iPad - Long 60 days!

First off I am excited about the upcoming iPad from Apple. You can view the press event here. And to be honest I was not going to blog about it as I did not have that much to add to the content that has already been published about it. But then there was this article at CRN about MS partners not feeling the tablet love.

Now as it would have it, I have had two (2) Microsoft Tablet PC's. They were both Toshiba and good laptops but they were terrible tablets. Too cumbersome and nothing overly special about them other than you could write on the screen with a stylus. I REALLY wanted the Tablet PC to be my only mobile computing device but it was nothing more than a laptop that I could turn landscape and write on the screen. Battery life was marginal. So I eventually abandoned both of them as there was nothing that special about them. I found that I type faster than I can write and it is more legible.

Now I have seen some great implementations of Tablet PC's. The best was when our company signed up with PayChex. The sales guy whipped out his tablet with a InfoPath application that allowed for me to fill out the form and sign it with out any paper. Then when the sales guy got back to his office, he could just dock his tablet and then it would automatically submit the application and sync everything to the backend. So definitely a great use of a Tablet.

But the iPad will rule the tablet space and not because it will have limited exposure. The iPad pricing is perfect for widespread adoption and has a lot of great potential. It was interesting to hear that some believe this to be niche product when I have talked to many a non-technical person who is excited about the iPad. 

Steve Jobs said it best when he discussed their vision for the iPad in that it had to be better than anything already out there. It could not just be a better Netbook because he was right, NetBooks are terrible! They are limited in everything except that they are cheap. Seriously what does a NetBook do that a decent small laptop does not?

So what needs to happen for MS to compete in the tablet space? They need to work with one hardware vendor extremely close and develop something completely innovative that is NOT tied to Windows 7 or anything else they have devised to date. They need to look at how to integrate it with the upcoming Office 2010 Web version and integrate with some Cloud Storage service but have some options for it to integrate into other web services. Make it work fantastically with hosted CRM and Hosted Exchange. Not to mention Sharepoint. 

Me, I will be standing in line the day that the iPad is available and trying to think about what I am going to use my MacBook Air for now!

NOTE: eMonarch (my company) is a Microsoft Gold Partner and make a great living working with Microsoft products. I love what MS does in the business space and the XBox 360 is the best consumer device I have ever seen!

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