On Jan 18, 11:47 pm, JamesJ <[email protected]> wrote: > I think > that tablet success is actually a combination of a large cultural > shift with the right technology at the right time.
No matter how you look at it, the iPad success is astonishing - it sold 14.8 million in its first _nine months_ and will be beyond 20 millions after a year. The DVD player sold only 350,000 units in its first year (http://www.cnbc.com/id/39501308/ iPad_Adoption_Rate_Fastest_Ever_Passing_DVD_Player), the iPod only 376,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg) and even the iPhone 6.1 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_simple.svg). For the first product in a new category (touch tablet) or the first big product in an existing niche category (tablets), that's a lot of units. I think in a few years we'll look back on 2010 and realize that the iPad is indeed the "computer for the rest of us" that Apple promised with the Mac back in 1984. With the iPad competition really showing up this year, I think tablets will go mainstream in 2011. Hoping for strong competition for the iPad, I'm a little discouraged to see RIM and Palm touting questionable features ("We can run 20 programs at once" - well, I can't) instead of saying how do you organize your music and video and pictures and books. Since Microsoft decided that tablets should run the real Windows and made itself more irrelevant in mobile, the only real competition will be Android. From the first Honeycomb videos on CES, it seems that "tablet Android" will be a lot different than "phone Android", which would be the exact opposite of what Apple does (Steve Jobs even mentioned that the iPhone trained millions of users in how to use the iPad). It'll be interesting to see how successful the Android tablets will be. But since the iPad is more like the iPod Touch than the iPhone in terms of customer experience (less carrier promotion and subsidies, more focus on media consumption) and therefore plays to Apple's "everything's integrated" strengths, I expect the iPad to hold a higher market share in the medium term than the iPhone. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
