Shades of Grey in a Binary World

Not all tablets are cre­ated equally.

Often, this doesn’t really mat­ter. I mean, the con­sumer knows what they want (pre­sum­ably) and has a price they want to pay, and they buy some­thing. How­ever, it’s nec­es­sary for those of us try­ing to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing to get a lit­tle more in-depth. To cat­e­go­rize tablets so we can gain insight into “what the num­ber mean”. It’s not about mar­ket share, it’s not even about profit share. Not for peo­ple who are try­ing to ana­lyze the indus­try rather than the finan­cial mar­kets.

Ben Bajarin, who per­haps gets me think­ing more than is good for any­one, has been think­ing out loud on twit­ter on how to cat­e­go­rize tablets. I had this thought-flow that I’ll try to keep brief.

It’s clear an iPad is a tablet that is impact­ing PC sales.

It’s clear that a Kin­dle e-book reader (not Kin­dle Fire) is not. I don’t know enough about the Kin­dle Fire per­son­ally, but let’s say that the Kin­dle Fire is only good at media (books, videos, audio) play­ing. With that assump­tion, let’s say the Kin­dle Fire has no impact on PC sales.

There’s an ele­ment of “com­put­ing device” vs “enter­tain­ment” device. Actu­ally, I don’t nec­es­sar­ily like the word “enter­tain­ment” but it will do for now.

Per­son­ally, I don’t like to read on my Kin­dle (eReader). I like to take advan­tage of the dig­i­tal for­mat by high­light­ing and com­ment­ing on what I’m read­ing. It’s really hard to do on a Kin­dle, very easy to do on an iPad. How­ever, an eReader does have the abil­ity to notate, high­light, and share ele­ments of read­ing (and video/audio). It’s a mod­ern expe­ri­ence of an old skill (read­ing, watch­ing, lis­ten­ing). It’s not just replac­ing the book, it’s replac­ing the book and adding lim­ited com­put­ing to change the expe­ri­ence. In the case of reading/watching/listening, the lim­it­ing com­put­ing added is triv­ial in terms of com­put­ing require­ments needed in the device.

What about sketching?

What if some­one bought an iPad only to sketch?

One could argue that sketch­ing requires PC-level per­for­mance. But, it’s not some­thing you’d do on a PC.

If you’re an artist, you might pur­chase an iPad sim­ply for sketch­ing the same way you’d buy a Kin­dle Fire if you were pri­mar­ily going to use media. In both cases, you might do some minor email, or brows­ing (things I know you can do well enough on a Kin­dle Fire). But… if you’re buy­ing the iPad as a sketch pad it’s like buy­ing a Fire as a TV.

That makes it hard to count. I think I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out if this mat­ters when try­ing to under­stand the impact tablets are hav­ing on PC’s.

Now, peo­ple who might oth­er­wise not use a PC who use the Kin­dle Fire are not going to expand their “com­put­ing use cases” and start using the device for more PC-like things, so it’s OK not to count this as a PC replace­ment. How­ever, some­one who buys an iPad as a sketch­pad might (I’d think they would, but that’s my opin­ion not a data-based obser­va­tion). So, maybe it doesn’t mat­ter how it’s used, it’s the class of device that mat­ters. If it can “be a PC” it should count as a “PC”.

The thing is, even that clas­si­fi­ca­tion is hard. Hard because peo­ple are buy­ing iPads because they’re cool and using them like “dumb media tablets”. This is the equiv­a­lent of buy­ing an iPad instead of a Kin­dle eReader and only using it to read.

How do you deter­mine the ratio of iPads pur­chased as PC replace­ments vs those used like LeBron is using them? (in the cat­e­gory of PC replace­ments, not actu­ally some­one say­ing — ‘I need a PC, but am going to buy an iPad instead’).

It’s one thing to use an iPad “dumbed down” like LeBron, it’s another to “extend com­put­ing” by doing some­thing only a PC-replacment-class iPad can do (like sketching).

I’m not sure this makes sense, but I think it’s going to be unfair to just say “iPads are PC replace­ments” and cheaper Android tablets are not as a way to gain insight into what’s hap­pen­ing in the per­sonal com­put­ing space. There has to be a way to sim­plify and cat­e­go­rize it though.

Here’s the deal. Ben’s a smart guy. Fol­low him on Twit­ter, lis­ten to his pod­cast, and read the other smart stuff he writes.

Two obser­va­tions:

1. Google has “won” search.
2. Enter­prise search “stinks”.

I can’t fig­ure out, with all their strength as an enter­prise IT provider, why Microsoft can’t pivot Bing to “solve” enter­prise search while at the same time com­bine enter­prise search with “inter­net search” to pro­vide a richer search expe­ri­ence for peo­ple search­ing at work. The lat­ter thought is a great attack on Google, sim­i­lar to the way Google’s tried to attack Microsoft’s Office franchise.

Face it. Dur­ing the day, most peo­ple search from work. Train them to securely and effec­tively search cor­po­rate assets through Bing, and com­ple­ment those results with a “reg­u­lar inter­net search”. Why would peo­ple dis­tin­guish between the two? They’d even­tu­ally use Bing for both.

Once that habit devel­ops, maybe they take it home. After all, it’s eas­ier to remem­ber 1 thing than 2.

What’s eas­ier to remem­ber? One thing or two things?

The thing that Microsoft has that Google doesn’t is not the search exper­tise to “fix” enter­prise search. The tech­nol­ogy is unim­por­tant assum­ing some basic level of search capa­bil­ity. Rather, it has the enter­prise IT rela­tion­ships and the power of it’s exist­ing cor­po­rate enter­prise license agree­ments to wedge Bing in there, to buy them time to iter­ate and get it right.

Any­ways, just some ran­dom thoughts now that there’s another rumor Microsoft will ditch Bing.

By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever once searched with Bing. I have, how­ever, made many searches over the years to Share­point — Microsoft’s col­lab­o­ra­tion tool.

Why are the two search tech­nolo­gies different?