Tablets - Why they wont last long.

[famousringo]

Oh yeah, sure, just a fad.

Just like nobody would want a smartphone without a keyboard, how could anybody want a PC without one?

Here's a fun graph:

http://twitter.yfrog.com/mn3oebp

And a nice analyst report:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/02/07/apple-pc-market-share-canalys/

In case you aren't going to bother looking at that last link: Apple shipped more tablets last quarter than any single PC vendor shipped desktops + laptops.

All the successful tablets are derived from smartphone tech, so if smartphones were going to kill tablets, tablets would hardly have gotten off the ground. Meanwhile in PC land, the netbook form factor is toast, OEMs like HP and Dell are heading for the hills, and Microsoft is betting its monopoly on tablet computing. You don't gamble with a monopoly unless you know it's under imminent threat.

Don't believe Microsoft is gambling? In just this past year, they released Windows with the most radical UI redesign since the GUI was introduced in the '80s, they've broken their marriage to Intel and the x86 architecture, and they've antagonized PC OEMs by launching their own computer line.

That's not a fad, that's a disruptive steamroller. Personal computing of five years from now is going to be dramatically different from personal computing of five years ago.