Tabula Rah Rah
TechCrunch sounds a little surprised to discover that tablets are taking over the world. Funny, because we’ve all heard the growth projections: Gartner, as an example, says that sales of all devices are going to grow by 7.6% this year – and since PC sales will actually decline and smartphones sales are increasing only by 5%, it’s tablets (broadly defined) that are driving the statistic, by going up 54%. But you pretty much knew that. And if you knew that , surely TechCrunch knew that. So what’s really going on?
Any successful new technology goes through (fuzzily defined and overlapping) stages where first visionaries see tremendous potential, then the bandwagon announces the new idea will cure cancer and arrange peace in the Middle East, then it’s picked up for its intended use and integrated it into the mainstream – and then it shows up in all kinds of applications where the visionaries hadn’t even imagined it would appear. Tablets seem to have reached this final age of wonder.
TechCrunch’s revelation is that tablets can not only do things that PCs and laptops can do, and can often do them better; but that they can do things that you wouldn’t even consider doing with a laptop (or a smartphone). Salesmen taking orders, doctors keeping electronic charts and clerks managing inventory on the shop or warehouse floor, these were all things foreseen when GRiD Systems released the first consumer tablet, the GRiDPad in 1988, and all seem pretty tame compared to the applications we’re carrying around today. In the early stages manufacturers try to convince us of the wonders to be accomplished with the new technology; then it reaches a singularity and it’s practically ripped out of their hands as new applications their marketers never thought of come in a cascade. An aid for those with learning disabilities; a remote control for everything (like your robot); vital signs monitor; everyman’s teleprompter. In my coffee shop the customers are listening to music and surfing while the staff use exactly the same device to ring up sales.
An article in InformationWeek last year quoted the popular wisdom that tablets are good for content consumption but not creation, while arguing that that may not be true for long. This is more than plausible. The Apple ad linked in the TechCrunch piece shows people filming, writing and drawing as well as viewing, reading and referencing. In my industry, the agents who started doing presentations and capturing sales are now pulling quotes from multiple carriers to the same screen, and manage documents submitted by customers using their own tablets, which also allow them to request endorsements, check on claims and pay bills. If you’re buying computers for business, these days you better be sure the job can’t be done on a tablet before you sign off on more laptops.
Postscript: The final stage of the introduction of a new technology is the backlash. People call them “fondleslabs” because of how we can’t seem to put them down. And then there’s this wry little advertisement by a French consumer product company which shows five ways tablets have replaced paper before suggesting one way it never will.
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