[Ankh]

Originally Posted by Graham

Here's another way to look at it. Tablets are big news at the moment, and lots of people are buying their first one. Within both the iPad and Android tablet communities you'll have a proportion of customers who find that the tablet is perfect for their needs, and another set who find that it has limitations for what they need to do. You only need to scan the posts here on MobileRead to see that there are plenty of the latter.

Ah, therein lies the difference. You see the current crop of the tablets as a very well defined (and bound) concept, a device best suited to "consume", rather than create the content, to borrow the phrase coined in quite a few net sources. Something bound by the (current) scope and limits imposed by Apple on iPad's.

I, on the other hand, believe that what we are seeing both from Apple, and from Android is but a start of that evolution. Apple is to defend against the onslaught of competition, and both sides will bring the heavy guns to the battle. The stakes are high, this, IMHO, is the start of war for "PC inheritance".

At the peak of their might, Microsoft did not only control the operating system and important apps, they controlled the concept of the PC. It was Microsoft that defined how much memory to buy on your new PC, what is the appropriate disk size, the machine was, pretty much, shaped by declarations from Redmond.

Apple with iPad success now controls the concept of the tablet, and everybody else is playing catch up. I have no doubt that Android crowd will turn to asymmetric strategies, to offer more hardware and features (see Asus Eee "transformer", it can turn itself into netbook), and attack the concept, rather than trying to create "a better iPad than iPad, mythical "iPad killer".

I don't expect swing back to netbook not based on the current functionality and scope, but based on expectations wrt the future development.

Originally Posted by Graham

Windows 8 hybrid netbook/tablets could well take off.

That would be a big, big surprise. Microsoft strength lies not in the technical prowess of their platform, but in apps runing on wintel machine. Apple's claim that "there is an app for that" is a joke compared to the wealth of apps existing for Windows PC.

But Intel can not even hope to bring x86 competitor to the mobile space, and that's the major problem for MS. Yes, I am very well aware that Microsoft is targeting ARM for 8, but that was tried before, and never produced the success equivalent to the Wintel hegemony. Nobody cares about Windows, it's the apps that matter. And Microsoft somehow has a special problem with developers. I wonder why?