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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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?!