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Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering: 1) Both have known it was com

Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. And there are a few reasons why its staggering: 1) Both have known it was coming, maybe longer than anyone else. But got the core requirements all wrong. 2) No one really seems to care. 3) Related to (2), there is no belief that they have anything up their sleeve. 4) Their existing ecosystem, probably a billion units strong, doesn't seem to help their situation at all. 5) Both CEOs seem firmly in place still. While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers.

pchristensen 16y ago
1 + 4 + 5 = classic disruption theory. The margins, cost structure, and organizations that have made them so successful so far are what's preventing them from seizing the tablet space. The CEO's are in place because they have made so much money from the old business.
- InclinedPlane 16y ago
  Ding ding ding. MS and Intel are still aware of the disruptiveness of "Tablets" (a poor description for the phenomenon, but descriptive enough), but they are chained to their existing org-charts, ship schedules, and revenue streams. Whether or not they'll be able to pivot fast enough is still up in the air. The really interesting aspect is that the important part in market growth isn't when the disruptive technology takes the lead in marketshare, or when it starts eating into the marketshare of the old guard significantly. Rather, it's the inflection points of growth that are important. When a big company is past its knee (still growing but growing at a smaller and smaller pace over time) while the little guy is growing at a faster and faster pace, that's when to pay attention, because lots of things happen quickly and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast.
  - angstrom 16y ago
    Chained, but not oblivious. Windows 8 will borrow heavily from Surface. Registry will be gone. It will be good, but it may be too late.
  - jimbokun 16y ago
    "...and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast." Sounds like precisely where we are with mobile computing platforms.
mkramlich 16y ago
Agreed but they have so much cash they could buy a company that does tablets well then rebrand/integrate. Never underestimate what a billion dollars can do given the willpower to use it.
- rryyan 16y ago
  In fact, this is exactly what HP did.
- yannickt 16y ago
  It won't do them any good if they don't have people in house who "get it". Look what happened with the Kin after they acquired Danger. Edit: another thing, the top dogs in this space (Google and the staggeringly efficient Apple) have a lot of cash and are much more focused. So if they were to go all in in any market segment their money is likely to go a lot further than it would at Microsoft.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    true. good point!
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Like Google, with Android...
Todd 16y ago
I wouldn't count them out. They've ported NT to ARM. The Windows Phone 7 shell, which runs on CE currently, could easily run as a front end to NT/Win8 on smaller devices. The touch device model and API is fully developed in WP7 and Win7. They have all the pieces in place to release a very compelling product--both from the end-user perspective, in the WP7/Metro shell, and the developer perspective, with excellent tools and a solid OS underneath. Whether they'll do it is another question.
- tomkarlo 16y ago
  If they can't get enough devices out in the market to make it a compelling target platform for app makers, it won't matter that they have all the pieces. That's increasingly looking like the outcome. Why would anyone develop an app for W7 before iPhone or Android, assuming they don't have incumbent knowledge of the W7 environment (and even then...)?
  - Raphael 16y ago
    What if Windows Phone apps also ran on Windows proper?
    - ikono 16y ago
      It's not just about having apps, it's about having good apps. Good mobile apps, in most cases, would not make good desktop apps and vice versa.
    - jimbokun 16y ago
      This has been Microsoft's strategy all along, and it has been an abysmal failure. A mobile app blown up for the desktop sucks as a desktop app, and a desktop app shrunk down into a mobile app will suck as a mobile app. Apple figured this out, and had the talent to invent a usable interface paradigm for mobile. Which led them to the highest market cap in the tech industry, with a lot of growth potential left.
  - kisielk 16y ago
    I wouldn't underestimate the huge number of .Net / Windows developers that exist for Microsoft's ecosystem. If they manage to line their technologies up just right and make a big push for the mobile space, there's a huge developer mindshare that's entrenched in the Visual Studio / .Net world. A lot of these people have never used a Mac or other OS, and never programmed for another platform. Many of them don't have the interest to switch over to Java or ObjC and would prefer to work in the MS ecosystem. These are the people who would be developing the apps.
tesseract 16y ago
Bill Gates (and with him, Microsoft) has been nigh obsessed with tablets since at least the mid-1990s. I think the trouble is more that MS entered the tablet market way too early, and got bogged down by hardware limitations of the era: the CPU etc. had to be something from the laptop world rather than from the PDA world because the latter was not capable of driving a big color display. Laptop CPUs were expensive and relatively power hungry. Big color displays were expensive too, so because of the cost people expected a tablet to replace a laptop. This probably led in part to the decision to run a desktop OS on tablets rather than come up with a new UI model and start a new app ecosystem. Rather than going with the (expensive, crappy, or both) touchscreen technology of the time they mostly used Wacom digitizers. The tablet that so resulted was doomed to be basically a niche product. I think you could say that MS is in the same situation with respect to the modern tablet market, that Palm was in with respect to the smartphone market about four or five years ago. As for the other phone makers, remember Nokia and others have been trying and failing to do the tablet thing for years too. Remember all the clamoring (for years) for Apple to introduce a tablet? It was not because all the Apple rumor bloggers had some clairvoyance about the market that Steve Jobs did not - it was because seemingly everyone else had a tablet out, or would soon, and people were afraid Apple would get left behind.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  I agree, tablets have been the ultimate fixation in computing devices for a long time. We need only look at scifi -- how many shows have people carrying around pencil-thin panels and pulling up a ship's specifications while they walk and talk with the warp engineer, pounding on a glass table to engage weapons system, or other things like that? Apple hit the right combination of price and style at the right time, and imo took the scifi conception much more literally than their competitors, to bring tablets mainstream.
  - greendestiny 16y ago
    It's all about the multitouch. Sure a windows tablet with multitouch running XP would have been massively inferior to the iPad but it would have started to realise the potential of the form. Instead years of Wacom pen tablets just made people hate the idea.
fleitz 16y ago
Microsoft actually jumped the shark on tablets with the whole XP Tablet edition years ago. The hardware just wasn't ready and interacting with Windows XP and it's app via a stylus is just not compelling. XP Tablet is Microsoft's Newton, an idea ahead of it's time. I think there is an anti-tablet culture at MS stemming from the failure of the early laptop-based tablets. Once MS has a solid hold with Win Phone 7 you'll see that interface transition to tablets.
- thristian 16y ago
  XP? Really? What about Windows for Pen Computing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing
  - rahoulb 16y ago
    I'm glad someone remembers Windows for Pen Computing. It's also the first instance I can think of of Microsoft using vapourware to obliterate a potential competitor (Go in this case).
zacharyz 16y ago
I remember playing with one of intel's tablet prototype units way back in 2007. It was bulky and was running XP and used a stylus for input. Obviously it was more for testing feasibility of the platform more than anything but it was incredibly unusable and uninteresting at the time. They were aiming for a fall release which obviously never materialized. So they have been thinking about the tablet space for a while, they just haven't been approaching it the same way as Apple has and I think realized that it would have been a shitty product if they had released it.
mjfern 16y ago
> While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers. If it were just the end of the consumer market, then Intel and MS should be concerned, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that they still dominate the enterprise space. The issue is that their dominance in the enterprise space is eroding as well. For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft's enterprise business is eroding due to several trends, such as cloud services (e.g., Gmail) and cloud computing (e.g., PaaS and IaaS). And both companies have to overcome some reputational issues stemming from their historical power in the PC space through the Wintel standard. Intel and Microsoft have tremendous resources to respond to these threats, but the clock is ticking.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  "For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers." Innovator's Dilemma.
  - mjfern 16y ago
    Yes, there are signs that the x86 architecture is in the early stages of being disrupted. Here is an article I posted in October that uses Christensen's disruptive technology framework to assess the threat posed by ARM: The End of x86? - http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/21/the-end-of-x86/ http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/21/the-end-of-x86/
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
lsc 16y ago
>While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers. the server market, for all of my career, really, has been following the consumer market. The stuff you see in a server is basically upmarket desktop kit; the primary difference being the addition of ecc in various places. If ARM beats X86 on the desktop, within a short number of years, they will beat x86 on the server, too. Now, arm is a /long way/ from winning the desktop market, and I'm not at all sure they will. I'm just saying... /if/ x86 loses the consumer market, they will also lose the cost-sensitive server market. x86 only owns the server market because the r&d and economies of scale paid for by the consumer market.
- dstein 16y ago
  There will be no desktop market. That's the disruption.
  - lsc 16y ago
    Personally, I find that... unlikely. Of course, that's a market I know nothing about, so I could very well be wrong. It doesn't really change my argument, though. s/desktop/consumer hardware/g and you get the same meaning. It's the mass market that makes things cheap, and if you can cram enough power in to a tablet CPU that it can replace the desktop, you can bet that us server folks will start using those CPUs (maybe modified with ecc support in the ram/cache) for our own applications The real difference for us server folk is that tablet CPUs are always going to be behind the curve in terms of raw power. Likely, that will result in server boards accelerating further in to the 'massively multicore' direction they are going now. Which is okay with me; 1024 chickens, for what I do, actually work better than four strong oxen.
  - eftpotrm 16y ago
    You really see offices full of workers staring at tablet PCs, trains & planes full of road warriors bashing out long reports on touchscreens? The home market may primarily shift to tablets; I'm not convinced by that and I think there's still a problem with the use case for content creators on tablets which includes an awful lot of school children. But the market I absolutely can't see abandoning PCs as we see them now and moving to handheld touchscreens is the office market and that's far from insignificant.
mjfern 16y ago
> Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. The real staggering fact is that it's just not the tablet market. Both Microsoft and Intel are also absent or significantly behind in smart phones, eBook readers, portable media players, connected TVs, and almost every market that represents computing (devices) beyond the PC for consumers.
- unp3rs0n 16y ago
  you are missing the xbox.
  - sxtxixtxcxh 16y ago
    ... which uses a PowerPC chip, likely (and ironically) the reason Apple switched to Intel.
  - dgabriel 16y ago
    The xbox/zune/netflix combo is really amazing. And the kinect is poised to create a different revolution in a different space. Tablets are not the whole future of computing, not by a long shot.
sofuture 16y ago
I'm going to -4 on this, but: it absolutely still remains to be seen whether or not tablets are worth a damn. Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary this concept is, but that's just talk. I'm not saying that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I am saying that it's not proven itself to be that just quite yet. I don't think the PC is (even close) to dead.
- far33d 16y ago
  >I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. 7.3m iPads sold so far hardly seems like just early adopters.
  - halostatue 16y ago
    7.3m is only the holiday quarter (FQ1'11 for Apple). The YTD was about 16m. I'd say that first year sales will probably bust 20m.
- dstein 16y ago
  Technology-wise I see absolutely nothing preventing Apple from being able to port and merge OSX and iOS down the road. And if Nvidia's ARM chips work out it looks like tablets might just be able to replace laptops. Imagine a MacBook Air without the keyboard and running both iOS and OSX.
- zachallaun 16y ago
  You're likely right in that tablets aren't about to kill PCs, but suggesting that tablets remain a simple "trendy gadget" seems a bit silly, especially considering Apple's Q1 reports [1]. Perhaps the iPad isn't to your taste, but it was to 7 million others. (And some 16 million overall.) One could argue that Apple does, in fact, have the largest consumer base of early adopters and trend followers of any company, but when you fan base grows larger than many other markets, you kind of have to call it main-stream. I'm pretty sure that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I'm comfortable saying that. But it's something other than a trend at this point. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/18/apple-q1-2011/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/18/apple-q1-2011/
bergie 16y ago
Intel is pretty heavily involved in MeeGo, an open source operating system targeting all sorts of post-PC environments.
- tesseract 16y ago
  It's looking like Nokia's about to get shaken up, which might possibly entail a jump to Android or Windows Mobile. Where does that leave MeeGo? Can Intel go it alone as the only major commercial sponsor? Whose devices will run it?

pchristensen 16y ago

1 + 4 + 5 = classic disruption theory. The margins, cost structure, and organizations that have made them so successful so far are what's preventing them from seizing the tablet space. The CEO's are in place because they have made so much money from the old business.

InclinedPlane 16y ago
Ding ding ding. MS and Intel are still aware of the disruptiveness of "Tablets" (a poor description for the phenomenon, but descriptive enough), but they are chained to their existing org-charts, ship schedules, and revenue streams. Whether or not they'll be able to pivot fast enough is still up in the air. The really interesting aspect is that the important part in market growth isn't when the disruptive technology takes the lead in marketshare, or when it starts eating into the marketshare of the old guard significantly. Rather, it's the inflection points of growth that are important. When a big company is past its knee (still growing but growing at a smaller and smaller pace over time) while the little guy is growing at a faster and faster pace, that's when to pay attention, because lots of things happen quickly and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast.
- angstrom 16y ago
  Chained, but not oblivious. Windows 8 will borrow heavily from Surface. Registry will be gone. It will be good, but it may be too late.
- jimbokun 16y ago
  "...and by the time the marketshare starts shifting it's already too late, the die has been cast." Sounds like precisely where we are with mobile computing platforms.

mkramlich 16y ago

Agreed but they have so much cash they could buy a company that does tablets well then rebrand/integrate. Never underestimate what a billion dollars can do given the willpower to use it.

rryyan 16y ago
In fact, this is exactly what HP did.
yannickt 16y ago
It won't do them any good if they don't have people in house who "get it". Look what happened with the Kin after they acquired Danger. Edit: another thing, the top dogs in this space (Google and the staggeringly efficient Apple) have a lot of cash and are much more focused. So if they were to go all in in any market segment their money is likely to go a lot further than it would at Microsoft.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  true. good point!
steveklabnik 16y ago
Like Google, with Android...

Todd 16y ago

I wouldn't count them out. They've ported NT to ARM. The Windows Phone 7 shell, which runs on CE currently, could easily run as a front end to NT/Win8 on smaller devices. The touch device model and API is fully developed in WP7 and Win7. They have all the pieces in place to release a very compelling product--both from the end-user perspective, in the WP7/Metro shell, and the developer perspective, with excellent tools and a solid OS underneath. Whether they'll do it is another question.

tomkarlo 16y ago
If they can't get enough devices out in the market to make it a compelling target platform for app makers, it won't matter that they have all the pieces. That's increasingly looking like the outcome. Why would anyone develop an app for W7 before iPhone or Android, assuming they don't have incumbent knowledge of the W7 environment (and even then...)?
- Raphael 16y ago
  What if Windows Phone apps also ran on Windows proper?
  - ikono 16y ago
    It's not just about having apps, it's about having good apps. Good mobile apps, in most cases, would not make good desktop apps and vice versa.
  - jimbokun 16y ago
    This has been Microsoft's strategy all along, and it has been an abysmal failure. A mobile app blown up for the desktop sucks as a desktop app, and a desktop app shrunk down into a mobile app will suck as a mobile app. Apple figured this out, and had the talent to invent a usable interface paradigm for mobile. Which led them to the highest market cap in the tech industry, with a lot of growth potential left.
- kisielk 16y ago
  I wouldn't underestimate the huge number of .Net / Windows developers that exist for Microsoft's ecosystem. If they manage to line their technologies up just right and make a big push for the mobile space, there's a huge developer mindshare that's entrenched in the Visual Studio / .Net world. A lot of these people have never used a Mac or other OS, and never programmed for another platform. Many of them don't have the interest to switch over to Java or ObjC and would prefer to work in the MS ecosystem. These are the people who would be developing the apps.

tesseract 16y ago

Bill Gates (and with him, Microsoft) has been nigh obsessed with tablets since at least the mid-1990s. I think the trouble is more that MS entered the tablet market way too early, and got bogged down by hardware limitations of the era: the CPU etc. had to be something from the laptop world rather than from the PDA world because the latter was not capable of driving a big color display. Laptop CPUs were expensive and relatively power hungry. Big color displays were expensive too, so because of the cost people expected a tablet to replace a laptop. This probably led in part to the decision to run a desktop OS on tablets rather than come up with a new UI model and start a new app ecosystem. Rather than going with the (expensive, crappy, or both) touchscreen technology of the time they mostly used Wacom digitizers. The tablet that so resulted was doomed to be basically a niche product. I think you could say that MS is in the same situation with respect to the modern tablet market, that Palm was in with respect to the smartphone market about four or five years ago. As for the other phone makers, remember Nokia and others have been trying and failing to do the tablet thing for years too. Remember all the clamoring (for years) for Apple to introduce a tablet? It was not because all the Apple rumor bloggers had some clairvoyance about the market that Steve Jobs did not - it was because seemingly everyone else had a tablet out, or would soon, and people were afraid Apple would get left behind.

cookiecaper 16y ago
I agree, tablets have been the ultimate fixation in computing devices for a long time. We need only look at scifi -- how many shows have people carrying around pencil-thin panels and pulling up a ship's specifications while they walk and talk with the warp engineer, pounding on a glass table to engage weapons system, or other things like that? Apple hit the right combination of price and style at the right time, and imo took the scifi conception much more literally than their competitors, to bring tablets mainstream.
- greendestiny 16y ago
  It's all about the multitouch. Sure a windows tablet with multitouch running XP would have been massively inferior to the iPad but it would have started to realise the potential of the form. Instead years of Wacom pen tablets just made people hate the idea.

fleitz 16y ago

Microsoft actually jumped the shark on tablets with the whole XP Tablet edition years ago. The hardware just wasn't ready and interacting with Windows XP and it's app via a stylus is just not compelling. XP Tablet is Microsoft's Newton, an idea ahead of it's time. I think there is an anti-tablet culture at MS stemming from the failure of the early laptop-based tablets. Once MS has a solid hold with Win Phone 7 you'll see that interface transition to tablets.

thristian 16y ago
XP? Really? What about Windows for Pen Computing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_for_Pen_Computing
- rahoulb 16y ago
  I'm glad someone remembers Windows for Pen Computing. It's also the first instance I can think of of Microsoft using vapourware to obliterate a potential competitor (Go in this case).

zacharyz 16y ago

I remember playing with one of intel's tablet prototype units way back in 2007. It was bulky and was running XP and used a stylus for input. Obviously it was more for testing feasibility of the platform more than anything but it was incredibly unusable and uninteresting at the time. They were aiming for a fall release which obviously never materialized. So they have been thinking about the tablet space for a while, they just haven't been approaching it the same way as Apple has and I think realized that it would have been a shitty product if they had released it.

mjfern 16y ago

> While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers. If it were just the end of the consumer market, then Intel and MS should be concerned, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that they still dominate the enterprise space. The issue is that their dominance in the enterprise space is eroding as well. For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers. Meanwhile, Microsoft's enterprise business is eroding due to several trends, such as cloud services (e.g., Gmail) and cloud computing (e.g., PaaS and IaaS). And both companies have to overcome some reputational issues stemming from their historical power in the PC space through the Wintel standard. Intel and Microsoft have tremendous resources to respond to these threats, but the clock is ticking.

jimbokun 16y ago
"For Intel, a central issue is the ascension of ARM. Smooth-Stone (a well funded startup), Dell, and NVIDIA (see Project Denver), as well as others, are now prototyping ARM-based servers for datacenters. A related issue is that Intel's latest processors now overshoot the performance needs of a majority of customers." Innovator's Dilemma.
- mjfern 16y ago
  Yes, there are signs that the x86 architecture is in the early stages of being disrupted. Here is an article I posted in October that uses Christensen's disruptive technology framework to assess the threat posed by ARM: The End of x86? - http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/21/the-end-of-x86/ http://www.fernstrategy.com/2010/10/21/the-end-of-x86/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

lsc 16y ago

>While Intel and MS will make money hand over first for years to come, it does appear to be the end of the consumer market for these two companies. Their focus will be business class computers, workstations, and servers. the server market, for all of my career, really, has been following the consumer market. The stuff you see in a server is basically upmarket desktop kit; the primary difference being the addition of ecc in various places. If ARM beats X86 on the desktop, within a short number of years, they will beat x86 on the server, too. Now, arm is a /long way/ from winning the desktop market, and I'm not at all sure they will. I'm just saying... /if/ x86 loses the consumer market, they will also lose the cost-sensitive server market. x86 only owns the server market because the r&d and economies of scale paid for by the consumer market.

dstein 16y ago
There will be no desktop market. That's the disruption.
- lsc 16y ago
  Personally, I find that... unlikely. Of course, that's a market I know nothing about, so I could very well be wrong. It doesn't really change my argument, though. s/desktop/consumer hardware/g and you get the same meaning. It's the mass market that makes things cheap, and if you can cram enough power in to a tablet CPU that it can replace the desktop, you can bet that us server folks will start using those CPUs (maybe modified with ecc support in the ram/cache) for our own applications The real difference for us server folk is that tablet CPUs are always going to be behind the curve in terms of raw power. Likely, that will result in server boards accelerating further in to the 'massively multicore' direction they are going now. Which is okay with me; 1024 chickens, for what I do, actually work better than four strong oxen.
- eftpotrm 16y ago
  You really see offices full of workers staring at tablet PCs, trains & planes full of road warriors bashing out long reports on touchscreens? The home market may primarily shift to tablets; I'm not convinced by that and I think there's still a problem with the use case for content creators on tablets which includes an awful lot of school children. But the market I absolutely can't see abandoning PCs as we see them now and moving to handheld touchscreens is the office market and that's far from insignificant.

mjfern 16y ago

> Microsoft AND Intel being effectively missing from the tablet race is staggering. The real staggering fact is that it's just not the tablet market. Both Microsoft and Intel are also absent or significantly behind in smart phones, eBook readers, portable media players, connected TVs, and almost every market that represents computing (devices) beyond the PC for consumers.

unp3rs0n 16y ago
you are missing the xbox.
- sxtxixtxcxh 16y ago
  ... which uses a PowerPC chip, likely (and ironically) the reason Apple switched to Intel.
- dgabriel 16y ago
  The xbox/zune/netflix combo is really amazing. And the kinect is poised to create a different revolution in a different space. Tablets are not the whole future of computing, not by a long shot.

sofuture 16y ago

I'm going to -4 on this, but: it absolutely still remains to be seen whether or not tablets are worth a damn. Seriously, people play shitty games on them, and I guess read ebooks (though I see vastly more Kindles on the subway, than iPads). I do not, at all see a compelling product yet, I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. Sure there's great lip service to how revolutionary this concept is, but that's just talk. I'm not saying that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I am saying that it's not proven itself to be that just quite yet. I don't think the PC is (even close) to dead.

far33d 16y ago
>I see a trendy gadget that early adopters and trend followers have purchased. 7.3m iPads sold so far hardly seems like just early adopters.
- halostatue 16y ago
  7.3m is only the holiday quarter (FQ1'11 for Apple). The YTD was about 16m. I'd say that first year sales will probably bust 20m.
dstein 16y ago
Technology-wise I see absolutely nothing preventing Apple from being able to port and merge OSX and iOS down the road. And if Nvidia's ARM chips work out it looks like tablets might just be able to replace laptops. Imagine a MacBook Air without the keyboard and running both iOS and OSX.
zachallaun 16y ago
You're likely right in that tablets aren't about to kill PCs, but suggesting that tablets remain a simple "trendy gadget" seems a bit silly, especially considering Apple's Q1 reports [1]. Perhaps the iPad isn't to your taste, but it was to 7 million others. (And some 16 million overall.) One could argue that Apple does, in fact, have the largest consumer base of early adopters and trend followers of any company, but when you fan base grows larger than many other markets, you kind of have to call it main-stream. I'm pretty sure that the iPad isn't the second coming of Christ. I'm comfortable saying that. But it's something other than a trend at this point. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/18/apple-q1-2011/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/18/apple-q1-2011/

bergie 16y ago

Intel is pretty heavily involved in MeeGo, an open source operating system targeting all sorts of post-PC environments.

tesseract 16y ago
It's looking like Nokia's about to get shaken up, which might possibly entail a jump to Android or Windows Mobile. Where does that leave MeeGo? Can Intel go it alone as the only major commercial sponsor? Whose devices will run it?