iPad and Google Android Taking a Bite out of Microsoft and PC Sales? Fork in the Windows Road?
iPads and other tablets took a bite out of PC and Windows based systems' sales this past Holiday Season. This is a surprising turn of events given that it is not only iPad but Android OS in general seems to be making inroads!
iPads are easier to use for a lot of mobile professionals and, once you start using it, many users say, it is tough to go do your work on any other platform.
What is surprising is that it did not take very long for them to affect PC sales!!
iPad Takes A Bite Out Of PC Sales is an interesting, recent article.
Both IDC and Gartner observed that PC Sales fell during the last Holiday season (2010) and that iPads and other tablets competed very effectively with PC Sales, and seem to have won!
IPad sales not only portends good things for Apple, it bodes well for other Tablet makers like Samsung that run the Google Android Operating System.
I thought I would never see the day when I would see the news that Windows platforms are losing out to other operating systems! This is not because I like Windows better than any other OS. It is just that users have so much information in applications and documents native to Windows, it is very difficult to switch to another platform even if you like those User Interfaces better and can get more done everyday!
If you really think about it, these days when someone in an office says "I would send you a document by email", the default assumption is that it is in Word format. Many times, it is PDFs also but when it comes to spreadsheets, nobody specifies that it is an Excel spreadsheet.
Over time, I would see that many competing, compatible platforms like Oracle OpenOffice may give users a solution to be able to open these documents in a backward compatible way and go forward with all new documents in some other format!
Microsoft has been struggling to compete with Windows in the smaller form factor computers like Mobile phones and tablets but it may never make any inroads unless they come up with a lean and mean version of Windows that takes very little memory, is really fast, and doesn't require huge amounts of disk space for just doing what other OSs have been doing easily!
Interesting development and may be a fork in the road for users of Windows!
Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in. - Alan Alda.