While the New iPad is clearly better than the iPad 2, Apple broke a ton of Steve Jobs' rules in presenting it, repeated John Scully's mistake with the Newton, actually resurrected Intel Inside (but with Nvidia), and left out the "magic." It was the worst presentation of an Apple product since Jobs came back in 1996.
Over the years, I've watched company after company lose its invaluable edge because executives critical to its success moved on, or died, and didn't pass on critical skills. Only IBM really made a massive effort not to screw this up, and even it eventually forgot, forcing a massive reset -- which almost caused it to fail -- in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Sony Walkman, PlayStation, Trinitron; Palm PDA; RIM BlackBerry; Microsoft Windows 95; Intel Inside; Cisco Flip Camera; and now it looks like I'll be adding the iPad to this list in a few years.
It really doesn't seem that difficult to take something that is already incredibly successful and keep it so. You'd think the hard work (and it is) would be in creating success in the first place. But we forget that people move on and, unfortunately, don't live forever either. When they go, often that hit product goes with them. Rarely does the product get worse; it often just loses its way or, in the latest case, loses the magic.
I'll lead you on a trip down bad memory lane and end up with the best/worst Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) product launched post-Jobs so far (because I think it will get worse). To be clear, I think the product (Siri omission aside) is fine -- it's how it was presented that sucked.
I'll end with my product of the week: Corel's (Nasdaq: CORL) VideoStudio Pro X5, likely the best affordable easy to use, semi-pro video editor on the market.
