It is fun to watch a real life case-study of sorts playing out in the battle of the tablets. There is the iPad 2, selling users on the experience, the emotional tug of Facetime, about how doctors and teachers and kids love the iPad.

And then there are the Android tablets selling specs, processors, gigahertz, dual-core, Adobe Flash and a good dose of WTF!

Seth Clifford (thanks to Daring Fireball) notes how a Staples manager says that a lot of people are returning Galaxy Tabs. To quote from the blog.

“Oh, ok, because we’re selling a lot of these things, and we get a LOT of them back. People buy them thinking they’re getting rid of a laptop, and they all come back returning them.”

This is what happens when you sell on features and not on benefits. This is what happens if you muddy the positioning of your product. Looks like we are all going to have start thinking about 2012 as the year of the iPad competitor.

It has been a hectic past few months. We launched our mobile apps for the iPhone and the Android, and also launched our partnership with Nuance Communications to launch PaperPort Anywhere, the cloud-powered version of PaperPort software.

Rolling out the two mobile apps, a tablet app was exciting, to say the least. You can expect a lot more of my thoughts on those in the coming days (and fanboys always have an opinion, don’t they?!). Meanwhile, you are welcome to catch up on my guest blog posts :

• At KissMetrics blog, I write about how we increased conversion in OfficeDrop by listening to our customers, leads and effectively using those tools.

• My chat with Morgan Friberg of Atlassian about how we do Product Development at OfficeDrop and how Jira helps us develop markets that people love and use!

Stay tuned, and happy to be writing again!

A great way to be friendly to your customers is to project some personality in your apps (and hopefully it reflects your company’s true personality).  Google Doodles are pretty popular and it is a pretty good proof that you can show off stuff, even though there isn’t much in your “home page”.

I found a couple of nice examples this week that I thought I would share.

The first is from MailChimp. On May 4th, their login page had been updated to reflect “Star wars day”, aka, May the 4th be with you.

The other example I found was for the release notes for the Yelp iPhone App (And yes, you can judge me by the fact that I read release notes of the apps I use)

Both are nice examples that bring a smile to your customer’s face when they come across them. Well done. How do you make your apps have a personality?

A couple of weeks back my trusted (rusted?) 3 year old MacBook pro wouldn’t boot. By the sounds of it, it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t something I could fix / hack, so I took it to the local Apple store. I had put on my “I am a Mac” T-shirt hoping to score some brownie points at the genius bar.

A quick diagnosis at the genius bar showed that the motherboard had likely conked. So it had to shipped to their depot to have it replaced. The extended apple care warranty had just expired, but the “genius” at the genius bar was gracious enough to “let it slide” and told me he would take care of it without charging anything. Wow!! That’s probably a good $300 worth of repairs.

I was supposed to have received my machine back in 5 to 7 business days, but lo and behold, I got a call in just 2 days saying my machine was ready. Woot. Awesome Apple. But wait, there is more. Not only was the logic board replaced, Apple had also replaced the optical drive and two fans, since they were not in “good condition”. What a nice gesture. But wait, there is even more!

One of the rubber pads at the bottom of the MacBook had fallen off. I was curious what they had done about it and sure enough all four of them were replaced. I mean, who cares about the rubber pads at the bottom, except of course the user. You don’t even have to be a fanboy like me, to be impressed by such attention to detail.

I was happy enough when Apple fixed my machine for free, even though it was out of warranty. But such attention to detail truly delights your customers. It demonstrates empathy, and it shows your customer that you care about them.

Fixing something with a bunch of goodies makes your customers happy. Going above and beyond what is needed and paying attention to detail delights them enough to write a blog post about it and tell the story to everyone in their inner circle of friends and colleagues.

Are you delighting your customers?

ProductCamp Boston, the awesome unconference on Product Management, returns on Saturday, April 2, 2011 at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge. I have been to prior year’s ProductCamps and they rock!  (I am pretty bummed that I can’t make it this year, because I will be out of the country at that time.)

If you are not familiar with UnConferences, you should definitely go to this one. There are no “attendees,” since everyone participates in some manner.  At ProductCamp, you’ll get to present, lead a roundtable discussion, share your experiences, and/or volunteer. Every single unconference that I have gone to (such as the MassTLC unconference, ProductCamp and BarCamp), has been memorable and insightful. They are a great way to meet fellow Product Managers and share ideas and exchange notes on common challenges, industry trends and network!

This year’s theme is “Innovation” – and it’s all about product, process and personal innovation to help you and your company win. You get to propose topics, deliver talks, attend sessions all around that theme. So what are you waiting for?

• Register Now and

• Propose a Session

And finally, tell me all about it, since I cant be there. Oh! and you should also follow ProductCamp on twitter