What the ‘tablet wars’ are really all about

The tech media restarted a “tablet wars” frenzy last week when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft was going to — honest! — get serious about tablet computing and come after the iPad. He also promised Windows 7-based tablets “soon.”

Meanwhile, Intel is furiously working to port Google’s Android OS to run on its Atom chips for use in tablets and slates, Google continues to slog away on its own slate-oriented Chrome OS and is collaborating with Verizon on an Android slate. Cisco Systems has its Android-based Cius networking slate in the works, and Hewlett-Packard announced plans for both WebOS and Windows 7 slates. Asian computer makers such as Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and LG have already promised lots of Android-based tablets for 2011.

Through it all, Apple has reported it now makes more money from the pricey iPads than it does from its iPod line, and demand continues to be so strong that the company can barely keep up with orders. It’s now clear the computer makers grossly underestimated the iPad — remember all the dismissive statements in February 2009 and January 2010, before the iPad was revealed? And now they’re scrambling to jump into the fray, grasping at whatever they can to do so.

But the battle is not just about hardware devices or about mobile OSes. The real tablet war is about the future of computing. Thus, any tech vendor who simply slaps Windows 7 or Android onto a slate, or that tries to compete on trivial specs such as cameras’ megapixel counts or screen dimensions, is missing the point — and that means most of them.

Tablet PCs: A dinosaur in a new skin Tablets PCs have been around for more than a decade, with little interest from consumers or businesses. Essentially notebooks that don’t fold up, tablets were full PCs that used pen-based input to replace the keyboard and the mouse. The health care industry tried them out but found they were too heavy, cumbersome, and battery-hogging to work better than laptops on carts. Other industries tried them as well, but the same combination of flaws relegated them to the status of dust-collecting curiosities.

Microsoft still views tablet computing as a nonfolding laptop, and it has done nothing to address the tablet’s design flaws. Windows 7 has poor touch UI capabilities (which Microsoft esssentially stopped trying to improve nearly two years ago) and consumes way too many resources to work on a lightweight, battery-sipping device. A Windows tablet is just a laptop that can’t fold up, with a realistic battery life of a couple hours, a heavy weight, awkward size, and difficult work environment because apps still assume users have mice and keyboards.

Microsoft has shown zero understanding that a tablet — or a slate such as the iPad — is not a traditional computer in a different box. You’d think a decade of failure and customer feedback about the device’s issues across three versions of Windows would have given Microsoft a clue to rethink the tablet as something other than a PC. And the (apparently exhausted) explosion of demand for netbooks in 2009 should have been a clue that users do want something new in portable computing — just not traditional tablets.

Google’s vision: A window to the cloud Last fall, Google made a splash with its Chrome OS announcement. Due this year, Chrome OS is essentially a browser-as-OS that would run on tablets but shift the processing and storage to cloud-based services and be more of a window to online content and services than a computer. The idea got a lot of buzz for a week or two, and Google says it will release Chrome OS by 2011.

But will anyone care? Google’s blind spot — or vision — is of a world where nothing is local. Everything runs on a server and is accessed over the Internet. Thus, every device is merely a wireless pane of glass. Google of course favors its own cloud services — the Android 2.2 OS is highly biased to Google’s services rather than to traditional ones, for example — and Chrome OS is likely to be the frame for using Google’s services.

That myopia around its own offerings and the pure “everything in the cloud” approach likely will limit the appeal of the Chrome OS, at least initially. But I think Google has a key insight that mobility means more computing happens off the device, whether in the cloud or on a company’s servers. Chances are, it will be a mix, and Google’s challenge is to not impose a pure cloud approach on a heterogeneous world.

Google also has an internal challenge: the relationship between Android OS and Chrome OS. Android OS allows the heterogeneity of cloud apps, server-based apps, and local apps that Chrome OS lacks. That’s why I believe almost every major hardware vendor has decided to produce slates (I’m reserving “tablet” for Microsoft’s dead vision) using Android. It’s also why Cisco is relying on Android to power its forthcoming Cius business slate, why Intel is porting Android to its own Atom chips, and why Google is hedging its bets by aiding others’ Android slate efforts.

Even if a pure cloud approach is the ultimate future (and I don’t think it is), the present is a mix of computing approaches that slates need to support. For everyone but Apple, the only game in town for today’s reality is Android. Though HP seems to be betting that WebOS will provide it the same platform advantage without being a me-too vendor, it will take a good year before HP can do something with WebOS; by then, it may not matter.

Apple’s vision: A new computing platform That mix of local, cloud, and server-based capabilities is of course what Apple’s iPad is all about, and it’s why I believe the iPad has been so successful. Sure, Apple’s design and mystique have helped capture people’s imaginations, but the enthusiasm in decidedly non-Apple strongholds — health care and field forces, for example — shows that Apple is on to something bigger than media slate for watching videos, playing games, listening to music, and tweeting and texting.

The iPad is clearly skewed to consumer users with an entertainment bent. Apple has long mined that market, which is big and full of discretionary dollars. But the iPad also has some serious business apps. For enterprises, Citrix Receiver lets iPad users run Windows apps from the data center, giving users secure access to corporate apps already being provisioned to remote employees. For a broader set of businesses, the iPad has a small but growing set of real productivity apps such as Quickoffice, Documents to Go, OmniGraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, WebEx, and Things. Then there are all those IT-specific iPad apps and iPhone apps that also work on the iPad.

As Apple did with the iPhone and iPod Touch, I believe it will do with the iPad: Capture the hearts on individuals and quietly add key business capabilities that cause businesses to accept the iPad due to employee pressure, then embrace it as they realize there’s something truly new here.

The iPad is not merely a pane of glass to cloud services. It is not a Mac or PC in a different box. (Not using Mac OS X for the iPad was a brilliant way to make that clear.) It is not just a wireless browser for websites, video, and audio (as some of the first knockoff competitors were — remember them?). It’s a portable computing engine that becomes an individual’s personal hub to everything.

I’m not suggesting the iPad is perfect; it is not. But it introduces the concept of a computing hub for everything you might do — PCs are still divided between personal and business uses — as either an adjunct device (such as for business travelers and pharmacy reps) or as a primary device (such as for field technicians, nurses, and college students). It supports most of the apps and services that people use on both traditional PCs and enterprise servers, and brings in new sensor-based information (geolocation, compass, proximity sensor, light sensor, camera, and microphone, for example) whose context allows new types of information personalization and field applications as yet to be created.

That vision is the future of computing. Apple gets it. Cisco seems to get it. Google may or may not get it. HP and HTC might. Acer, Asustek, Dell, Nokia, and Research in Motion probably do not. Microsoft does not. Users will.

This article, “What the tablet wars are really about,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Gruman et al.’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com.