The Age of the Tablet by Al Giovetti
09282011
In a recent Dilbert cartoon, Dilbert
was on his desktop computer and one of his coworkers criticized him
for being behind the times. The toon explained that in this decade,
the modern worker uses his phone to conduct business. Perhaps the
next decade will be marked as the decade of the iPad.
Most of the modern business people are
getting older and you can read the text on an iPad much more easily
than the text on an iPhone. The iPad is becoming a large phone with
internal speakers, microphone, and two cameras (on the screen side
and the opposite side to the screen) just like the iPhone. There are
several reasons why the iPad may be the next generation standard.
As with most innovations, competitors
attempt to produce “a better mousetrap.” Not to be outdone, even
Apple is competing with itself with the introduction of the iPad 2.
Very soon we expect to hear the Apple announcement of the iPad 3,
which most iPad users hope will be that significant improvement that
will allow them to finally retire or pass on their iPad 1 and iPad
2s.
These new competitors have been called
tablets. An alternate title to this article could be “Tablet
Wars,” or maybe “Tablet Trek” (in reference to Bill Shatner's
recent statement that Star Wars was only a poor copy of Star Trek in
that it depended solely on special effects). No matter what you call
it, there are so many pretenders to the iPad throne that I might not
have enough room to get through more than a few of them in this
article.
I would not be surprised if a company
launches another tablet before you finish reading this article.
Samsung, Fujitsu, Blackberry, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, Viewsonic,
and Acer have their own tablets that they are marketing. I am sure
there are many other competitors that I do not have time to list
here.
Tablets were around for over a decade
before the iPad appeared on the scene. Lately there seems to be a
tablet coming out from competitors on a weekly basis. But no one was
able to put the package together like Apple. Apple made the tablet
so easy to use that it sold like hotcakes.
In the last 10 years Apple stock
has risen dramatically due to the tremendous sales of iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices and
services. In 2001, Apple stock was $17 per share. In 2011, Apple
stock rose to over $400 per share. Microsoft stock was about $50 per
share in 2001, and in 2011 the stock is around $26. This gives you a
real assessment of how important Apple is in the current market.