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Why Tablets Haven't Taken Off In Business
An anonymous reader writes "On PC World's blog, Keir Thomas suggests reasons why tablets have never taken off in business, and explains how Apple's iPad was able to waltz in and steal the entire market. It's all about giving users freedom to figure out how useful tablets can be, he says, rather than forcing them into narrow usage scenarios: 'There's a lot to be said for having faith in users to make best use of their computer, without pushing and pulling them in ways you think are best for them.'"
So that's why the first tablet that doesn't let you do everything a laptop would succeeded?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
However, there exists another key to Apple's success: its products are built around giving people freedom in the user experience. Apple lets you figure out how best to make use of their handhelds. The App Store is a beautiful demonstration of this--it's all about choosing what you want to do with your iPhone or iPad, and not being badgered into using them in a particular way.
Err no. Apple locks down the user experience and rejects apps that change it or threaten it in any way, like widgets and alternate browsers etc.
By way of a demonstration of how not to do it, take a look at Windows Phone 7. Everything is built-in, making for a very focused device. You want Facebook? It's built-in. You want Gmail? It's there. It feels like Windows Phone 7 is trying too hard.
Although it might sound like built-in tools present a lot of usability, what Microsoft is actually doing is limiting the user by pushing them into particular usage scenarios. It's feels too limiting. The user has little freedom to adapt the phone to their way of working without a significant amount of tedious configuration.
That makes no sense whatsoever. Slow news Saturday?
This space for rent.
The reason the tablets we've had since the 90's never really caught on was because they didn't do enough beyond what a notebook did to justify the difference in price.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
different kind of restriction
Like anyone can even know that
If you're buying an iPad or iPhone and think that you can run something that didn't come from the App store, you should have done better research. For many people what Apple produces is sufficient. For those who want features that Apple doesn't provide, there are other options. I see no point in complaining that a device doesn't do what you want if you're never going to buy one in the first place, buy something else.
... would be that historically, the "business" community has rarely adopted anything computer-like until it comes out with the IBM logo on it. Back in the 1980s, lots of little companies were marketing desktop computers, but they were considered toys by the business community, until IBM came out with theirs.
Now, I can hear people saying "What about Microsoft, huh?" This is an example that supports the thesis, since Microsoft's first successes were with the machines labelled as "IBM Personal Computers". Furthermore, if you go to ibm.com and look for available small computers, you'll see that all of them are advertised as running "Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Edition"(or sometimes "Vista" or "XP"). This supports the general business-world belief that Microsoft is the software-development division of IBM.
Yes, I've asked business people about this, and I've gotten funny looks, because "everyone knows" that Microsoft is part of IBM. If you try going into an explanation of why this isn't technically true, you merely find yourself dismissed as a geek trying to confuse them with Too Much Information. They don't need to know the details of the arrangement; they just know that "computer" and "IBM machine" are and always have been synonyms, and the small ones run Microsoft software, so Microsoft is IBM's small-computer software developer. That's all they need to know; the rest is left to the hired help to discuss. And they don't order "tablet" computers because they haven't seen one sold by IBM yet.
(Hey, is there one? I don't see it at ibm.com, but that doesn't mean that they don't have one. Sorta like how yes, you can get an IBM PC running linux -- if you can find it to order it. But try digging around at ibm.com to find it. It'll probably take you hours, and you should bookmark the page when you find it, otherwise it'll take you more hours to find it again the next time. Or it'll have moved and your bookmark doesn't work any more. But you can find MS Windows Pro all over the site. I's hard to find tablets there, so IBM probably doesn't sell them -- or doesn't want to. ;-)
Anyway, it's likely that Apple has never much marketed to the business community, because like everyone else selling non-IBM-branded stuff, they know that they can't sell enough there for it to be profitable. But they can sell to individual purchasers, who might take their Apple toys along to work with them, and that's fine.
There's an old saying that nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM. Similarly, nobody ever stays in business by trying to sell non-IBM stuff in IBM's market. That's a recipe for disaster and bankruptcy. The folks at Apple are smart enough to understand this, and don't try to sell in an arena where IBM/Microsoft will squash them.
Of course, there may be a third and fourth theory for why Apple stays out of the business arena. Anyone want to explain the others? ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Because everyone uses them. It's not choice, it's doing the same things as almost everybody else.
And there's nothing wrong with PDF, btw. The problem is Acrobat Reader on Windows.
Yeah but what "market" are we talking about here? I've walked around a lot of enterprises and I haven't seen many tablets, Windows or otherwise. My understanding has always been that except for individual enthusiasts, the markets (plural) for Windows Tablets have traditionally been verticals -- healthcare, oil and gas, things like that. These aren't Compaq tablets that you order from Tiger Direct, either; they tend to be purpose-built, ruggedized devices. I don't really see the iPad worming its way into those markets with any great speed.
And even if iPad has "stolen the entire market" -- a statement I choose to interpret as saying that people who have bought iPads are happy with them and have no plans to switch to something else -- how big is that market really? I hear vague statements about iPad sales. I live in the City of San Francisco and I've maybe seen 2-3 iPads out in the wild. Maybe most people keep theirs at home, I don't know -- but you would think that if mobility is such a big factor in why people are buying these things, I'd see more of them around town. By comparison, I feel safe to assume that just about every single person I pass on the street has access to a laptop, or at the very least a desktop PC or Mac. The iPad's true market presence does not seem very significant by comparison.
Breakfast served all day!
Except that the Ipad isn't supplanting those traditional tablets. As far as I can tell, for the most part, the Ipad is entering into a market that didn't exist before the Ipad. Everyone I know who owns one bought it as an entertainment device. On the other hand every traditional tablet in end user hands that I am aware of is in a business environment.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Timing, as others have said. People loved their iPods, then fell in love with their iPhones and iTouches - they got use to the interface. True, the iPad is more in the smartphone device category than in the netbook/laptop/tablet PC market (it doesn't even have a wacom digitizer to permit inking... what good is a notepad you can't write on naturally?) - and people have grown accustom to those with the recent emergence of powerful smartphones. If the iPad was launched 2 years ago it wouldn't have succeeded.
There was nothing wrong with PDF, sort of like how there was nothing wrong with .DOCs either. But then some genius got the idea that it might be fun to embed a programming language in there for whatever reason and the rest is history.
In the modern era securing PDFs shouldn't take much effort, declaring the region that it's loaded into to be non-executable ought to go a long way towards that. Although since PDFs can be essentially executed, that kind of makes that a challenge.
isnt it rather because technology finally reached a point where a device that is the size of a tablet provides acceptable resolution, processing power, battery life, thinness/lightness, and an acceptable touchscreen interface ? and apple jumped in at the right time ?
They also jettisoned the inappropriate WIMP interface, a not inconsequential addition to what you've stated. (Yes, I know, save me the effort of point out a dozen products over the years that used a similar interface. Those devices lacked the technical merits that the post I'm replying to mentions. Good hardware with WIMP fails, bad hardware without WIMP fails. The current popularity of tablets requires not only good hardware, but non-WIMP)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
That's one way to put it. Or one could say they make it really, incredibly easy to do 90% of the stuff people want to, while making it near impossible to shoot yourself in the foot trying to do the other 10% (by preventing it from happening).
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It makes a great portable Web-Ex client, as well as GotoMeeting and other presentation formats. It handles documents well. Using iAnnotate lets me markup and read PDF docs.
I also found it great for reading specs rather than killing trees with paper or trying to read them off a computer screen. I can take them with me with ease.
[...] Add on top of that the fact that I can do Voip calls and listen to my music all at the same time.
At my office, we do all that stuff with laptops that cost about as much as an iPad, but they also run Office and various other productivity apps. Have you discovered any advantage of doing them on an iPad instead, or are you just pointing out that the iPad isn't 100% useless in an office environment?
I also have RDP and VNC clients plus a shell terminal (no, not jailbroken) lets me SSH into other boxes and do sys admin work as well as a slew of other network tools available.
My god, why would you torture yourself by trying to do remote desktop and SSH without a keyboard? I mean, yes, those tools exist, but the iPad itself really isn't suited for typing more than a few words at a time.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Pffft! I didn't know it was comedy hour.
Apple has one real niche. Multimedia production.
Beyond that, attempting to shoehorn Apple into a "enterprise" solution is not using the product as Apple intended.
PERIOD. I don't care if they're selling you "enterprise support" or not. Apple doesn't do that. They don't even fake doing it well. Their enterprise solution is "buy this and try it, buy that and try it, buy this other thing and try it, if none of them work, sorry, we don't do enterprise support".
Call me when the discussion has left the reality distortion field.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Er, they did. You have two options: the keyboard dock, and the bluetooth keyboard. Both work great for entering lots of data. The bluetooth keyboard is even portable, although I am not really in the habit of bringing it along--it turns out not to be necessary most of the time when I'm out and about, but the iPad itself is damned useful, particularly if you're in a strange city.
"However, there exists another key to Apple's success: its products are built around giving people freedom in the user experience. Apple lets you figure out how best to make use of their handhelds. "
Then I stopped reading.
So you are saying allowing people to use computers as computers makes them more useful?
Who wudda thunk it?
Even if you win the rat race, you are still a rat
I once had a Windows tablet. The problem really was, the form factor itself would have worked, but...
It was a pain in the arse to use thanks to Windows, it was heavy, it had fans, in other words, it went from a useful want to have it idea straight to ebay... The only thing this thing was good at was crayon physics, not even reading was decent (which I bought it for) due to its 16:9 form factor. I was so glad Apple went to a letterbox/a4 like form factor for the ipad because it makes reading more decent. This is one thing all the Asian ipad wannabees dont get right, the form factor is always 16:9 or 16:10 might be good for movies but for 99% of the rest of the applications which are more book like it is absolutely dreadful especially since they do even opt for less vertical resolution.