This past week Apple announced the release of their contender in the new seven inch tablet market, the Ipad Mini. This completed the entrance of all the major players willing to compete in the new 7 inch tablet space. For the first time in a while, this is a reactive move by Apple. They’re late to the game and it feels fantastic to actually have more than two companies actually competing for the number one spot in tech gadgets.
Yet Apple is not too late. Google’s Nexus 7 was officially announced on June 27, 2012. Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD was announced on September 6, 2012. While the original Kindle Fire had been out for nearly a year, the software was incredibly flawed. These problems were resolved in the second generation with the product now named the Kindle Fire HD. While the Nexus 7 isn’t exactly the best seller Google wanted it to be, Amazon’s seven inch Kindle Fire HD is touted by that company as their best selling product site wide.
In case you missed it, earlier this summer Cameron Moll gave his initial thoughts on Google’s Nexus 7.
Here’s Joshua Topolsky’s summary at The Verge at the end of his review of the Nexus 7:
Google’s Nexus 7 isn’t just an excellent tablet for $200. It’s an excellent tablet, period. In fact, it’s the first Android tablet that I can confidently recommend to buyers — and not just because it’s got a low price tag (though that certainly helps). It’s a well-designed, powerful, and useful product, with lots of bells and whistles that makes it feel like a device that should be more expensive than it is.
As I’ve previously written, there’s been some serious lines in the sand being drawn between the internet giants in terms of ecosystems. Google’s system makes the most sense for me not only because I’ve been using their online services for over six years, but that they were the first to go openly ‘all in’ with the internet and the world wide web being the future of how everything works. They’re positioned as the company that wants your primary interface to be the browser. They’ll make your experience from a native mobile or tablet client on your Android phone to the browser and back seamless, but that’s the point. Rather than going to desktop clients, you’re returning to your browser for Google Drive (previous Google Docs), Gmail, Google Talk/Chat, and other online replacements for desktop software.
Apple’s built their strategy around having dominated the mp3 player scene with the iPod and iTunes (now fading due to cell phones replacing mp3 players), the modern phone scene (still going strong having a head start measured in years, with the iPhone and iOS have little in the way of serious competition until earlier this year when Android 4.1.x brought that system up speed.), and the larger tablet scene (with the iPad only seeing serious competition from Amazon’s ten inch HD Fire this year). In addition to their strength in negotiating content deals with the film and music content multinationals, Apple also had ‘first mover’ advantage that allowed Apple to build strong relationships with developers. Developers have had much larger monetary success on the iOS platform due to Apple’s targeted demographic (Upper-Middle-Class and richer) being both willing and able to buy the applications and games in waves strong enough to mint more than a few companies tens and hundreds of millions of dollars (the peak of the insanity is highlighted by Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, with it’s initial value marked at $1B, now less due to it being 70% shares of Facebook’s cratering stock).
The post PC world – Apple thinks it’s the future for computers – that desktops and laptops will be seen as specific utility vehicles like trucks, and everyone will be using tablets based devices. Microsoft is making the same wager with Windows 8. Both are in a serious period of transition. Both have billions of dollars in cash reserves to see it through. Yet both Microsoft and Apple are at a disadvantage to Google and Amazon. Both are internet companies born from the initial dot com bubble that have survived to become giants in their own right, and have none of the legacy weight holding them down from the pre-world-wide-web, and PC-centric days.
From everything that I’ve seen, Google, Apple, and Amazon are NOT taking Microsoft seriously. They’re pretty much ignoring them. Yet they’re the elephant in the room, they have enough cash in the bank to slog through years of unprofitability in order to dominate where they think is important (see the XBox division of Microsoft as an example), but there is currently no signs of an attempt to compete in the tablet market. Microsoft’s bet appears to be that they can eat Apple, Google, and Amazon’s lunch by providing larger 10 inch Windows RT and Pro devices (in house like the Surface or through manufacturing partnerships) that eliminate the need for both a laptop and a tablet. Will they succeed?
Buying into a successful ecosystem appears to be the question on many minds this holiday shopping season. No one wants to get burned by buying into a dying or already declared out of date and dead ecosystem. Like those who bought the windows 7 phones or Nokia N9 with the MeeGo OS (and with new Blackberry devices delayed until sometime next year), folks are making wager something similar doesn’t happen with Microsoft’s latest attempt into the mobile space. Microsoft’s cloud and desktop based ecosystem is already built out, but the mobile space remains a big question mark for the company.
