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BlackBerry CEO: Tablet Market Is Dying
Nerval's Lobster writes "BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins believes that tablets will be dead by 2018. 'In five years I don't think there'll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,' he told an interviewer at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles, according to Bloomberg. 'Maybe a big screen in your workplace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.' That may come as a surprise to Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung, all of which have built significant tablet businesses over the past few years. Research firm Strategy Analytics suggested in a research note earlier this month that the global tablet market hit 40.6 million units shipped in the first quarter of 2013, a significant rise from the 18.7 million shipped in the same quarter last year. So why would Heins offer such a pessimistic prediction when everyone else — from the research firms to the tablet-makers themselves — seems so full-speed-ahead? It's easy to forget sometimes that BlackBerry has its own tablet in the mix: the PlayBook, which was released to quite a bit of fanfare in early 2011 but failed to earn iPad-caliber sales. Despite that usefulness to developers, however, the PlayBook has become a weak contender in the actual tablet market. If Heins is predicting that market's eventual demise, it could be a coded signal that he intends to pull BlackBerry out of the tablet game, focusing instead on smartphones. It wouldn't be the first radical move the company's made in the past year."
World to Blackberry: In five years there'll be no reason to own a Blackberry.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
I might be able to take their word seriously if they didn't paint the blackberry playbook in a positive light at all. After running one of the worst launches in history, no wonder that thing fell flat on it's face. My favorite review said something along the lines of "It's like paying $200 to see Bruce Springsteen and having to settle for a homeless guy in the subway air guitaring it"
BlackBerry seems incapable of judging where there market is going. That's why they were blindsided when the iPhone came out. They still had a chance to adapt, but they pretty much pretended like the iPhone didn't exist. Even after Android came out they had their heads in the sand. By the time they finally woke up, it was too late.
From the company bleeding money for the last three years because it has absolutely no idea what customers want, comes the grand declaration "Customers won't want tablets."
Maybe if Blackberry had released a tablet that had full access to the Android market, they might have sold some. My daughter got a playbook from her boyfriend's parents a few months ago, and while the hardware is nothing to sneeze at, the fact that you couldn't even install the Netflix app was a revelation to me as to just how clueless RIM/Blackberry really is.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Screen Real Estate.
There is some stuff you Just. Cant Do. On a phone. The screen is too small.
IF his idea that phones will be a little bigger, do we really want to look like an idiot walking around with a giant brick to our head? Or have to wory about always using a bluetooth earpiece? And where will you stick that larger than you prefer phone?
IMHO an iPhone 5 is starting to get a little too big. The larger samsungs are even worse.
Who wants an automobile? The form factor is terrible; the tiny wheels can hardly get through a foot of mud or ford a stream. You have to fill it up with "gas" constantly, instead of simply letting the horses wander around in your pasture.
No, there's simply no future in the automobile, once people try them out and find how limiting they really are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Guy who was late to the party says the party was boring anyway.
I agree completely. Tablets are a fad. The form factor is terrible and the functionality is lacking. I think that most people are going to continue using phones and laptops.
Laptops are bulky and heavy. Netbooks offer a terrible user experience (mostly thanks to Microsoft forcing lousy specs on vendors as a prerequisite for Windows Starter licensing).
I've taken my iPad with me on my last few business trips. It was light and with a big enough display for comfortable use without being too big (or too small like smartphone displays). (Although I'm not happy Apple has already abandoned updates on my not-even-3-years-old iPad 1 -- might have to consider an Android tablet next time.)
Not sure where the market will go, but tablets aren't a fad for me, they're just the best compromise of all the alternatives (when traveling, at least).
The major issue is that tablets are great content consumption devices for watching video or reading but piss poor content creation devices.
This is like comparing the number of people who own music versus the number of people who play music. "Content creation" hasn't been on the radar of most people since pre-recorded media has been made available at a good price point. I remember being about 12 or 13 years old with a Commodore 64. Of the 6 other kids I knew at the time who owned computers about 5 of us could code simple games and such. That's roughly 85%. How many kids can code today? The difference is that for a 12 year old pre-recorded media was too expensive and my parents weren't shelling out 20 dollars for the latest SSI title every other week.
This isn't even remotely the same and you damn well know it. Horse drawn buggies existed for a very long time before cars and cars were seen as a natural progression of that mode of transportation. The fact we measure engines in horse-power to this day is a testament to that fact. Tablets could be seen as the next phase of computers, but the fact remains they are not as useful for many purposes as real computers are. Whereas with your car example a car completely and thoroughly replaced all functions of a horse drawn carriage in its entirety.
I've had several smart phones but recently picked up my first tablet. I do most of my smart phone stuff on the tablet now. I'm now looking at the end of my current cell contract and realizing I'd be better off going to a basic cell.
I have an Asus Transformer TF700T tablet with a detachable keyboard. I can VNC remote desktop. I can access SMB shares. I can game, surf, and do stuff I never would do on a phone (or Blackberry).
The thing in my house that's collecting dust? My old dell laptop. If I need to do real work I'm on my desktop. It's been months since I opened the screen on my laptop. I'm going to wipe it and give it to the kids. There's your dying form factor.
As someone who works in educational technology, I can say with confidence that tablets are going to be sticking around for well beyond 2018. Take a look at all the schools that have or are starting 1:1 programs, and you'll see that more than half of those programs are using iPads or some other tablet. Look at the OLPC tablets and what's been happening with them. Certainly there's a certain group of people who might not "get" tablets because they're not "traditional" computers, but that does nothing to discount how intuitive they can be, especially to children and the elderly. No, you're not going to be doing extensive command-line work from a tablet, but nobody is suggesting that tablets will entirely overthrow traditional computers. Tablets are an educator's dream. You don't have to teach a child to use a mouse--they just touch what they want. Hell, you hardly have to teach any of the basic functions of a tablet to a child at all; they can figure just about everything out themselves.
Of course the tablet market isn't dying. It could possibly be described as a bubble at the moment, but that doesn't mean that that sales are going to disappear within the next five years.
The issue is more that tablets are essentially as powerful as they'll need to be for the next five years, if not longer. They're designed to be highly portable devices that can access the internet and be used as ebook readers, but are large enough to be easier to read from than a smartphone. Aside from the people who need to have the new shiny, most people who own or are thinking of buying a tablet will only upgrade when it can no longer handle their needs, much like Windows XP computers.
Who wants an automobile? The form factor is terrible; the tiny wheels can hardly get through a foot of mud or ford a stream. You have to fill it up with "gas" constantly, instead of simply letting the horses wander around in your pasture.
No, there's simply no future in the automobile, once people try them out and find how limiting they really are.
I heard something extremely similar in a discussion recently about the Tesla Model S, and it was in all seriousness. "foot of mud" and "ford a stream" was replaced with "drive a 1500 mile road trip" and "pull a trailer", replace "gas" with "charging". There was totally no way they could possibly have a future once people found out how limiting they really are. You can people said what you just wrote in full seriousness back in the day.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They were in star trek. They'll be around. Everyone likes phones for communication. Tablets will replace books eventually. Tablets will replace phones even.
Think about a tablet with a flexible screen. One that you can roll up. Now think about a cell phone type stick device that you can put to your ear. Now think about pulling out a display for when you need to use it's screen. And then when you're done just let it roll back into the device.
Welcome to the next tablet device.
Blackberry is completely short sighted.
I disagree, unless you're plugging a keyboard into it, they are piss poor as a means of creating content. At which point, you have a device that's barely any smaller than a laptop and quite a bit slower.
I think he's right. Have you noticed that phones are getting bigger and tablets are getting smaller? I think phones are about to eat tablets in the same way they ate other stand along devices. People don't want two devices. They want one.
Personally, I hate the idea.
Yet nowhere in his reply did he even mention Apple. He may be an "Apple fanboi", but that post doesn't smack of one to me.
I also disagree that tablets are a fad. I owned a netbook for about two months before it was sold because it was nearly unusable. Everything about it was horrible: 600px high screen resolution made web browsing laughable, near-unusable trackpad (this was a Dell, others may be better/worse), the small keyboard made text input a chore (especially the punctuation keys), and so-so battery life.
Tablets are much more usable *to me* than my netbook ever was. My first tablet was much more pleasurable to read webpages on (in fact, I still prefer using Pulse to keep up with the tech sites I read every day to using multiple tabs in a browser), and its text input was easier because the soft keys were larger than the keys on the netbook. Yes, it lacked tactile feedback, but I was used to that within a week. I don't usually hammer out many multi-paragraph emails or forum comments on it, but I have no problem doing so, if necessary.
I'm not saying they're for everyone, but for me my tablet is my go-to device for 95% of my non work-related "computer" usage (the other 5% is a custom-built computer for gaming and photo editing.) I've even stopped carrying my laptop (a sub-3lb ultra-book) to and from work everyday.
The horse will mow AND fertilize your lawn!
The tablet isn't "automobile vs horse". Neither smartphones nor laptops could be considered "horses" and those are what bookend the tablet market.
The basic issue is that people want something small and easy to carry with a lot of on-the-go features like telephone, texting, and GPS like a smartphone. However, they also want something they can sit down and compose documents or browse the web on for long periods of time. They also want something that can replace a book, an MP3 player, and a television. This is all possible because all of these tasks involve using the Internet in today's world (with true 4G LTE cellular networks become a true IP-based network that is connected to and routable by the Internet), and tablets take advantage of this.
Tablets, like netbooks before them, are an attempt to merge semi-portable laptop computers and semi-multipurpose smartphones into a single superdevice. I would continue to argue that tablets are still shitty devices, however. They're only slightly less shitty than netbooks, and that's why they're doing well. Apple may have understood that tablets are shitty smartphone-laptops, however, and instead positioned the iPad as a third device primarily for media consumption (music/movies/limited games/books/web/web-like apps) which is really all the device does well. This has turned out to be a new market, which is why the segment has seen such explosive growth. One of the mistake market analysts make is that they think tablets replace laptops or smartphones, when, in reality, they merely provide feature subsets of both. Certainly, some users will find they no longer need a laptop with a tablet, but I don't think this is that significant.
The other mistake is that the market analysts have forgotten the difference between developing and developed markets. Established markets like laptop computers and cellphones (smartphones are overtaking and replacing regular phones, rather than being an emerging market) have shown stagnant growth because they're developed and saturated markets. The majority of sales are for replacement devices rather than new owners. Tablets, OTOH, represent an emerging market, with many people purchasing their first tablet. It's difficult to speculate how long it will take for the tablet market to saturate, but it's clear that what was once thought to be just a segment of the computer market is instead a completely different market altogether.
What may happen is that families that currently own multiple laptops will instead own a single laptop and multiple tablets instead. I could see that, particularly if tablets stop being so strictly linked to a single person as if they're a smartphone or internal organ.
Let's say this is how things are now. Assume a family of two adults and two or more children:
Each adult owns a single-user smartphone.
Children share one to two plain cellphones (or hand-me-down smartphones).
Each adult owns one single-user laptop.
Each family owns one multi-user desktop.
Each family owns one large screen TV, and two or more modest screen TVs.
Here's what I can see happening in the future:
Each adult will own a single-user smartphone.
Each child will own a cheap single-user smartphone.
Each family will have one multi-user laptop.
Each family will have one or two large screen displays (either TVs or computers primarily for video capabilities).
Each family will have two or three multi-user tablets.
See how the tablets provide coverage between televisions and laptops?
Personally, I think it's equally as likely that this happens:
Each adult will own a single-user smartphone.
Each child will own a cheap single-user smartphone.
Each family will have two or more multi-user or single-user laptops.
Each family will have one or two large screen displays (either TVs or computers primarily for video capabilities).
Each family will have one multi-user tablet.
That's more expensive, but also far more useful for many people.
Perhap
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
The difference between netbooks/chromebooks & a tablet? One has a keyboard attached... one uses a bluetooth keyboard.
That and 10" netbooks tended to be cheaper than a 10" tablet, a Bluetooth keyboard, and a case to keep them together. And netbooks shipped with an operating system that supports tiled or overlapping windows, unlike tablets whose operating systems inherit the all maximized all the time window management policy from the smartphones that they were originally designed for. And when you do need a more precise pointing device, there's more of a culture of using an external mouse with a netbook than with a tablet.
And netbooks got their asses handed to them by the iPad. Why do you think that is? Is it because everyone is stupid and will come to their senses (i.e., somehow come to agree with you instead of having their own preferences)? Or is it because the things that you decry are things that they either don't mind, or specifically prefer?
Honestly, nine times out of ten, if a nerd makes nothing but technical claims against some product, it's almost always guaranteed to be a success. That's because the things we care about are outside of the norm.
A lot of geeks seemed to think that because computers went from nerd to commonplace over the past two decades, that means people all became geeks themselves. They didn't. Most people don't actually want computers (or tablets or phones, etc.) for the same reasons we do. Yes, there's some overlap, but the things that stand out to us do not stand out to them.
People like you often complain that the iPad is a "consumption device". Well, guess what? Most people want to consume on their devices. That's why they have them. Consume and communicate, and engage in "lite" forms of productions (i.e., share photos with Instagram filters). They don't want a mouse. They don't want Blender 3D. They don't want gcc and vim.
It's hilarious to watch geeks extoll the virtues of the netbook over the tablet as an argument that the iPad is a fad, but the netbook is the real product people want. Every quarter, tens of millions of people prove that assertion ass-backwards. I always thought geeks were supposed to be smart, so why do so many of them have such a hard time noticing this contradiction? A contradiction that is easily remedied by a simple adjustment of a few basic assumptions?
SuperKendall is an Apple fanboi and will make any semi-plausible argument to support his master. Don't take his arguments seriously, he's just here to sell things.
Funny how a person who's views fit reality (that people prefer iPads over netbooks) is a "fanboy" that shouldn't be taken seriously.
No, actually it's not funny. It's sad, to be quite honest. Why are Slashdot nerds so angry and hateful?
I am a technologist. You are an idiot. I serve no master save myself; you serve any master that will have you.
There's something mentally amiss with a large swath of the population here. They call others "fanbois" (with the extra-gay 'i' for good measure), but all they do is spew hatred for the things they don't like.
We're all supposed to be nerds here. Android is awesome, Linux is awesome. But so is Windows and Macs and iPads and all that. And if you happen to simply like something that is not sanctioned by the holy order of a minority here on Slashdot, you're the "fanboy"!
Nerd/geek is supposed to be all about being excited about tech (or other things, but quite commonly tech). I don't understand why all the negativity. I get that there's going to be rivalries to some extent, but here (and a few other places, like Engadget and Google+), the Linux/Android fans are like absurdly exaggerated caricatures of the supposed Apple "fanbois" they are always complaining about!
This even goes to the extreme of Linux enthusiasts hating Ubuntu, or Android fans calling the Raspberry Pi useless. What the hell guys?!
Precisely. This is the distinction that so many of the "tablets suck for content creation" crowd are missing.
If you're going to be coding, work with a device that has an interface designed around a keyboard. If you're going to be writing articles, do the same.
If you're going to be painting digitally, find yourself something that works with a stylus. Previously, people used to attach a Wacom peripheral to their PCs to accomplish this task, but tablets are already owned by millions of people and can basically do this sort of thing right out of the box.
For musicians, especially amateurs, the tablet can be a complete game-changer, since it can replace the need to purchase hundreds or thousands of dollars in instruments and other tools. Clearly it won't be replacing the need for a physical violin or a physical piano anytime soon, but for stuff like synths, beat boxes, or just quick compositions that could use an instrument the musician doesn't have available, a tablet can fill that gap quite capably for a fraction of the price of purchasing those items individually, and its touchscreen interface is far better-suited for those uses than a mouse and keyboard are.
If you're going to be taking or editing videos or pictures, a tablet won't be replacing a professional-grade setup, but for amateurs the tools that are available are already quite good, and a lot of the actions (e.g. for videos: scrubbing through a video, selecting a portion of the video, or establishing the path of a panning shot; for images: cropping, zooming, or rotating) come more naturally with fingers on a touchscreen than they do with a mouse and keyboard hooked up to a screen that sits in front of you.
Tablets don't suck for content creation. In fact, they're quite good at it. But they're general purpose tools that will rarely be better than purpose-built systems, especially once you start to talk about professionals and the incredibly specific needs that they have.
Me thinks the man doth have the taste of Sour Grapes in his gullet. But hey, I'm not so big on tablets my self. But you know who is? Non-techies. My wife loves her tablet. LOVES IT. Takes it with her whever she goes. I absolutely cannot do my work on my tablet, I always pull out my ultra when I want to do development. But as a mass-market gadget, the tablet seems to be a big hit. Five years from now? Dunno, probably. 10 years? Hell, who knows? Maybe we'll be using empty air as an interface to our smart phones to pull up data on a 3d projection in that air. Maybe people will get in to being wet wired (William Gibson, anyone?) and jack their data directly into their brains. Wtf.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Pfft! Hey, look, everybody! An objectivity fanboi!
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