The Days Gadget are Over

The launch problems of The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's iPad media enterprise, are a lesson to all getting ready to get into the iPad business for delivery of news from your athletic departments.

The public is no longer tolerant of the "new" media. It's just media, and it by God better work as close to flawless out of the box as possible.

When we rolled out iHog two years ago, we worked through issues, but our fans were so happy to have it, we got very little push back. When we went to add audio, same thing. But recently, when our programing provider and our internet provider had an issue over how a RSS feed was resolving, it was holy hell in emails -- two and three a day until it was fixed.

This is now established technology, just like pay per view TV as a good example. When you do it the first few times, the fans are happy. When a mistake happens two or three years in, oh my word.

All of that to get to this article on Paid Content pointing out the bugs in The Daily launch.

The payoff quote (and it's taken literally from Paid Content):

Just before the launch I suggested that The Daily had better s**t diamonds or come with a Swarovski iPad case to live up to the hype. At this point, it simply has to work.

Staci Kramer wrote the piece for PC, and she makes another extremely important point. She is a power user, and fought through the four big problems. The average user will just walk away.