Mossberg's Best and Worst Products of 2010
This week on WSJ Digits, Walt shared his thoughts on his best and worst reviewed products for 2010. Taking Walt's top spot this year was none other than Apple's iPad. For a 1.0 product, the iPad was amazing.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mossberg closing 2010 by naming the iPad his best-reviewed product caps a year in which Apple dominated both his columns and the broader gadget conversation: he had already framed Apple as the defining company of the past decade back in January, and the iPad spent the year converting skeptics into customers.
The endorsement lands on solid ground rather than hype — a September survey already showed the iPad leading in consumer satisfaction, and even contrarian takes conceded its pull: one April analysis argued the device ultimately strengthens Amazon's position by expanding e-reading demand. A Mossberg 'best of' call on a 1.0 product is therefore less a surprise than the seal on a consensus.
First-order effects
- Apple heads into the holidays with the most influential reviewer in tech confirming what the satisfaction data already suggested — the iPad enters 2011 as the validated default in a category it invented nine months earlier.
Second-order effects
- Every rival tablet shipping into 2011 now has to argue against a category-defining 1.0 product that carries both the market lead and critical blessing, raising the bar for launch reviews from Mossberg and peers.
Third-order effects
- When a single trusted reviewer can crown a brand-new product class in its first year, review verdicts become de facto gatekeeping for which categories consumers treat as real — a structural edge for incumbents like Apple that ship polished 1.0 hardware.
The trend: Tablet computing is consolidating around Apple's first-mover standard, with elite reviewer endorsements accelerating the winner-take-most dynamics of brand-new device categories.