Mike, completely agree with the post, but while we praise the Web 2.0 darlings for raising the bar on UX, let's also admonish some of them for lowering expectations on application performance and reliability. Too many ship beta products to end-users (many do openly acknowledge this) for my tastes.

Dmitri makes an excellent point about the problem posed by so many different approaches to UX. However, the likelihood of a solution materializing is close to zero. The unified UX that Apple offers on iOS (and increasingly folding that into OSX) is why Apple has been so successful with raising the bar for UX. The consistency from app-to-app is what makes it so valuable. Similarly, this is the single-biggest problem with Android -- the sheer inconsistency in UX, not only from app-to-app, but more importantly from handset maker-to-handset maker (HTC Sense v. Motorola MotoBLUR v. Samsung TouchWiz...clearly the worst name of the 3).

Agree with @Raul and @Katherine wrt "innovation"...although I like my iPad. But the other term that needs to be banned from marketers' vocabularies is "unique". Almost no claim that you see as unique is so. Most are actually common which is about as far from unique as you can get. It reminds me of one of my favorite movie lines, from the Princess Bride (swap unique with inconceivable): [Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up] Vizzini: HE DIDN'T FALL? INCONCEIVABLE. Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Mike, perhaps "communicating better" is the right phrase after all. What you describe regarding overflowing inboxes is "communicating more" and often was driven by covering one's ass, rather than effective communication of stuff that people needed to know. If social platforms and their application within the enterprise improve the efficiency of communication and allow people to truly work collaboratively rather than thinking spamming people with mostly irrelevant email, I think that what we're all looking for. And in my mind would be communicating better. But I also think that your points are intended to push the concept of communicating further than most people are currently think about: moving from one-way to bi-directional and asynchronous communication that is engagement oriented rather than broadcast-oriented, and analyzing the interactions to help drive better business decisions (which is an outcome of social communications, not an activity in and of itself). Just my 2 cents. Glenn

Well written and reasoned post. I'm reading Godin's Linchpin right now too. With respect to "blocking" of social sites, it's a topic that Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson have addressed many times on their FIR podcast. What's funny is that so many employees now have mobile devices with apps or access to the mobile web so that it may speed adoption of using mobile devices as the primary means of accessing social sites, which is already accelerating due to the rise of geo-location apps like Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp. But I'm probably not saying anything you don't already know.

The $20 warranty was brilliant (hopefully) strategic sale by Apple. Apple makes much, much more on purchasing apps and music (books in the future) that replacing the device for $20 makes sense. It's like a very high tech razor. Gillette made gazillions with that model as has HP on the laser printer side. Frankly, Apple may be missing on an opportunity to upgrade the millions upon millions of 'classic' iPods out there to iPod Touches that people can buy apps on. I would expect it would be a wildly successful campaign. I do want to comment on your Genius Bar experience however. I remember my first experience with the Genius Bar at the Apple store...only I didn't know the process before I drove to the store. A little miffed I would say. To me the word "bar" always meant to walk up to it, order and get served. I did sign up and came back a few days later, although somewhat irked (and did have to wait for 30 minutes past my time).