What Holds Back Tablet Adoption In Business?

All sorts of arm chair analysts wax pedantic about Tablets.  They throw out the term "consumerization of IT" and all nod, lemming like, as to the wisdom of the musings in a manner reminiscent of the scene in the movie Life of Brian when Brian's followers parrot back to Brian his utterance "We are all individuals."

So forget the flowery labels for obvious concepts for now.  Tablets are, indeed, real.  They are a game changing technology form factor.

Technology Business Research where I work has completed three different tablet studies.  One addressed the consumer market, another the general business market, and the third business vertical markets.  In short, TBR's awash in Tablet buying behavior data right now.

There's a lot of uniformity in the findings which ought not surprise people.  Tablets are pretty simple devices.  There's not a lot of moving parts to these things.  People, not surprisingly, want solid screen resolution and responsive touch screen capability given that is the I/O interface in lieu of a keyboard.

And they want long battery life, because they like "instant on" instead of booting up a notebook PC and then going to get a cup of coffee before being able to get at "their stuff" as I do every morning at work. 

Clearly, what "their stuff" is varies widely.  But the desire for instant access does not vary.  It is a key differentiator against Desktops and Notebooks. 

(Yes, we have a new round of devices emerging called Ultrabooks seeking to fill the spot unfilled by netbooks. But, alas, a netbook by any other name is still a boat anchor, albeit a light one.)

Now tablets are coming at business and coming hard.  Consumers like them.  They fit the form factor differential between a smartphone and a notebook quite nicely.  People mocked the first Blackberry as too small a device for computing, and we all know how well that prognostication held up from a decade ago.  

Today people mock the tablet, saying people will not put them up against their ear to use as a phone.  With a blue tooth device they won't have to.  The Gordon Gekkos of the world can walk through an airport with their headset tied to a tablet in their brief case just as easily as they can with it tied to a smartphone.  And they won't have to be lugging around their notebook anymore, either.  

Maybe.

That is where the market will head, but there are two mission critical hold ups stalling adoption in the Business environment.

• Office File Treatment

It is clear users want to be able to perform business productivity functions on tablet devices.  Microsoft Office essentially owns business productivity apps at this point in time, so this is simply a codeword for MSOffice on a tablet form factor.  And nothing out there resonates in the market.  

The three likely alternatives are:

• Windows8 brings Office functionality down to the tablet form factor
• A "killer Android App" bridges MSOffice to Honeycomb
• Apple comes up with a better alternative to Open Office
  
  

• Mobile Device Management
  
  This has more nuances and political implications.  It is the historical pendulum swing of IT control.  The client side has been over-run as smartphones broke open beyond Blackberry and has businesses scrambling to determine how to address the security issues associated with business/consumer devices in a manner that will not irk their employee base and still protect businesses from litigation and loss of key business intelligence information.
  
  The tablet sits here as well.  It will be a multifunctional device for the individual.  Individuals prefer performing consumer tasks on tablets now, and they increasingly want to perform business tasks on tablets.  And crossover functionality between business and consumer tasks will spark explosive growth in unit sales.  IT has to rationalize this, and rationalize it fast.  Employee demand for tablets will only intensify in the next 6 to 18 months as MSOffice treatment gets addressed in the marketplace.

So Apple iPads have been brought into business from their highly mobile professionals and their C-level executive teams and have been evaluated.  Android devices crop up in there as well, and all eyes turn to Redmond wondering what Win8 will do.  Eyes might have turned to webOS over time as well, but HP's recent decision to discontinue the TouchPad tablet and Veer Smartphone put an end to that prospect.

Bottom Line

In 2015, industry wags will look back to a tablet device launched in 2012 or 2013 and point to it as the tablet equivalent of the BlackBerry smartphone device as the pricey, secure product entrant locks up high end business users.  It will have a way to manipulate Office files, and it will have solid MDM features protecting business information.

In turn we will see significant shifts in Desktop and Notebook unit volumes from Tablet cannibalization.  Some big names in the PC industry will start to take on water financially and the fragmented tablet bottom feeders in the $250 price band that also includes "eReaders on steroids" will consolidate like the PC industry of the mid 1980s.



Similarly, some business facing technology entity will be generate a decent services revenue stream handling mobile device management issues, and they could very well be doing it with RIM server-side software picked up in an acquisition of that mobile device pioneer on the fast track to oblivion right now.

For, the more things change, the more they remain the same.  The fact this industry keeps changing over so rapidly is what makes it fascinating to watch and to translate into real world business implications.