RicDay on Publishing

The decision yesterday by Hewlett Packard to put the TouchPad out of its misery and to seek a buyer for its PC business was interesting, and instructive. HP was not alone in struggling to find a toehold in the tablet business. Every maker, other than Apple, faces the same struggle. And all are making very similar mistakes.

Tablet computers have been around for years. The ones which stuck around were generally built as rugged devices for special-purpose applications: devices doctors used in hospitals, or geologists used in the field, or (car) racing teams used at the track. Their sales tended to be driven by dedicated applications. Makers who tried to appeal to a consumer audience quickly disappeared. I have a nephew who started a software business some years ago, developed one such niche tablet application, and eventually sold the business for a stunning amount of money. Tablets per se are not new.

The launch of the iPad last year was fascinating. Apple almost never pre-announces new products, but allows minors leaks and rumours to create pre-launch buzz. In the iPad case, the buzz was a mix of doubt and skepticism ("just a big iPod"), with dedicated Apple fans trying to assure everyone (and reassure themselves) "it will be great."

Pundits weighed in on the pre-launch chatter, pronouncing that the iPad would be priced no lower than $1,000 and likely much higher, because it would be hugely expensive to build the rumoured beast.

What emerged was dramatic. The iPad (WiFi, 16GB) came in at one-half the projected retail price point. More than that, the device arrived "whole." Let me explain that.

Wholeness

The moment Apple launched the iPad, it was clear that the company had invested a great deal of resources and time in its development. This was no enlarged iPod, it was a new product which was engineered from the ground up with custom parts and components. I imagine we will learn one day just how many iterations the design and engineering went through prior to the order to roll the production lines. I have no doubt there were many iterations and that a significant dollar investment went into the engineering.

Equally obvious: Apple launched the product with well-developed applications, designed to help make the iPad look good and to demonstrate some of the range functions. Also, IOS, already field-tested on the iPod Touch and iPhone, had been tweaked to accommodate the much larger iPad screen real estate.

The App Store had a decent range of apps available from day #1, and there was a veritable tsunami of new apps during the next few months as developers ported their small-screen apps to the iPad, and new developers rushed to get on board.

When the first iPad launched, Apple was already working on the next model: thinner, lighter, much faster, with cameras, and without a change in the retail price points.

Less Than Whole

When the first iPad launched, friends in Asia quickly began telling me of all the new tablet production cancellations by other companies. Those companies had assumed that the $1,000 "minimum" price point claimed by the pundits was true. So they had designed clunky tablets to come in at around $700 retail. It was "back to the drawing board" time, because there was no way they could sell these devices at a higher price point than the iPad, and no way they could get the price down to less than the iPad.

Tablets in 2011

What we have seen since the first iPad launch has been one debacle after another. Companies big and small have slapped together tablets, rushed them into the market, hyped the heck out of them before, during, and after launch, and failed. Miserably.

TouchPad

Let's start with the latest debacle, the HP (iPod)Touch(i)Pad. When it was announced, my first thought was, "good grief, they have as much confidence in this as the street seller of knockoff "Armany" fashion wear in New York's Garment District -- they've actually cribbed Apple's product names."

In an ironic twist of fate, the evening before HP gave the Touchpad its last rites I was in my local Best Buy to pick up a connector. Most of the guys in the store know where products can be found, but not a lot about the products. One guy I chat with occasionally is a serious gadget nut and spends a lot of low-traffic time getting to know the products in the store's computers section. He was at the TouchPad display, so I asked him if he was selling many of them. His "why?" response was elaborated with, "it's rubbish, so I steer them to the iPad."

Asked to elaborate, he did at some length. The short answer:

1. They got lots of returns and he'd had more than one angry customer verbally abuse him. "It is buggy."
2. He had spent a lot of time comparing the different tablets they sell, and concluded that while he uses Windows and Linux at home, the iPad was simply so much better/reliable/consistent that he found it hard to advocate for a different tablet.

He had a lot more to say, but given the product is dead, I'll spare you.

PlayBook

RIM's PlayBook is a very weird device. Going to a 7" screen helped differentiate it from the iPad, but a retail price point the same as the base iPad makes little sense when the screen offers a 45 percent smaller viewing area. The QNX operating system has been around seemingly forever (I was writing code for it almost 20 years ago) and is robust.

Leaving aside the "where the hell is it and how do I make it work?" power button, where the PlayBook fails is that it just isn't very useful. RIM evidently assumed that its corporate customers would rush to acquire it. Bad assumption.

RIM's smartphones have failed to keep up with the changes wrought by Apple and others in the category. People increasingly expect their smartphone to be an all-round portable computing device with lots of applications available. RIM really does not offer that. The entire process of acquiring and installing an application on a Blackberry is nothing short of tedious, edged with annoyance as one wades through screens of permissions and other settings. Sure it is secure, but as we know with passwords, consumers have a low tolerance for techno-detail tasks.

RIM's one really big edge had been in its very secure Mail/Messenger service. IT departments love it. But it has helped kill the PlayBook because one email address can only have one device associated with it. So the PlayBook cannot directly send or receive email, but must be tethered to the "authorized" BlackBerry phone first. Yet again, tedious and annoying.

Those are not the primary reason the PlayBook is not gaining traction. The big reason is, IT departments in large corporations are losing the ability to "lock down" the corporate network to mobile devices from RIM and no one else.

I know the chairman of a very large NYSE-listed corporation. He told me recently, "we're getting rid of all the paper at our board meetings and giving everyone iPads." He has been a dedicated BlackBerry phone user for years. IT doesn't get to say no to the chairman, president, and board members of the company. Nor did IT get to insist on the PlayBook. Instead, IT in this and numerous other corporations is facing the need to provision iPads all over the place, as more and more use cases are made and accepted.

I don't see the PlayBook surviving. Actually, I have doubts about RIM's ability to survive. Apple has the expense account end of the market for smartphones, and the fashionista segment. Various Android devices are taking out both the middle and the low-end of the market. And it is likely that Microsoft's next attempt to enter the market will try to straddle a range of price/feature/function points (whether it will succeed is a quite different question). I don't think RIM has the ability to stay afloat in the storm which is coming.

The Rest

Yes, Motorola and Samsung are still out there with tablets of varying quality/appeal, together with a swarm of here-today-and-gone-tommorrow Asian no-name tablets. Some will survive, but they have an awfully steep hill to climb before they make any kind of dent in Apple's "new" tablet marketplace.

Last Thoughts

Ever since IBM launched the first PC, the game has been one of cheap assembly of off-the-shelf parts, enhanced with a feature or two to differentiate my box from your box. Gateway and Dell showed the way. My friends Stan and Margaret Shih took it further with Acer. HP went after the corporate market with (slightly) better build quality and on-site after sales service for the largest accounts. Clone makers produced lots of clones so that retail chains could all slap their brands on their low-end devices. And everything ran Windows because Microsoft was smart enough to get into Asia fast and early, and make deals with the assemblers and cloners that locked them in and locked out competing operating systems.

So personal computers became commodities and we all enjoyed being able to own them. Microsoft rode the OS and Office gravy trains by producing "just good enough" software and iterating it occasionally with new "features" which tended to equate to things like new menu arrangements and animated paperclips.

Somewhere around the debacle that was Vista, many of us using Microsoft software on cloned boxes began wondering if there might be something better.

I certainly began to wonder. I had left Apple when they launched the original Mac. I detested the closed box because I had become accustomed to modifying the innards of my Apple ][s. The PC with its open architecture was irresistible. I lived happily with a mix which at various times included Windows, Linux, BSD, and QNX. Windows and various Linux distros were the constants. I clung to Windows until I could no longer stand Vista on my Acer laptop. I bought a 13" MacBook Pro. And quickly realised jut how much better the hardware and OS were. I still have a HP box running Ubuntu, a clone running a LAMP server and a stateful firewall, and have added two iPads and a 27" iMac. After using and abusing computers for more than 40 years, I have a simple policy: buy quality hardware and software, it pays its way. So long as Apple makes those, I will buy.

Apple makes the most complete tablet, combining high build quality with good reliability. It has more apps available than anyone. Its pricing for this is more than competitive. Would-be competitors need a much better game plan than they have shown us to date. They should start by not pre-announcing their "next great tablet" and instead just work on he damned thing until it is whole, and wholly ready for market.