The market for Apple's tablet "computer"

Following a fever pitch in marketing hype, Apple announced the iPad yesterday. (Note: perhaps if I’m ever in a humorous mood one day I’ll wax on the horrible name... is the low end version a “mini-pad” and the high end version a “maxi-pad?”) It appears that the majority of the reviews are positive but there are quite a few critical naysayers out there. Many continue to chew on the fact that many PC vendors have had Windows Tablets available for years. (I guess that’s like saying that Apple’s Newton was the originator of the handheld smart device... certainly didn’t mean much!) The fact that Dell and HP and others have had tablet devices and they haven’t taken the market by storm is supposed to, in the critics minds, mean that there is no market for the Tablet and that Apple will fail. One of the loudest critics has been Balmer and Company up North.

I can choose to sit idly by and not chime in on this debate -- and I largely refrain from adding my comments to the end of articles on the Computer and IT news sites because having an anonymous argument with a 12 year old always seems to end with “...no I didn’t!” “Yes, you did!” “No I didn’t!” “Well, you’re a poopy-head!” etc.

The reason that Apple succeeded with the iPod and iPhone is that they didn’t redesign their PC / PC-operating system into those devices. Instead, in both cases, they defined what the end user wants to do and designed -- from the ground up -- a system / solution / software / hardware to best deliver the functionality. OS X is good for a PC but not good for a phone. This is in direct contrast to Microsoft which continues to insist that Windows is the best OS for EVERYTHING. What part of fail have they missed? Windows is a horrible device OS.

The reason that Windows is a horrible device OS is at the heart of the reason that Apple introduced the iPad yesterday. There is a clear and definable market for a computing device IN BETWEEN the phone and the traditional laptop / netbook / PC. This is a device that let’s us manage our content but isn’t about content creation. A device that allows us to watch a video but doesn’t limit us to the screen of our phone. A device that let’s us look at pictures the same size as they were originally taken. A device that does simple things like browse the web, watch videos -- movies and TV -- and play games, without the limitations of a phone. What we don’t need is all the bells and whistles of a full blown PC OS. We don’t need the functionality, and the overhead costs, the pop-up screen. (Think of watching a movie from a laptop on an airplane... don’t you hate it when you’re all set up and the guy in front of you decides to recline his seat; crushing you laptop?)

The tablet allows me to bring up a recipe in the kitchen without firing up my expensive laptop. It allows me to browse the web while watching TV AND easily share that experience with others. (Note that last phrase! It’s an important distinction!) The laptop / PC experience is an individual one. The Tablet is a social experience that is easily shared.

THIS is the experience that Microsoft doesn’t understand; that past Tablet manufacturers don’t understand. This is why the iPad will succeed.

Restart

For those few who have followed my blog with earnest through the first half of 2009 and have noticed that I haven’t updated this space for a while please consider this a restart. I am again committing myself to update this space on a weekly basis with more of my technological observations.

First an update -- and full disclosure -- I am now VP of Marketing for a small virtualization company called ScaleMP. ScaleMP’s own technology would easily be a natural fit within this blog but I needed to make sure the full disclosure is present before going into further detail. I do have an interest in this technology -- both philosophical and financial -- so continue reading with that warning in mind.

Where all other virtualization vendors -- VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat among others -- have focused on using hypervisor / Virtual Machine Monitors to disaggregate server hardware (or desktop hardware) from operating systems in order to increase workloads on top of a single system -- also known as partitioning a server -- ScaleMP has a hypervisor / VMM that aggregates multiple servers into a single system with a single operating system. This may seem counterintuitive but storage vendors have been both partitioning and aggregating storage systems for decades. On one hand -- and as a parallel to what VMware, et. al does for a server -- customers have purchased large storage systems and partitioned them for multiple users and multiple purposes, customers have also purchased a bunch of small disk arrays (JBOD for instance) and aggregated them to appear as a much larger disk. ScaleMP’s technology allows customers to purchase far less expensive x86 servers and aggregate them together to create a large supercomputer with hundreds of CPU cores and large RAM / memory capabilities. These systems appeal to anyone with a high performance workload needing many CPUs or working with files in excess of 128GB but don’t want to pay millions of dollars for the system capabilities. Using off-the-shelf x86 servers and ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation aggregation platform can now assemble a 128 core, 4TB system running Linux for a few hundred thousand dollars.

As virtualization for consolidation / partitioning was revolutionary when IBM introduced it over 25 years ago and took flight when VMware introduced the capability for standard Intel servers I believe the same will be true for virtualization for aggregation. The challenge for server vendors is realizing that forcing customers to rely on proprietary, expensive high end systems for exclusive workloads is counter intuitive and flies in the face of technological evolution.

This blog will not exclusively focus on a single technology -- certainly with Apple’s iPad tablet announcement looming mid-next week I’m sure that will result in commentary here in the not too distant future -- it is absolutely a certainty that virtualization will continue to be an underlying theme of many of my musings.