Gabriel's Blog

Last week I attended this year’s Technology Tools for Today (T3) conference in Florida… as an exhibitor.  It’s a conference for software and service providers focusing on the investment and financial planning industry.  Like most jobs involving the phrase “man your booth” it involved a lot of sitting around between sessions.

HP Mini

During the bits of downtime between sessions I tended to read on my netbook.  I have an HP Mini I picked up as a discounted display model at WalMart.  I only got it because it was cheap and I needed something for a long trip, but it turns out that I rather enjoy it.  I like to turn it on its side like an open book and read full screen PDFs.  Other exhibitors read on their machines, with quite a few leaving their laptop attached to demonstration screens and pulling out an iPad.  It happened like clockwork when the rooms cleared out, my netbook went over on its side and the iPads came out of their sleeves.

Over time I started to notice that a few people were looking strangely at me reading the way I was.  Before too long someone sat their iPad down and came over to ask me how I liked the HP.  They said they’d been thinking of getting a machine like it.  It wasn’t too long before someone else came over and asked if they could try it out… then another… and another.  A total of five presenters asked me about my netbook over the course of the conference, three with iPads at the conference and one who owned one for personal use.  All seemed very interested in getting a netbook.

Why?

This isn’t a crazy story about a group of professional presenters abandoning tablets in favor of tiny laptops with tinier touchpads or oddly frustrated users ceding to the difficulty of using Apple friendly web browsers in an IE centric industry.  It’s a story about people replacing their Windows based laptops with netbook class Windows machines despite their total adoption of the iPad for reading, browsing, and entertainment.

Most of the exhibitors carrying iPads also used full sized laptops to demonstrate their product or, more importantly, to run their displays.  A couple of the folks asking about my netbook also regularly used their laptops to present in larger sessions.  Only one mentioned having a keyboard for their iPad and another mentioned that they still used their laptop for email. While they had taken most of their activities away from the machine, the iPad wasn’t replacing everything.  They needed a more portable machine than their laptops, but still needed it to perform the same functions.  While they might be able to use their iPads for that purpose, it would take it out of their hands to do so… which was unacceptable.

What’s it mean for the future of tablets?

Beats me… probably nothing.  I didn’t exactly have a great view of the entire tech world from my booth.  What I saw was a group of people with a particular need choosing devices multiple devices on different platforms to meet their needs.  Because available devices now have different underlying capability they may have chosen a new way to divide tasks among them, with traditionally intense processes like games going to the tablet.  It should be expected instead of some big deal.

Every one of the devices involved will be obsolete in two years.  All the key aspects of their operating systems will be horribly outdated in five years.  The entire class of device will be outmoded in ten.  The truth is that people make too much clamor over platform wars.