Smartphones and laptops have always been a pain in the side of any enterprise admin. They almost always find themselves into the IT environment via a decidedly non-IT driven process, usually when an executive gets a new toy that he’d like his corporate email on. However the tools to support these devices have improved drastically allowing IT to provide the basic services (it’s almost always only email) and then be done with it. For the most part people see the delineation pretty clearly: smartphones and tablets are for mobile working and your desktop or laptop is for when you need to do actual work. I’ve honestly never seen a need for a device that crosses the boundaries between these two worlds although after reading this piece of dribble it seems that some C-level execs think there’s demand for such a device.
I don’t think he could be more wrong if he tried.
The article starts off with some good points about why tablet sales are down (the market has been saturated, much like netbooks were) and why PC sales are up (XP’s end of life, although that’s only part of it) and then posits the idea of creating “super tablets” in order to reignite the market. Such a device would be somewhere in between an iPad and a laptop, sporting a bigger screen, functional keyboard and upgraded internals but keeping the same standardized operating system. According to the author such a device would bridge the productivity gap that currently divides tablets from other PCs giving users the best of both worlds. The rest of the article makes mention of a whole bunch of things that I’ll get into debunking later but the main thrust of it is that some kind of souped up tablet is the perfect device for corporate IT.
For starters the notion that PCs are hard to manage in comparison to tablets or smartphones is nothing short of total horseshit. The author makes a point that ServiceNow, which provides some incident management software, is worth $8 billion as some kind of proof that PCs break often and are hard to manage. What that fails to grasp is that ServiceNow is actually an IT Service Management company that also has Software/Platform as a Service offerings and thus are more akin to a company like Salesforce than simply an incident management company. This then leads onto the idea that the mobile section is somehow cheaper to run that its PC counterpart which is not the case in many circumstances. He also makes the assertion that desktop virtualization is expensive when in most cases it makes heavy use of investments that IT has already made in both server and desktop infrastructure.
In fact the whole article smacks of someone who seems cheerfully ignorant of the fact that the product that he’s peddling is pretty much an ultrabook with a couple of minor differences. One of the prime reasons people like tablets is their portability and the second you increase the screen size and whack a “proper” keyboard on that you’ve essentially given them a laptop. His argument is then that you need the specifications of a laptop with Android or iOS on it but I fail to see how extra power is going to make those platforms any more useful than they are today. Indeed if all you’re doing is word processing an Internet browsing then the current iteration of Android laptops does the job just fine.
Sometimes when there’s an apparent gap in the market there’s a reason for it and in the case of “super tablets” it’s because when you take what’s good about the two platforms it bridges you end up with a device that has none of the benefits of either. This idea probably arises from the incorrect notion that PCs are incredibly unreliable and hard to manage when, in actuality, that’s so far from reality it’s almost comical. Instead the delineations between tablets and laptops are based on well defined usability guidelines that both consumers and enterprise IT staff have come to appreciate. It’s like looking at a nail and a screw and thinking that combining them into a super nail will somehow give you the benefits of both when realistically they’re for different purposes and the sooner you realise that the better you’ll be at hammering and screwing.
