Comments on: Why the lack of Camera for the Apple iPad is a Strategic Move

By: Hearing Tiny Voices: The Hidden Next Layer in a Noisy Mainstream Cloud | TechYell

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 01:59:44 +0000

[...] bigger sites pick up on the story later on and get the majority of the credit such as my piece on why the iPad had no camera. It’s also frustrating to see no traffic on something that you felt was worth reading. [...]

By: Mahendra

Mahendra — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 07:59:20 +0000

Interesting…thanks!

By: manielse

manielse — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 06:14:32 +0000

Supporting Follow-up on this subject: US Army meets with Apple, discusses tech for soldiers - http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/23/us-army-meets-wi...

By: Is Web 2.0 Reaching Puberty? The Birds Meet The Bees Plus Tampons (Twitter, Google Buzz, iPads) | TechYell

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 18:19:46 +0000

[...] aside of the names in the title, the birth of the Apple iPad and Google Buzz are both very significant changes to the Internet. These tools both are built on [...]

By: Mahendra

Mahendra — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:11:18 +0000

Thanks for the update, Mark. I've always associated Apple's products with ordinary 'consumers', not Government organizations, hence the skepticism. It would be interesting if someone *does* get inside info on this!

By: manielse

manielse — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 20:17:08 +0000

Mahendra, I should have added some stats to back this up, thanks for the reply.

DHS currently has a policy against cameras, for example, the FEMA BlackBerry devices and all Laptops lack a camera. FEMA’s recently awarded a contract to AT&T in January for mobile devices, smartphones and wireless laptop cards. Following the contract award to AT&T Global Solutions, it's set to deliver of 22,000 devices by April 1. "AT&T Government Solutions" is already providing an array of voice and data services to the Department of Homeland Security and several of its agencies, including U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Transportation Security Administration and several others.

The federal government is trying to incorporate a growing number of mobile devices in new areas, such as in census-taking for the 2010 Census, to wirelessly send data back into the database in realtime. Also, these devices are being used for field inspections with the Department of Agriculture. An iPad type device can certainly be an effective tool for this.

The Department of Homeland Security employs more than 230,000 employees that can't use any device with a camera today. The Department of Defense also has the no camera on devices policy, they employ over 3 Million people between Civilian and Military functions. Many of the Department of Justice 100,000+ employees also have to follow this no camera rules.

So I know I'm jumping to conclusions rather quickly here but I pretty quickly came up with close to 3.5 Billion "potential' Units lost if a Camera was present. Being that the US Government has a very good relationship with AT&T, this give Apple an even bigger opportunity to enter the iPad into the Government's small list of devices. Let's not also forget that Apple's walled garden philosophy and the ability to lock these Government devices from Games and such would be something that the Gov would really be interested in. I'm in no way a Blogger with inside info, but I think that there is more truth to this Strategy than people may be thinking about.

By: Mahendra

Mahendra — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:14:12 +0000

Mark,

I doubt if the use case scenarios you describe that benefit from the lack of a camera are significant enough to influence product feature set.

Completely agree about iPad being a consumer device (focus on content consumption, not creation) and the future double sales strategy.