In today's WSJ, I read a fascinating story about how the iPad is having difficulty on some college campuses. As the headline says, the iPad "struggles." The story is written by Melissa Korn (please visit her website) and Ms. Korn was probably in a hurry and didn't think this story through but it's a bit amazing that Ms. Korn didn't take the time to track this story back to a spate of stories about the very same issue when the iPhone went to market.
Let's think this through for a second, okay?
College students are showing up on campus with iPads that are hitting college WLAN networks. Right. What else might be hitting those WLAN networks at George Washington University, Princeton University, Cornell University and Seton Hall, all named in the story. Well, students on those campuses might very well using the iPad. Those students might very well be showing up with iPads and my guess is that they probably are. Of course, a higher percentage of students might be coming to campus with any number of devices that make use of the WLAN, such as netbooks, plain old notebook computers and an increasing number of completely new types of devices / monitors / gizmos that use WLAN.
So why iPad being singled out? Let's think about it for a second.
The reporter picks up a signal that some students / kids at some name-brand schools are having trouble watching YouTube, downloading movies from iTunes, or whatever people do with iPads. (As I don't have an iPad, I won't suppose what people are using an iPad for.) Let's also say that everybody who has any sort of WLAN device are loading and using WLAN apps like they never have before. --I can believe that, can you?
So the reporter contacts the schools, reaches the public affairs offices, maybe even directly reaches someone in the IT department at some of the schools. What does she hear? "Yup. Those new fangled iPads are hitting the network and are pulling down WLAN availability."
It's Apple's fault. It's Apple's fault that it invented the iPad and that kids use it.
I wonder if Ms. Korn asked any of the people she contacted about how IT planned for WLAN availability? How those WLAN networks were built? What capacity did IT plan for? And I won't even get into the issues of the gear used to build those networks as I've been involved in one or two or three or four of the companies that make WLAN gear. Can you plan for infinite consumption? Ms. Korn has impeccable credentials, and is extremely bright, but she doesn't shine her light onto the real problem.
Let's puzzle this out. Let's use the technique we've learned from the cinema-photographer and we are building a mise-en-scène where the perspective pulls back from the image of the Seaton Halll student who is stymied while trying to download the latest episode of whatever to reveal his dormitory and the entire campus and the city and intercut "flashbacks" to people pulling cat5 cable then we cut to a shot of people at home broadcasting a WLAN signals and then a shot of someone signing up for the actually well-thought-out policy AT&T has requiring iPhone users to sign up for an unlimited dataplan, or the way Amazon brought the Kindle to market with the data / network included --- because we want more. The light reflecting off the screen become blinding.
And it wants more. It is an infinite appetite for more, more, more.
So, are iPads pulling down networks at some schools? Maybe. Getting an Apple iPad into a headline is a nice way to build that string. It wants more.
Conclusion: It isn't a story.
