After iPad's Head Start, Rival Tablets Are Poised to Flood Offices
SAN FRANCISCO — The billboards promoting the iPad have a simple message: The tablet is a device for leisure, to be held on one's lap while lounging on a couch in casual clothes, to watch a film or read a magazine.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ten months after CNET framed the iPad as just the beginning of a broader tablet wave, the New York Times reports the wave arriving from the direction Apple's own billboards avoid: the office. Apple has marketed the device as a lap-bound leisure machine for film and magazines, leaving the work use case rhetorically unclaimed even as rivals line up hardware aimed at desks rather than couches.
The arc so far has been about what the tablet is for, not just who sells it. paidContent argued back in April 2010 that the iPad actually strengthens Amazon's position by making content distribution the real battleground, and TechCrunch's January 2011 piece on why iPad magazines need a new blueprint showed the publishing side of that question still unresolved. A fight over office adoption adds an enterprise dimension those stories only implied.
First-order effects
- Competing tablet makers now have a clear opening to pitch IT departments directly, attacking the one segment Apple's leisure-first advertising does not court.
- Corporate buyers gain their first realistic alternative to standardizing on the iPad, turning tablet procurement into a vendor evaluation rather than a single-option default.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces pressure to decide whether its consumer-couch positioning extends to the workplace or whether it cedes enterprise pilots to rivals willing to court CIOs.
- Publishers and content distributors, already reworking formats for tablet screens after concluding print-style layouts do not carry over, now face a multi-platform audience instead of designing for one dominant device.
Third-order effects
- If office adoption spreads beyond the iPad, control of the tablet platform — apps, content storefronts, device management — becomes the new lever of gatekeeper power that PCs once gave to desktop software vendors.
- A fragmented tablet market would force companies to treat the tablet as a managed computing endpoint with its own architecture, not an accessory to the laptop.
The trend: The tablet is splitting from a single-vendor leisure device into a contested workplace computing category, with platform control rather than hardware design becoming the deciding advantage.