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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?
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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?"
Apple may lock it down for the average user, but not for ENTERPRISE. Who within some minor boundaries (No using the enterprise program to build your own app store to sell to others, and no using it to write software that does it's best to harm the cell phone network) are free to develop and distribute within their business whatever they'd like.
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.
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.
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Actually no one is more equal than another. An enterprise or private user can pay the fee and write all the code they want for their own device(s). Only when they want to distribute to the app store do any rules come into play. What enterprise is going to put their apps for internal use on the app store anyway?
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.
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