Finally, the Tablet to Make HP and RIM Feel Better About Themselves
There have been some pretty bad attempts to take on the iPad over the past year, but things reached a new low last night. — On NBC's “The Office,” the fictional Dunder Mifflin team was forced to sell a triangle-shaped tablet, dubbed the Pyramid.
Context & Ripple Effects
The joke lands because the record behind it is real. Back in January 2010, Microsoft waved off the iPad as "humorous"; eighteen months later, its own platform partners were the ones being laughed at. By April 2011, the New York Times was documenting RIM's PlayBook shipping without the apps buyers expect, and HP's tablet effort had joined it on the list of the year's worst iPad challengers.
What changed with last night's episode is the venue: the failure of the "iPad killer" genre has moved from trade press to NBC primetime, where Dunder Mifflin hawks a literal triangle-shaped tablet called the Pyramid. When a sitcom treats weak tablet rivals as self-evidently ridiculous, the competitive narrative is no longer contested — it is set dressing.
First-order effects
- HP and RIM take a brand-level hit that no press release can answer: their tablet struggles are now common knowledge to a mass TV audience, not just gadget readers.
- Apple gets the satire for free — every laugh at the Pyramid reinforces the iPad as the default against which all challengers are measured.
Second-order effects
- Rivals still in the game must differentiate on something other than "not being those guys," which pushes them toward price cuts or niche positioning rather than head-on iPad comparisons.
- Developers watching the mockery have one more reason to treat second-tier tablet platforms as low-priority ports, deepening exactly the app gap that sank RIM's launch.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the tablet market consolidates around Apple plus at most one or two credible ecosystems, and late entrants compete for leftovers rather than leadership.
- Cultural saturation of a failure story tends to mark the end of a strategic cycle — expect the next wave of challengers to avoid the "iPad killer" framing entirely rather than repeat it.
The trend: The tablet market is consolidating around Apple's iPad so decisively that failed challengers have become pop-culture shorthand, closing the window for me-too hardware.