tablet

Acer chairman J.T. Wang recently predicted that Apple’s share of the tablet market would decline precipitously as new rivals emerge, falling from nearly 100 percent to 20 to 30 percent.

via Apple Will Retain At Least Half the Growing Tablet Market, Says Analyst | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD.

So let me get this straight: A PC vendor...

• that did not consider building tablets because they failed to see an opportunity
• that, once introduced, dismissed the iPad as a failure
• that has no software assets to couple to an alternative offering
• that cannot license software assets that compete because none exist
• that does not understand what jobs the device is hired to do vs. what his current products do
• that has no ecosystem to couple to an offering
• that cannot market products any cheaper than the incumbent

...should be taken seriously when predicting share for products that do not exist?

WebOS: HP, and HP Only.

With the launch of RIM's tablet computer based on QNX and HP's confirmation that WebOS will not be licensed, we have

• Apple the largest tablet and music player company,
• HP the largest PC company,
• RIM the largest smartphone company in the US, and
• Nokia largest smartphone company in the world

avoiding Android.

These are the companies which today are profitable and enjoy large market shares. Why did they choose integrated (aka "closed") software with their hardware vs. the modular (aka "open") approach offered by Google and Microsoft?

See also: asymco | Android’s Pursuit of the Biggest Losers

The bottom line: HP's decision to bundle a tablet computer with its new $399 printer could make trouble for competitors.

HP's New Tablet Could Be an iPad Spoiler - BusinessWeek

HP took the control panel display from a printer and made it detachable. The idea, according to the manager in charge, is that this will encourage printing. Printing is a good business for HP because they manage to charge $7500 per gallon of ink.

I suppose there can be some sense to this idea but I don't use inkjet printers so I can't judge how popular this can be. But the headline suggestion that the new display panel cum web pad is "an iPad Spoiler" calls into question the author's motivations. Maybe he did it for a bet.

But the real gem is a quote from Richard Shim an IDC PC analyst who says "Everyone is trying to figure out the opportunity for these types of devices, how to position media tablets in a way that they don't cannibalize other businesses."

That's an interesting comment coming from a PC analyst. It says that the vendors in the industry are already feeling that the iPad is substituting regular PCs (and hence the need for a response that is sustaining not disruptive).

This acknowledgment means it's only a matter of time before the idea of iPad as PC morphs from crazy talk to conventional wisdom.

In my talks with about 100 senior-level people at as many companies over the past six months, the feeling is that the tablet is here to stay and it's going to be bigger than everyone expected it to be. It's an always-on, always-with-you data experience. The other thing is that we spend about $1,500 for a laptop and another $300 per year over five years for the Microsoft Office suite. That same capability on an iPad is $600 to $800, and the software is $10 per application forever. It's about one-third or one-fourth the price. The cost of ownership is inexpensive--and that's just the first generation before they drop prices.

via Rise Of The Tablet Computer Page 3 of 3 - Forbes.com.

How fast is it catching on?

In the C-suite and the executive suite there is mass adoption. In Bank of America it took 60 days to hit the corporate standards list, which is the fastest any technology has hit that list. We've already bought 1,000 of these and we hadn't bought anything from Apple in more than a decade. Executives everywhere are carrying iPads. And like we saw with the BlackBerry, once the head goes the body follows. The top executives get them and then they order them for the next 10 or 20 people.

The iPad use in corporate settings is even more disruptive than the Blackberry. No contract to sign, no administration overhead for voice and data plans. Trivial setup and instant gratification.

The way iPad is knocking down IT barriers to entry makes one wonder if Apple did not engineer it for this. But when you look at the product and positioning corporate use is that last thing you think of. This is often the case with disruptive products.

Lost of other great quotes in the article. For example: the iPad can be passed around a table but a laptop can't.

Android is an open platform. We saw at IFA 2010 all sorts of devices running Android, so it already running on tablets. But the way Android Market works is it's not going to be available on devices that don't allow applications to run correctly. Which devices do, and which don't will be unit specific, but Froyo is not optimised for use on tablets. If you want Android market on that platform, the apps just wouldn't run, [Froyo] is just not designed for that form factor.

via Google's Hugo Barra: Android 2.2 'not optimized for tablets' - Google 24/7 - Fortune Tech.

How appealing are tablets that don't run any apps? Or content?

It still amazes me that a Google exec would say that it's acceptable that consumers are led to make purchasing mistakes with his product.  Apparently any malfeasance is excusable in the name of openness.

Sony in May:

Sony is “not convinced there is a large enough market to justify bringing out a tablet,”

Sony would say No to Walkman today
Sony in September:

Sony Corp., said yesterday it hasn’t decided yet whether to offer its own tablet computer. It needs to be a “very appealing product that is going to be widely accepted, as opposed to a me-too product,” said Kazuo Hirai, president of Tokyo-based Sony’s Networked Products & Services Group.

Hirai said 23 companies are planning to bring tablet computers to market, making a price war inevitable.

via Samsung, Toshiba `Me-Too' Tablets Use Price to Fight IPad - Bloomberg

I'd bet that Sony will soon join the stampede to make iPad knockoffs. They probably did not read today's Appleinsider piece on Apple's plans to increase iPad production to 3 million units per month.

There is a rush to market a whole new batch of tablets. Here's another one.

Image (www.pocket-lint.com)

Yet another tablet

They all bear an outward resemblance to another tablet that was widely panned.

So what strikes me about all of these designs is that they're basically just shiny rectangular things. There is very little you can do as a vendor to stand out with any particular rendition of a rectangle.

This is also becoming obvious with the mechanical design of smartphones. They are all smaller rectangles with shiny black screens.

Which begs the question: as they are all just screens, shouldn't what's on the screen matter more than the screen itself?

It seems only one vendor shows what's on their screen.

Giving Android the green light:

In addition, for the time being, Microsoft will not offer new Windows versions to support non-Intel architectures that are targeting tablet PC development, noted Guggenheimer.

The formation of a market segment for a new product category necessitates the existence of a supporting ecosystem made up of a complete industry supply chain, Guggenheimer emphasized. He cited the netbook market as an example; units were selling well initially and people believed that the market was going to be established as a new segment, but recently market growth has slowed down considerably, Guggenheimer pointed out.

via Whether tablet PCs can become market segment is still uncertain, says Microsoft VP.

I remember when Microsoft used to be paranoid.

We see the next flood of new portable color touchscreens headed to market in the next 18 months as a game changer. It will be the opportunity that content producers like Time Inc. have been waiting for to reestablish value for quality digital content. It’s argued that it will be impossible to get consumers to pay for digital content since they’ve grown up getting everything for free. We disagree.

The tablet restores something we lost when we went to the Web. Our readers can once again literally touch our content while still having that familiar “lean back” experience of a magazine. In real time, they can link in instead of linking out to the rest of the story on Time.com.

The advertising can be so good it can become content itself. It can help you evaluate products. And when you’ve made your decision it can help to find you a place to buy them.

As more and more hardware manufacturers come in with these e-readers there is just huge demand for our product, for our video product, for my print product—it’ll all be combined. We think very healthy business models will be coming out of it. We’ll be making more money in those businesses than we’ve been making with our traditional dot-coms.

People are paying. We know people will pay for it … it’s a business model that is just really very delicious.

via Time Inc. Is Really, Really Excited About Tablets « The Biz Blog - Forbes.com.

Using the politically correct terms "tablet" or "touchscreen" or "e-readers" to describe the iPad like it was PC for music companies to talk about "MP3 players" when referring to iPods.

We're focused on putting Windows Phone 7 in phones, no plans for tablets.

Ballmer: No plans for WP7 in tablets? | WMExperts.

Keep pining for those fjords.

Continuing from Will Apple rule the iPad market? | Asymco.

The first claim is that

it is unclear if [Apple] will end up dominating the market the way it has come to rule the digital music player market with the iPod.

After hearing a thousand voices cry out that the iPad is nothing more than a bigger iPod touch (which, plainly, it is) it's amusing to read that its similarity with a sibling ends when it comes to market performance.

Let me make one claim up-front: the iPad is more of an iPod than the iPod.

The original iPod was successful because it had a significant integrated value chain bolted on. Apple disrupted music with a value chain, not a product. It changed the way music is bought, consumed and even how it is produced. It changed the economics from retail down to songwriting.

This is why it came to dominate its market. Every competitor that took a run at it did so with a partial solution to the value chain. Often it was nothing more than a music player, and in some cases (e.g. Zune) it was bundled with some other pieces of technology, but poorly executed and too late.

The iPad comes with an even bigger value chain bolted on: the App Store. Apple is flogging not just an "app player" but also a new way to develop and distribute software. If you cut "music" and paste "apps" you see the immediate parallel between iPod and iPad. The app ecosystem will quickly grow to be larger than the music ecosystem with the mobile software business already eclipsing the music business.

A competitor launching a tablet device will have to somehow overcome the momentum of billions of downloads fed by hundreds of thousands of apps built by tens of thousands of developers for hundreds of millions of users.

The iPod juggernaut pales in comparison to the iPad supernova. The iPod had no apps or dedicated developers. Its ecosystem consisted of a handful of music companies. The only thing that made it "sticky" was the tie-in with one type of content.

The iPad on the other hand has a thousand other jobs to do for its users. It has a rich tapestry of functionality and a multi-dimensional (literally) user experience.  It's a platform. It's even powerful enough to impose new standards on the web itself and to suggest that search is a bygone activity.

So to suggest that Asus or Dell will somehow build "iPad killers" sounds asinine. These competitors don't even grasp what the product is and what it's for.  Sony said they don't see a market for it. Microsoft, trapped in the innovator's dilemma and overshooting the market by miles, said they don't understand what the point is because users want full PCs.  Google asked what's the value of a big iPod. I could go on, but there was not a single company in the industry who recognized what they were looking at in January. Apple keeps a tight lid on new products so that competitors don't get a head-start on copying, but in the case of the iPad, advance knowledge would not have had any impact. Competitors look at the iPad and see nothing.  They'll only react once the market explodes and they start to feel belated pain.

If, and it's a big if, they do recognize what an iPad is, their response cycle is going to be measured in years. On hardware, they were blown away with a product that had twice the power, half the bulk, twice the battery life with half the price of what they had on the shelf. They may catch up on hardware in a year or two and launch some sort of iPad-like assembly of components, but that is like making the first iPod killer in 2002.

Then there is software. Their software supplier (Microsoft of Google) will have to build a platform that works. That will take years. Years during which the iPad will penetrate every geography, demographic and vertical market.

Google might move more rapidly than Microsoft, but they will produce an open source poster child of a platform. Fragmented and rough around the edges to the point of looking like a hobby project. Their flea market store will also have the smell of fresh glue about it. Microsoft is so far behind the curve that I don't even think they will try to move the tiller.  Their view of the market was betrayed by the recently knifed Courier demoware. To suggest a challenge to the PC/Windows model inside Microsoft is a career-limiting move so don't expect their brightest to be lining up to propose new platforms to management.

What about HP? Assuming they overcome the pitfall of NIH that kills 80% of integration efforts, they will still need to perform an enormous amount of heavy lifting to get WebOS to be a competitive experience on a tablet. Most opinions were that Palm came pretty close with a smartphone, but that was nowhere near enough to stay alive, never mind challenge iPhone.

Then there is the ecosystem. Building it is just not something I can even begin to roadmap. What about developer tools, SDKs, frameworks and evangelism? With a Palm division, HP is the best positioned of the PC vendors but it has a chance at being a player as much as Creative did vs. the iPod, or needless to say, Palm vs. the iPhone.

So the iPad challengers face five daunting obstacles:

1. Recognition of a threat from a seemingly benign product
2. Execution on hardware against the best integrator on the planet
3. Execution on software against a new UI metaphor fortress surrounded by a patent moat
4. Integration of hardware and software to a sublime whole
5. Re-building a value chain for which they have no handle vs. a broad and deep existing universe of app/content creation distribution and consumption enjoying logarithmic network effect value.

That does not even touch the logistics, sourcing, margin and pricing challenges of world-wide distribution of the whole value chain. Nor does it cover the lock-in of advertisers to new tools for creatives or the billions of daily views from a platform that is blindingly dazzling.

To put it in the language of disruption, by the time the competitors launch symmetric attacks on the iPad, Apple will be the incumbent. And we all know that symmetric attacks never work against entrenched incumbents who have all the levers of power at hand to deploy in a withering counter-attack.