Did we hear a monkey there?

Since we promised to discuss innovation regularly, it is a good time to return to the do’s and don’ts of aping. Earlier, I already established that Microsoft’s Zune is far from a devastating, deeply innovating answer to the domination of Apple’s iPod. To be able to do sort of the same, but obviously not so cool, it is not exactly the market proposition you are looking for. And things can be made worse, for example by claiming that it is so convenient to exchange MP3 songs between two Zunes through the wireless connection (Steve Job’s answer: “I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your ear buds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of head phone cable”).

How aping can work out the right way is proven by Apple’s new iPhone device. The very juicy user interface consists of exactly one (‘home’) button and is entirely based on a touch sensitive screen. I am not sure how many patents have been registered, but it seems sure that that the impact of the iPhone on the user interfaces of computer-like devices in the forthcoming years will be massive.

Meer op Capgemini's CTO blog