Barclays Bank has ordered 8,500 iPads in what is believed to be one of the largest corporate deployments of the device in the UK. ~ via TUAW
This kind of thing has got to be terrifying to Microsoft. Microsoft is losing the battle for tablet’s in the Enterprise and they know it.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the following has to make their blood run cold:
Barclays told The Channel that they went with the iPad because of staff demand.
However, Microsoft is in it for the long run and Windows 8 tablets have barely even come to bat yet. But if this was a baseball game, It would be like Microsoft coming to bat for the very first time in the bottom of the eighth inning already down 8-0.
Microsoft’s “come to market late and wait” methodology worked in the 1990s because they were the dominant vendor then. But now someone else is the dominant vendor in tablets, and waiting won’t help Microsoft. The only thing that would help them would be a really attractive product, and I haven’t seen that yet.
One could say that Microsoft is again copying Apple with this tactic. Wait until others develop a new device category, then come in with your own superior product and take over the market. Apple did this with the iPod, the iPad, and arguably the iPhone. So Microsoft is trying that move. Working against them is 1) the tablet is a category they have been trying at for about 10 years, with no success, and 2) they just don’t have the ability (based on their history) of coming out with a superior, blow away the competition coming out of the gate product. Slow improvement is the best that Microsoft can do. It has worked in the past (it took three tries to get a version of Windows that people would use), the question to be answered is whether that strategy will work in tablets.
This site has been extremely pro Apple since its inception