Doc had said this on the episode of The Gillmor Gang this past week,  but here is a bit of posting about it.

Doc called it New Sony (Hollywood centered)  instead of Old Sony (“the inventive one that owned the high-gloss/high-margin end of the entertainment gear business”)…Apple gave us the entertainment pad rather than something which

It would be cool if it also helped any of us to become movie producers, and to share and mash up our own HD creations. But I think Steve is more interested in hacking Hollywood (entertainment) and New York (publishing).

Doc Searls Weblog · Up the creek without an iPaddle

Doc says:  “There should be for the iPad what Google’s Nexus One is for the iPhone.”

I hope so.

This is something that feeds that hope,  or justifies it:

Joel may be right that “the average consumer” will have no trouble being locked inside Apple’s silo of “simple, closed Internet devices”. But there are plenty of other people who are neither average nor content with that prospect. There are also plenty of developers who prefer independence to dependence, and a free market to a captive one.

One commenter says:

The target audience isn’t for geeks.

It’s for regular people who don’t care about all the stuff you are complaining about.

But didn’t the iPhone do just that (ie. Be a phone that geeks could love) ?  I see nearly every tech pundit has one,  and most of them have loved it.  They naturally have found many things about the Nexus or Droid they like much better,  but the iPhone captured the phone market for two years (I forget when the first one came out),  and geeks led the way.  Why couldn’t the iPad have done something to entrance the geeks?  Again,  like tap the very thing that helped to make the Mac such a big hit amongst artists:  Photography, audio,  and video production and software.  It seems like all the professionals used Mac gear with their professional and/or prosumer cameras.

This is a great post, and a great conversation,  as is the seminal post that got Doc going by Dave Winer (Dave’s post was published the day before the unveiling by Apple)

Robert Scoble had included the video/grassroots production capabilities in his “hopes/forecasts” list in the Gillmor Gang’s pre-unveiling;  and it was this that got me latched onto that bandwagon (although thus far I have seen only Scoble and Doc mention it.  I’d like to find the thoughts of others along this line)