Quoting from: There Is No Tablet Market:
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?
And:
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.
And:
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
I wasn’t paying attention to what pundits were saying in the 90s, but to me this sounds like someone claiming there was no market for desktop computers a decade and a half ago, but rather only a market for Windows computers. Although Windows still dominates, Apple has since made a comeback in the desktop computer market (though frequently in the form of a laptop these days) by going back to building something that people want again and slowly winning people over. The market always existed, but winning over customers was never easy.
Today’s tablet market is dominated by the iPad because Apple have built a device that people want. Similar products have not been built by the competition to the standard that people want or at the price they are willing to pay for them. That doesn’t mean the market doesn’t exist. It just means nobody else has built something many people want yet.
So should Microsoft and Google and HP and the other outsiders stop trying and move onto figuring out the next thing?
Not really.
I look at Apple’s product range over the past decade and see no grand ideas that originated from them. MP3 players existed before the iPod. Smart phones existed before the iPhone. Tablets existed before the iPad.
I’ve always thought of the iPhone in the same way that Steve Jobs introduced it. It’s a phone + an iPad + a decent web browser.
And as much as it usually annoys me when people have described the iPad as just a larger iPod Touch, that really is what it is.
But I’m not dismissive of these devices because people manage to describe them in a simple way. They sell because Apple put in so much work on the boring little details that make these devices good. And, crucially, they have plans on how to market and sell these things to consumers.
If companies give up on tablets now and concentrate on thinking up the next computer device, Apple will come along when they are ready and build a better version of that new thing and it will sell. Because Apple build decent stuff that people want.
Likewise, if a company builds a tablet and gets the combination of price, quality, features, interoperability and marketing right, they will find a market. No company other than Apple have yet to do that, which is why iPad sales are so vastly superior. The market exists. Their competition just needs to do a better job at building decent stuff.