On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 13:59:26 UTC, codephantom wrote:
Microsoft had the vision though, and they had it earlier than
perhaps anyone else. But the vision was too far ahead of its
time, and, around the early 2000's they refused to lose any
more money, put it on the back burner, and competitors came in
a took over - at a time when 'consumers' were just beginning to
share the vision too....
Yes, HP had the IPAQ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
It was kinda interesting, but a bit too clunky and a bit
expensive for personal use. I guess it was used for things like
filling out forms on-site in businesses or doing measurements and
things like that.
And touch screen and battery quality was a consideration as well,
but either way, Apple App Store was probably a big factor for iOS
to succeed. And the iPad was very popular with journalist who saw
it as a device for electronic news papers and already was in the
Apple fold (desk top publishing) I guess, so the iPad 1 got lots
of free marketing.
So the technology has to be effortless, but there are also such
social factors that drive free media coverage that come into
play. If regular news paper journalists had not been enamoured by
it, then it would have faded away…
But I think what really made it take off so fast and
unexpectadly, was the convergence of mobile devices, mobile
communication technology (i.e wifi, gps and stuff), and of
course the internet... as well as the ability to find cheap
labour overseas to build the produces on mass.
You could attach lots of stuff to IPAQ, just like any laptop
(Wifi, probably GPS, etc…)
