There is an growing notion that it is impossible to compete with the Apple iPad. The tablet market isn’t a tablet market. It’s an iPad market and it is largely limited to Apple. Does that mean that PC makers have to surrender?
A couple weeks ago, a casual chat I had with a high-ranking executive from a large Silicon Valley hardware firm took an interesting direction. When I questioned the current strategy of Android tablet makers and pointed to lackluster sales, I was told that “of course, Android can’t compete with the iPad.” Of course? It sounded like I was the last one to find out what everyone else in Silicon Valley already knows. There is no market for a general tablet. Not surprisingly, that executive asked not to be quoted since it is never a good idea to question a trend that is reshaping an entire industry and has an effect on billions of dollars of investments.
In the following weeks, I chatted with more people at companies that are heavily involved in tablet development. It was quite stunning that there seems to be virtually no hope left that anyone will be able to ever reach the sales numbers Apple has with its iPad. Quotes to prove this claim? Impossible to get – no one likes to get fired. But there is more credibility to such a statement and the prediction that the iPad is likely to remain the only successful tablet for several years, even if analysts are predicting that more than 250 million tablets will be sold annually by 2015.
Apple iPad 2
Of course, we know about non-iPad tablets that are offered well below the $500 price barrier and then we know about tablets such as the Galaxy Tab, the Motorola Xoom or the Blackberry Playbook. Each high-profile Android tablet so far ignored key features of the iPad, including price, size and app availability, in an way that could almost be considered sabotage (note to Motorola: Apple does not sell many iPads in the $799 range), but the question really is: Would it matter, if there was a perfect Android-iPad clone? Would you buy it? My arrogant prediction: You won’t and if you do, you will be in the minority. Most people will stick with an iPad since it has the necessary platform support Android lacks. Android would need Windows and Chrome OS interoperability, a compelling and unique feature set and it would need a lot more apps. Success would even be questionable then. We should accept at some point that simply because Apple can sell a tablet, it does not mean that Acer, Samsung or HP can as well.
While the traditional PC reflects quite a bit usability, the tablet does not. An iPad is an expression of lifestyle, a certain expression of status and wealth, and represents a device you really don’t need, but buy because you have seen someone else with it – or because you find it just plain cool. Would you flaunt your Xoom? Probably not. If someone asked you what the Xoom is, you would always have to say “it’s like an iPad.” Apple already has the mindshare. Given the substantial failures of Android tablets so far, it is amazing to see how Microsoft is chasing what appears to be a phantom tablet market as well and we even see a new processor war evolving just over the tablet market.
A recent report released by iSuppli states that the tablet market led by the iPad is now causing PC sales to decline. In Q1, sales were down 0.3%, Acer took the brunt of it with a decline of 20.4%. The conclusion was that the tablet market has an “increasing momentum”. Honestly, I haven’t seen a tablet momentum yet. Sure, I have seen an increasing iPad momentum, but a few hundred thousand sold Xooms and Playbooks can’t be called a momentum. It is just a rounding error in overall PC sales right now.
However, the report pointed to Acer as the most vulnerable PC company, most likely because of Acer’s netbook exposure, which helped the company grow in 2008 to 2010. Netbooks aren’t selling anymore. Like iPads, netbooks aren’t serious computing devices, but simply compact web browsing tools. For web browsing, they just aren’t as useful and look somewhat old and outdated. The problem for PC makers may not be so much that they don’t have a successful tablet. It may be because they simply stopped innovating after 2008 and consumers have found something else.
In that sense, we believe that the tablet market, in fact, is limited to the iPad. It may be a waste of time for everyone else to build something that can only be a copy of the original. The longer PC makers will try to build iPad clones, the more successful Apple will get: This trend confirms for consumers that an iPad (tablet) is a sure trend and a safe investment for them. To outmaneuver Apple, PC makers will have to think beyond the tablet and envision what is next. Running after Apple will only get them second place and that second place may be business suicide for some in this particular race.
The question is not what the best tablet will be. The question is what the best next computing device will be. Google is taking some risk with its Chrome OS platform, but we are only seeing the traditional range of netbooks and notebooks built on top of it. It does not take much to predict that those devices may not sell in stunning numbers. What we need is a hardware vendor that is willing to make a similar leap that Apple was willing to make with the iPad. We should have learned that lesson with the iPod, right?
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