Lack of iPad Competition: A Tale of Missed Opportunity

HP touchPad photoIn a new report on the tablet market, Gartner predicts that the iPad will account for two-thirds of the 103.5 million units it expects to be sold next year and nearly half of the 326 million units in 2015. While its easy to quarrel with some of the details in the forecast (not to mention the ridiculous habit of forecasting sales to the nearest thousand) the general drift of the prediction seems dead-on.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This year, the iPad was supposed to get three serious competitors in Android, Research In Motion’s PlayBook, and Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad. Instead, the TouchPad was killed before it had a chance, PlayBook’s heart is barely beating, and Android, while still promising, is beset by mediocre products, fragmentation of the operating system, and a severe lack of applications. The only really good news is that Microsoft is determined to make Windows 8 tablets succeed when they launch next year, though it is way to early to assess its chances.

For competitors, 2011 was a year of badly missed opportunities and at least in the case of RIM and HP, these flubs have serious implications for the future of the companies. For RIM, the PlayBook, based on the QNX operating system, was to breathe new life into the slumping BlackBerry line. It showed great promise at the Consumer Electronics Show last January, but quickly flopped when launched in April.

The reasons were pretty obvious. Not only was it buggy, but the PlayBook shipped without native email, calendar, or contact apps. It was usable only if paired with a BlackBerry, which it also relied on for a 3G connection. In practice, its market was limited to existing BlackBerry owners on carriers other than  AT&T because AT&T blocked installation of the software required for PlayBook pairing. To make matters worse, the selection of apps was dismal, even by BlackBerry standards. Summer came and went without promised software improvements appearing. Little wonder that PlayBooks mostly sat on dealers’ shelves.

In fact, the QNX sales forecasts are one of the odder things in the Gartner report (table).  The analyst firm projects sales of 3 million for all of this year, odd because RIM shipped (to dealers, not sold through to customers) only 900,000 units in the six months ended in August. In would take one spectacular autumn to hit 3 million, and some sort of miracle–or at least a while new product line–to hit the forecasts of 6.3 million next year and 26 million in 2015.

Worldwide Sales of Media Tablets to End Users by OS (Thousands of Units)

OS 2010 2011 2012 2015
Android 2,512 11,020 22,875 116,444
iOS 14,685 46,697 69,025 148,674
MeeGo 179 476 490 197
Microsoft 0 0 4,348 34,435
QNX 0 3,016 6,274 26,123
WebOS 0 2,053 0 0
Other Operating Systems 235 375 467 431
Total Market 17,610 63,637 103,479 326,304

Source: Gartner (September 2011)

The failure of the TouchPad was even more tragic. When HP bought Palm and its webOS last year, company executives saw it out of a path in which its software choices were controlled by microsoft and its hardware was increasingly commoditized. But all the steam, heart, and funding went out of the effort when CEO Mark Hurd was fired and replaced (temporarily, it seems) by Léo Apotheker. What could have been a serious iPad challenger launched this summer as an intriguing but half-finished product. A battle that HP officials once said would take years, not months, ended in abject surrender after six weeks, when HP killed the TouchPad and the rest of the webOS Global Business Unit. The main impact of the whole HP-webOS affair was to set of an existential internal struggle over the future of HP. Gartner wisely projects next year’s sales at 0.

Android’s future as a tablet OS is hard to assess because the present is so muddled. This year saw dozens of products, or widely varying quality, hit the market, but none of them really took off, and none could answer the essential question of why they should be purchased rather than an iPad. Google will try again this fall with a new version of the software, called Ice Cream Sandwich, that is supposed to unify the fragmented Android landscape. But, in fact, further fragmentation may be in store if Amazon.com goes ahead with rumored plans for a custom tablet based on its own modified version of Android. If the rumors are correct, Amazon doesn’t want so much to challenge Apple as to create a new market for a low-0cost media consumption tablet.

One place I think Gartner may be seriously off the mark is in its forecast for Windows tablets. An estimate of 4.3 million units might be on target for next year because we don’t yet know when Windows 8 will ship, but 34 million, barely 10% of the total, seems unduly pessimistic for 2015. We’ve just gotten our first real glimpse of Windows 8, but it is clear that this is a very serious effort by Microsoft–the first, really–to design an operating system optimized for PC-like devices that lack mice and keyboards. Many questions, including how well Microsoft will do in attracting developer support, remain, but Windows 8 has the potential to become the iPad’s most serious challenger.

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Steve Wildstrom

Steve Wildstrom is veteran technology reporter, writer, and analyst based in the Washington, D.C. area. He created and wrote BusinessWeek’s Technology & You column for 15 years. Since leaving BusinessWeek in the fall of 2009, he has written his own blog, Wildstrom on Tech and has contributed to corporate blogs, including those of Cisco and AMD and also consults for major technology companies.

9 thoughts on “Lack of iPad Competition: A Tale of Missed Opportunity”

  1. Windows 8 does indeed have potential – but at this point, that’s all it has. We don’t know when it will be released, as you say, and we therefore don’t know how far along Apple will be be the next version of iOS. And let’s face it, Microsoft often (not always) delivers considerably less than its pre-release publicity would suggest.
    So any estimates of Windows market share that far ahead are purely guesstimates, not based on any solid evidence, and Gartner’s guess is probably as good as yours, or mine.

    1. I think that Windows 8 will do well on desktops and notebooks providing Microsoft doesn’t build another Vista, somehow. I just have to question a full-size Windows desktop OS running on a thin tablet. It’s claimed if you just use Metro apps, the rest of the Windows OS won’t have to load, but then that defeats the whole purpose of putting a full OS on the tablet. Plus, I’m skeptical how many companies are willing to build tablets to oppose the iPad if the next round of non-iPad tablets fail. There’s only so much money that companies are willing to lose to get no returns. Shareholders definitely won’t like companies taking the risk of spending millions of dollars up front and then have to sell every tablet at a huge loss. By late 2012, so many people will be owning iPads that they’re not going to be willing to give up an established ecosystem for a brand-new one.

      Still, we need to wait for a finished product before making any assumptions of what Windows 8 is capable of in terms of sales, no matter how good the OS turns out.

  2. 1st Lets state that Gartner’s predictions of non mature market sales are very bad.
    And Windows 8 is still the real question, when will it come out and what will it run on? Will it be like Vista or W7? Will W8 ARM have any software? Will Intel finally make very low power processors and save windows and the X86? All total unknowns at this point.

  3. Gartner makes the bold assumption that between Apple & Oracle the two dont collectively kill the competition.

    A bold assumption.

  4. I’m suspicious that the MS tablet will be out next year. I’ll guess the first volume sales will be in 2013.

    Gartner is claiming 11million sales of Android tablets this year? Where? By whom? To whom? Are there cheap Android tablets being sold in Asia that we don’t know about? He says these are sales to end users but are they in fact just claimed shipments? Seems oddly high.

    The MS tablet is really a mystery. It won’t ship in volume till 2013. By then we’ll see the iPad 4 and iOS 6 and iCloud. The professional market will have coalesced around the iPad. IT departments are loosening their grip on mobile technology allowing users to choose their own device. How does MS think they can enter this market? What will be their strength? Will it be enough to say “we’re not Apple or Google?”

  5. Predicting the future is notoriously difficult. When rumours of Apple’s iPad surfaced all the supposed producers of the still future iPad killers nixed Apple’s chances of success.
    Microsoft insisted that without a full PC operating system it would fail miserably. RIM insisted that without a keyboard is would be a non starter. Google was confident, that if perchance it would sell they could easily copy it like they did with the iPhone.

    Now, all those nay sayers are slated to produce and sell as much as 50% of the iPad competitors in three years time. Unless they surprisingly copy Apple’s supply chain in production, Apple’s infrastructure in sales outlets and content I fail to see how they are going to reach more than 100 million units in sales in 2015.

    Hope springs eternal, but prediction are just pie in the sky as they have failed so far to produce a viable competitor.

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