret to market space is in creating new behavior space through a value disruptor.  The iPad, like the iPhone before it, and the iPod before that, is their next value-disruptor.

Watch The Publishing Industry Be Value-Disrupted

So, no the iPad is not a replacement for the laptop.  No, it doesn’t do multitasking, or have video, nor phone capabilities.  It doesn’t need to.  It’s going after a much larger market.

Combining 100’s of thousands of iPhone app developers with a mobile multi-media device creates the potential for a massive increase in behavior space in the publishing industry.  Apple will do to the publishing industry what they did to the music industry. They will value-disrupt it. What new behaviors can you imagine emerging?  In gaming?  In publishing?  How will the business models of publishers change?
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