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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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>> why tablets have never taken off in business
No cupholders.
"It's all about giving users freedom to figure out how useful tablets can be, he says"
Umm, aren't people buying these *because* the software ecosystem is more locked down and controlled than a traditional computer is? To a lot of people that is an advantage if it reduces their risk of malware.
Something seems backwards. There are far less restricted machines out there, but people prefer the iPads instead of those.
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?
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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?"
I'm not sure I'd say the iPad has "stolen the market". Nearly every presentation I've been in/been a part of still has a laptop as the primary source of information. An ipad is great to carry around if you're just trying to get email. If you're trying to do any real work, it fails miserably.
The reason the tablet never took off is because it's just a more expensive, less powerful laptop. The iPad isn't REPLACING the laptop anytime soon. Hell, it isn't even REPLACING the tablet. The people who have adopted the tablet will continue using it. Everyone else will continue using their laptops for 99% of their business oriented tasks, and keep their iPad's around when they don't want to lug around a full laptop, and don't need to get any "real work" done. If I'm going on an overnight trip to attend a meeting where I'm not presenting, you bet your ass I'll probably just grab an iPad for the flight to watch movies and check email. If I have to get any work done, I'm taking a laptop.
I would be willing to bet the reason most business users have picked up an iPad is the same reason I have: 10 hours of movie playback. I can watch movies for almost my entire trip to Sydney on one charge. You aren't getting anywhere close to that with anything else on the market today.
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.
The features that have made the iPad a huge success are very consumer oriented features:
Will those benefits apply to business customers? Maybe, but none of those are things that business really cares about. In fact, some people (service providers and IT departments) have a lot to lose by recommending a device with those first two features. It's possible the only effect this will have is on how happy business users are with the equipment they're given.
...hipsters don't have jobs.
Kill all hipsters.
Exactly. Hyperbole never helps.
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I was given to understand that the reason the Ipad hasn't succeeded in a business environment is because the Windows based Tablet already dominates that market. I know the local hospital purchased a ton of tablets recently when they underwent a huge remodeling.
Except that's not what the article or the summary say. It is about how the iPad is supplanting those traditional tablets.
It isn't the first time the article has been full of shit. I work in 2 government departments, they bought a stack of ipad's with the assumption that the intitial trial would lead to full scale rollout and do as the article suggested. It took all of about 3 weeks before most of the 30 trial ipads been returned to IT (think the number stands at 22 returned) and they went back to laptops/tablets. The Ipad is nice but it just isn't a good work tool, it is something for entertainment.
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
No, it wasn't cost. It was weight and battery life. I had a couple of tablet-style computers over the years. They were nice machines and not all that expensive.
But at over 1" thick and weighing 6 pounds, you simply couldn't comfortably carry them around. They also took too long to turn on and off. You couldn't build a powerful lightweight tablet at the time at any price.
Now that we have the processors, batteries, and screens that make lightweight, long-lasting tables possible, they are appearing from many companies.
Given that IBM has pretty much exited the personal computer market I really don't understand what you are trying to say. You do realize they just market re-branded Lenovo stuff in that space right? I also think any executive issuing a PO for such equipment is not so clueless that they can't understand the differences between Microsoft, IBM, and Lenovo and I also doubt very much your thesis they don't care to understand.
You either have astonishingly poor communication skills or actually do work with a bunch of monkeys and PHBs. I am not suggesting most Officers don't have their PHB moments but if yours are still having that moment in Q4-2010 you might want to look for another job because your firm's days are probably few.
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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.
Yeah, no more music, poetry or any other form of creativity either. I say we never look at things in new ways ever again.
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
and not enough thrust.
...is that they wre horribly overpriced. I wanted a Windows tablet when they first came out, right up until I found em priced at $2000 and up. What the hell? You could get two nice laptops for that.
Even today they run about twice what they should. Apple waltzes in with a tablet half the cost of a Windows tablet, and it actually works well with its touch interface ... It is not at all hard to see why people liked it.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
of course they had a plan of how to use them. Just the majority found them unwieldy and awkward for most of the work items they used them for, an example would be the citrix client and the horrible onscreen keyboard, it simply drove people batshit trying to get stuff done. Basically managers their thought they would be a good improvement to productivity for many of the remote based users that aren't terribly good with computers to begin with, turns out they were wrong, that's why they only bought 30 so they can test before doing a major rollout.
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
The apple is really just a gloriphied iPhone that doesn't call people and is slightly larger though, it doesn't do anything that would make it useful in the proprietary tablet market (anything in any industry I hinted at above), as long as apple has their penis connected to the device, and prohibits 3rd party software from being installed without going through the appstore and such bullshit makes it so useless.
Sure there are games and a few useful applications, but the essence of a useful tablet is not the desktop tools, but the ability to have a quick interface for doing things on the go related to stuff in those areas where you don't want to sit down to use a laptop or computer. Like in car garages, warehouses, hospitals, they provide infinite usability with no standard word processing or anything. But not with an apple hookup. The stupid iPad doesn't even have USB drives!
My point is the iPad is trying to be a laptop and a PDA and not a tablet. The old tablets were expensive because the parts were a lot and I really don't see what the point in them at all is. But considering what the iPad is, it is overpriced. It has a proprietary OS that only lets you use things from their app store, and no app or series of apps is going to be worth 500 bucks.
Really, all they need is as much power as an old PDA (like my Palm T/X) with a bigger screen, and some easy to use APIs, for cheap. My Palm TX cost 300 dollars, is over 6 years old, and I wrote dozens of programs for it to do all kinds of useful things, including a graphing calculator and much more. We should be able to put the same power into something with a screen twice as big for the same price by now at least.
Where is the mod rating for "scary"? Also,
Joe, the majority of users do not need or want an integrated keyboard adding additional bulk. Those who want a keyboard can get a case which let's you use the Apple Bluetooth keyboard but then it is no longer a tablet form factor and you might as well use a laptop instead.
I sometimes put the Apple wireless keyboard in my messenger bag along with the iPad in an apple iPad case so that I can prop the ipad up and type more text with the keyboard for longer emails but the onscreen keyboard is fine most of the time.
There are blutooth scanners and these scanners are far more accurate and reliable than a camera. With a blutooth scanner, no changes in the software are required. The scanner will work with any software, even web UIs providing an alternative to keyboard input. You also can then continue to hold your tablet like a clipboard cradled in one arm while scanning items with the other hand. You can then hit a "submit button with your finger if needed between items.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I'm in the middle of converting a law firm from laptop's with docking stations to desktops and ipads. The whole process started when the senior partner with a gadget fetish picked up an ipad at launch. My job was to wrestle with what he wanted to do vs what it was capable of and find ways to make it work. The issue before had been that a lawyer would have to carry their laptop, charger, bag and usually some sort of 3g card or pray for wifi access, this is in addition to a briefcase with all the needed papers (legal is still one area where paperless is impossible) for the case. My job was to find out how to do all of the same stuff they normally do with just the ipad and a keyboard. I warned them that I didn't think it was possible, but managed to prove myself wrong.
It took 4 apps to get them up and running, iAnnotate for pdf editing, documents to go for normal word and excel stuff, iDictate for DSS compatible dictation and iTeleport for remote access if they really need to connect to their profile back in the office. The rest of the functionality is out of the box. Now they can send, receive, edit and review any documents or media related to the case directly without having to hassle with all the gear, security settings, etc. It may not be for everyone, but for some jobs its been a blessing.
Incidentally, he tried this about 5 years ago with an HP TX1100, thought the functionality was there (they were slates that ran XP) the lack of a touch or pen oriented interface made it clumsy at best, it had all the bells and whistles, it was upgradeable, had usb, memory card readers, etc...but due to its identity crisis it just wasn't comfortably useable as a tablet or as a notebook.