Does Your Business Need iPads?

We all love Apple (well, OK, I do...I don't know about you). But does that mean we should run out and buy iPads for our firm?

Well, maybe not for our creative firms.

AppleInsider wrote last month that Apple is targeting the iPad for small businesses. The article talks about the capabilities Apple included to make it business-friendly and discusses the appeal of the iPad for business application designers. But as you read it, the benefits seem to mostly be about storing and moving information, rather than creating it.

Bruce Nussbaum, in his Business Week blog, wrote about how his students at Parsons were disappointed in the iPad. Nussbaum wrote,

Essentially, the Parsons School For Design students are saying that in an era of user-generated content, the iPad is about the consumption of media, not the creation of media. It doesn’t give you the normal tools to make stuff. It is so weird to them. And to me. What the iPad appears to be is a vehicle for traditional, main-stream media—movies, TV, books, newspapers. Which is OK, but maybe not for $1,000 (the iPad price for 3-G accessibility). Yes, there will be thousands of new apps that allow up to five people to work the larger iPad touch-screen. In that sense, it is social. But that’s not the same thing as enabling millions of users to do their own thing.

This is raises a critical point about your firm's IT strategy: in a creative firm, you need systems and components that are designed for media creators rather than for media consumers. Many people only want to look at what someone else has produced, whether on an iPad or their smartphone or at their computer or on TV. Your Creatives, though, are the ones who will create that content, and they need tools designed for that rather than just the new trendy thing.

For many companies, IT is all about information management, whereas for you, it's about information creation. So make your purchases accordingly.

As an Apple shareholder, I'd love it if everybody bought one (or two or three) iPads. But as a leader, I've got to think that my Creatives probably don't need them, at least not for work.