There continues to be a great deal of mis-understanding within the discussion of the PC vs. the tablet. It is easy to say that no one wants a PC and everyone wants a tablet. The reality is that this is only partially true. But more importantly it does not tell the whole story of what is actually happening in the US marketplace and abroad. But for this article I want to focus on how we define a PC.

The biggest challenge facing the tablet narrative today is in its definition. I can show you charts and data of what is happening in the ‘tablet’ category until you are tired of staring at them. All those charts do is tell you that we are shipping–and will be shipping–many hundreds of millions of pieces of glass between 7-10 inches for years to come. It does not tell you what people are doing with these pieces of glass in the market place. More importantly, it does not inform us as to whether many of these pieces of glass should even be compared to PCs in the narrative as they so often are.

Which brings me to my point on how we should define and classify tablets in the PC narrative. A computing device should be defined by its possibilities. Even though someone may buy a notebook and only use it for games, videos, social media, etc., we will count it as a PC because of the possibilities of computing it enables. Said consumers may not be using it to do what many consider “personal computing” tasks but the point remains that said consumer CAN do more at any point they choose using the very device they purchased. This point is not true of all tablets being lumped together in the grand tablet category. In fact, I’d say that there are only a few tablets in the market today that should enter the conversation of personal computing possibilities.

This is why myself, and many others in the industry, are so adamant about the point of the PC and the role it plays in the future of computing. Where I may differ with other analysts is on how we define a PC or what we consider ‘real work.’ We agree we want to put devices in consumer’s hands that bring them the potential of computing, not limit their computing potential. The iPad’s limitation is not that it doesn’t have a keyboard and believing so misses the point. However, the Surface’s (and many products being designed like it) limitation is its necessity of a physical keyboard. ((I have to thank Harry Marks for this point.)) [pullquote]The best way to think about many of the tablets being sold today are as accessories to PCs.[/pullquote]

Tablets that are running a smartphone processor, outdated OS, and can only be used to watch movies are not PCs. Tablets stuck on walls at retail are not PCs. Even some tablets that are tied directly to media and commerce services but can also check email and do minor modifications to word docs, etc., are not PCs. The best way to think about many of the tablets being sold today are as accessories to PCs.

That brings me to the iPad Air. This product signifies in my mind a blank slate of possibilities for personal computing. The iPad is truly a blank slate of opportunities for the future of computing. In fact, it is not by accident that this image is used in Apple’s marketing of the iPad Air and that the iPad Air is metaphorically being compared to a pencil.

If you saw this ad and just thought the pencil was there to show the scale of the iPad in terms of size you missed the big picture of this ad. The pencil, or any writing utensil, is all about possibilities. Before computers, typewriters, printing press and other technological innovations the pen and pencil were for centuries the key innovation for many societies which helped them progress. And so the iPad Air commercial ends:

and we can’t wait to see where you’ll take it next.

This statement is not about location it is about innovation. How will people use this unique computing form factor and create the future? Because that is the reality of what is going to happen. The next billion computing consumers are going to be touch computing literate not keyboard and mouse computing literate. The iPad has fundamentally altered the landscape for personal computing to one that brings more attainable possibilities of computing to the mass market. We will look back in 20 years and fully realize how central the iPad has been to the history of computing.

Apple’s App Store is a boon for many developers and budding entrepreneurs. It offers individuals the ability to create something from nothing with a worldwide distribution channel that costs them $99 per year to use. Apple is the portal. It is not, however, where a developer’s marketing ends.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber recently posted a link to a Tumblr blog called “Eff Your Review“, a website that highlights developers’ egregious demand for star ratings from the people who use their apps. Gruber has offered a tongue-in-cheek way for everyone to get what they want:

…I’d encourage Daring Fireball readers, whenever they encounter these “Please rate this app” prompts, to go ahead and take the time to do it — but to rate the app with just one star and to leave a review along the lines of, “One star for annoying me with a prompt to review the app.”

Eff Your Review’s tagline is “If I wanted to leave a review of your app I would have,” a passive aggressive dig at developers looking for feedback in what the blog’s operator(s) deem to be annoying and distracting. Except, both Gruber and Eff Your Review are shrugging off a big detriment to the App Store’s popularity: discovery.

Reviews are necessary for both developers and users. A highly rated app is more likely to both be found and downloaded by a customer. Low-rated apps get bumped down in the list. They’re ignored for better-rated ones in the same category. How does it help anyone if a fantastic app gets a one- or two-star rating simply because it deigned to ask for a quick review?

Of course, there’s always another side to an argument, as Ben Brooks states:

__Your__ app isn’t the only one nagging them to review. In fact, if it was just one app every once and a while nagging the users, then users would likely never care — but it’s not just one app every once and a while. Actually most apps, most of the time, are nagging thus creating a feeling of constantly being nagged.

Being asked by one app for a review is one thing, but when every app takes you out of the experience, it can seem maddening. Even worse is when an app you’ve already rated keeps nagging for another review and it doesn’t look like Apple is providing alternative means for developers to solicit the necessary feedback to keep their app ratings up, but does it have to?

Apple’s alleged lack of attention has also affected another area of the App Store: Newsstand visibility.

For those who may not be aware, Newsstand, Apple’s homescreen folder for iOS publications, can now be tucked inside another folder. Users rejoiced at the ability to hide an app they never used, but publishers, such as The Magazine‘s Glenn Fleishman, aren’t thrilled with the UX change. Fleishman was interviewed by Pando Daily’s Hamish McKenzie for an article about Newsstand and had this to say:

“I get email regularly from readers who say that they forget that issues come out.”

McKenzie continues:

Fleishman uses push notifications to remind readers when a new issue is available, but there’s a limit on how many such reminders you can send before you start getting on people’s nerves. He’s considering changing The Magazine to a weekly publication, even if it publishes the same number of stories as it currently does, just as a way to justify reaching out to readers on a more frequent basis.

So, users don’t like being nagged by push notifications on the availability of new issues. What about email blasts? Twitter, Facebook, and App.net announcements?

(Author’s note: I have contributed to The Magazine in the past.)

He believes Apple doesn’t think the Newsstand is as important as it once was, because the company hasn’t made enough changes to improve it. His view is supported by Marko Karppinen of digital publishing startup Richie, who has argued that it now makes more sense for publishers to prioritize a stand-alone app over a Newsstand app because, to paraphrase John Gruber, the Newsstand is now more than ever a place where apps go to be forgotten.

The job of marketing a publication is up to the publisher, not Apple. If Newsstand is where “apps go to be forgotten”, it is because publishers have let them become forgotten. It’s like saying Amazon is where Kindle books go to die, or Barnes & Noble should do a better job at promoting one particular magazine.

Marko Karppinen believed, like many early Newsstand publishers, readers would adjust to Apple’s decision:

The segregation of Newsstand apps into the Newsstand folder wasn’t ever a positive aspect of Newsstand, but we were optimistic and thought that perhaps readers would form new habits around it. As an industry, we decided to give it a go. Apart from some early successes, attributable to a first-mover advantage, that was a mistake.

What if obscurity isn’t the real issue here? What if constant reminders aren’t the true problem with subscriber loss? Perhaps Newsstand publications are losing subscribers because people just aren’t interested in the content.

The Magazine of 2012 is much different from The Magazine of today. As Federico Viticci of MacStories put it back when The Magazine first launched, “Marco Arment’s The Magazine falls exactly under this aspect of writing. It’s about people who love technology, delivered as a curated collection of articles from great writers.” Unfortunately, this model didn’t sit well with a portion of early subscribers. Here are some reviews plucked directly from the App Store:

__Won’t last…__

Love the clean look but for basically 8 articles a month, the Magazine won’t last. Marco said he’s gonna give it two months to see if it turns a profit. Might as well close up shop now.

Words are cheap and $2 a month for some tech pontificating isn’t worth the cost in my opinion.

— BB92647

> __This is a Blog not an App__

After reading several tech blogs hyping The Magazine, I thought I’d try it. Okay, it’s a collective blog in an app and not even a rich one – just text no images, no videos, no interactivity. While I’m plenty techy, maybe I’m just not geeky enough to understand why this is a) worth being an App rather than a web blog and b) why I would want to pay for this content

— DLwhite6

Over the last year, The Magazine‘s content has shifted away from primarily tech-focused pieces and delved into such topics as typewriter repair, bicycling in the Netherlands, and caffeine’s effect on runners. To call its content “eclectic” would be an understatement. When people subscribe to publications like Men’s Fitness and Forbes, they know what kind of articles to expect, but The Magazine isn’t targeting a specific niche anymore. They’re publishing interesting articles, but the topics vary so wildly the chance an average subscriber is going to read a few paragraphs to see if she enjoys a piece is slim. App Store obscurity may be the least of its worries.

What about other Newsstand entities that do cater to more niche-focused readers? Jamie Smyth, co-founder of TypeEngine, had this to say about Newsstand’s role in subscriber loss:

Ultimately the responsibility to retain subscribers is up to the publication. They need to produce content of a quality and on a schedule that resonates with their readers. There any number of things that can result in a publication to lose subscribers over time, but I don’t think the mechanics of using Newsstand is one of those factors.

Smyth points out that marketing efforts vary for publishers large and small, including simple tactics like posting links on blogs and social media, all the way to taking out ads on Facebook and topic-oriented websites. For example, “a dog magazine has purchased some ad space on a couple of dog web sites, and that seems to have helped.”

He also goes on to mention how important push notifications are to the marketing process, as “they bring the content to the user and remind them of the new adventures that are just a swipe away.” TypeEngine actually delivers two push notifications automatically to its apps.

One is an invisible one and wakes up the app and tells it to download the new issue in the background. We delay sending the visible one by a few minutes to give the app a chance to finish download the issue. That way, when the user sees the notification, the content is (should be) already there.

Publishers can also customize the notifications so they don’t say the same stock message every time. The result of these combined marketing and push notification efforts? “Some of our publications have done remarkably well…some people are making a living from selling TypeEngine Newsstand apps.”

This brings us back to the topic of review notifications from earlier. Smyth doesn’t think they’re a problem if they’re handled properly.

Regarding prompting the user for reviews, it’s a solved problem in my opinion. The publisher wants reviews, but they only want __good__ reviews. You can subtly guide the user to leave a review if they like the app, and send you an email if the user sees a problem. Guidelines: – If you decide to pop up the prompt to rate the app (which I don’t recommend) only do so once. __Ever__. – In the settings panel show an action something like “Love our app? Leave a review” and guide the user to rate the app.

He also suggests offering a way to email bugs and issues to the developer via an action in the settings panel. “The trick is to answer those emails or else those people will leave you a bad review.”

But in not recommending the modal prompt, this still leaves the problem open. How do developers solicit reviews from users without bothering them? In reality, they can’t. This is the Internet and its denizens want what they want the way they want it without any hindrance. To them, review reminders are the pop-up ads of the mobile era, a problem in need of a solution no one has yet to provide. Sure, we hate having to take the one second is requires to dismiss a dialog box, but in all the blog posts whining about this issue, no one has suggested any real ways in which developers can fix it.

In fact, more time was probably spent writing those pieces than it would’ve taken each writer to review five apps on their iPhones. Priorities shift when you feel you’ve been wronged, even over something as trivial to the user as a review request.

Not everyone has the reach of a John Gruber. Marco Arment’s forthcoming podcatching app may lack the features of its more mature brethren, but that won’t stop hundreds of people from downloading it day one. For those individuals, reviews may not be as necessary to their apps’ success as they are to lesser-known developers and we must remember that.

Until Apple modifies its App Store ranking algorithms, or until users wise up and leave the reviews developers need, nothing is going to change. I’d like to think we’ll all become benevolent customers and give the people who build the things we use what they need, but since we still complain every time a developer dares to charge two dollars for a software update, I’m not holding out much hope.

Independent developers and publishers most likely don’t have large marketing budgets. Aside from social media, blog posts, and the occasional reviews on high-traffic sites, they depend on user reviews for decent App Store placement and, in turn, financial stability.

Apple is not to blame for a magazine’s loss in subscribers. It’s not to blame for an app’s poor sales. It’s not up to Apple to promote one’s work. The onus is on us to give Apple a reason to do so.

When Jeff Hawkins was designing the original Palm Pilot, he had a simple rule for his team. If a feature was generating error messages, it either got fixed fast or it was removed.  The Palm user experience was designed to be error free. ((Here’s a note Hawkins wrote explaining his design philosophy in response to a 1998 column of mine in BusinessWeek.))

The Palm was designed to do just a few things, but do them very well. Unlike just about every other high tech device of its era, it almost never threw error messages. And nearly 20 years later, I still believe this commitment to user experience helped Palm successfully create the category that eventually became today’s smartphones.

A great deal has been written about the reasons of the consumer success of today’s tablets, particularly the iPad, at the expense of traditional PCs. Of course, there are the obvious factors of their ultra-portability, relatively low price, and the availability of a plethora of clever apps that are either free or very inexpensive. But I think the is another, at least equally important factor: Tablets, to steal a phrase, just work. They don’t offer a lot of complexity. They don’t scare or confuse users with incomprehensible and vague threatening error messages.

Things have gotten better from the days when Mac and Window users frequently saw messages like these:

But after 30-plus years of dealing with these things, I still see Windows and OS X error messages that I do not understand. An example: when editing a complex document in Word 2011 (Mac), it is not unusual, after a lot of changes have been made, to get a message saying that Word has run out of room to store the document. Since I am working on a system with 12 gigabytes of physical memory and an all but unlimited amount of virtual memory, something other than the stated cause is behind the message. And I’ve learned that the correct response is to close and reopen the document. Despite the message, it always saves correctly. But why should I have to put up with this? And on a tablet, I don’t.

Features, not bugs. The iPad is the leader in tablet simplicity. A number of design decisions, for which Apple has been roundly criticized by those who dislike the locked-down nature of iOS, contribute to the iPad’s error-free nature. There’s no USB port, no installable device drivers, no user-accessible file system, no direct way to print to standard printers, no way to install apps not approved by Apple, very limited communication between apps, which run in a sandbox. This Apple-knows-best approach to software design has eliminated a large number of ways that things can go wrong and cause baffling errors. (In the early days of Mac and Windows, a common source of crashes was one program overwriting another’s memory. Throughout the history of Windows, error analysis has shown that the overwhelming majority of application and system crashes were generated by installable device drivers.)[pullquote]A number of design decisions, for which Apple has been roundly criticized by those who dislike the locked-down nature of iOS, contribute to the iPad’s error-free nature. [/pullquote]

This is not to say that apps and even the OS in tablets never crash. But they do it quietly and gracefully, without generating an error message or requiring any action. When an iOS or Android app crashes, it usually just quietly shuts down and restarts itself, generally without loss of data and without affecting any other running apps. Even a system crash, rare in my experience causes a reboot in which the tablet mostly or completely restores its pre-crash state.

App updates are another place where tablets shine. Both Android and iOS automatically install app updates in the background. By contrast, as I was working on my Mac today, a Window popped up informing me that skyDrive needed to be updated. I gave permission for the update, which then proceeded to open at least six more windows–I lost count–each of which required some action on my part. If the software needs updating, just go ahead an update it (the auto-update feature can be disabled on both Android and iOS, but I doubt that many users do.)

Good behavior. I think the geekiest among us underestimate how important this well-mannered behavior is to a lot of users. Especially folks who write code are used to complex and hard-to-diagnose errors and consider them part of a day’s work. The Mac system bomb was always a bit of a joke, though on some particularly nasty versions of Mac OS, it was rare to get through a day without seeing it at least once. But I remember people who became genuinely upset after getting that Windows “illegal operation” message, believing they had sone something seriously wrong. Microsoft made matters worse by sometimes including a “Continue” button in the dialog box that invariably did nothing when clicked.

People like tablets because they don’t behave this way. They just do what you want them to do. And both system requirements, UI limitations, and the prevailing ethos of app design cause developers to write apps that only do one thing, and more often than not, do it well.

Windows struggles. This may be one reasons why Windows tablets struggle so badly. Metro-style apps, for the most part, behave like tablet apps should. But there is still Windows underlying the whole thing and the ability to run any (Windows 8) or a few (Windows RT) legacy Windows apps makes the tablets prone to all the ills that Windows is heir to.

I sometimes chafe at the restrictions imposed on the iPad (and to a lesser extent, Android tablets) compared to a traditional PC. I would love for it to be easier to print, easier to share files among apps, easier to load content. But when I think about what I have gained by giving a few things up, a realize it is a trade I would make again in a second. I love the power that a traditional PC gives me when I need it, but I value the simplicity a tablet offers when I don’t.

It’s the first time for both Betsy and me: she’s never given birth before and I’ve never helped a goat produce a kid. My heart races as I pace her pen, reviewing what I need to know to make sure she has a safe delivery. She seems as content in her element as if she were an experienced mother.

My days are mostly spent in a windowless office. I meet with clients, analyze data, and wear fancy clothes. Now I’m out in the bright sun in a slightly smelly goat pen wearing overalls and galoshes and about to assist with a birth. Betsy’s instincts kick in as delivery becomes imminent. Mine did as well. I was not altogether unprepared: I had my iPhone.

Overgrown

My wife, Jennifer, and I began our journey the first year we planted tomatoes, zucchini, onions, lettuce, and strawberries. Each year the garden got bigger, and we experimented with new seeds and starters. The garden started to overflow our tiny backyard. Our front lawn was doing us no good, so we pulled it out and planted more crops in its place. In the very traditional suburban neighborhood in which we lived, our micro-farm became increasingly out of place. Our neighbors had nicely manicured green lawns and we had nicely manicured rows of vegetables.

Neighbors and passers-by thought either that what we were doing was inspirational or that we had gone crazy. To make peace with the latter group, we built some planter boxes next to the curb and planted vegetables for the neighborhood to pick from freely. We enjoyed giving fresh, homegrown goods to neighbors, friends, and family out of our abundance. We even started our own FSA (friend and family supported agriculture) to help others learn the benefits of growing your own food.

The more we “farmed,” the more we joked with friends and family that our next move should be to the country. It was appealing to think about sitting in our yard and looking out at an expanse of land rather than a solid wood fence 20 feet away, but it also seemed unrealistic. Our dreams had outgrown our boundaries.

It took a chance meeting to break through the fence. I ran into a friend with whom I’d started a company in the late 1990s, and we wound up talking about hobby farming. He mentioned that his father had looked at a house with lots of usable pastureland. We decided to check it out.

The farm was a 30-minute drive south of San Jose (add 15 in rush hour), where the sprawl of the Bay Area has dropped away and one enters something approaching real country. We took a look at the house and its fields, and we were sunk: we agreed that this was the place. The house was simple and came with three acres that already included a pool and two different playgrounds for our kids. We could see nearby hills from the house and hear and sense the quiet. We didn’t hesitate. We packed up and headed south.

It took just a few weeks until we settled into the calm and peace of our newly christened Bajarin Farm. Sitting and relaxing in the yard was like going on vacation. Everyone around us, and many we met in town, had similar gardening and farming interests. I knew we had made the right choice, though, the first time I saw two guys riding horses down our street, each with a beer in hand.

We rapidly expanded our gardening into farming and planting a greater variety of crops, and then we progressed into ranching — my idea. My wife resisted. “You do have a day job, you know,” she reminded me. I sold her on the chickens easily enough, as they don’t require much work and plenty of city slickers have them now. The taste of a fresh, free-range egg is the capper.

I agreed to take on all the animal duties, even if it meant getting up at the crack of dawn. We brought in two dozen chickens and shortly thereafter added three goats, two female and one male. Our goats quickly became family favorites. We knew it was likely that they would have babies, and we even fancied the idea of their kids running and jumping around our property. It simply happened much faster than I thought nature needed to take her course.

Push technology

As I pace Betsy’s pen wearing overalls and galoshes, I picture a rancher sitting on the back of an old pickup truck watching me. He has a face weathered from seasons of working outdoors, his cowboy hat is pulled low, and a long strand of hay hangs from his mouth. He shakes his head and has a good deep laugh at the city-boy office worker.

But so far the Internet has delivered — figuratively to date and soon literally. Jennifer and I relied on the Web to supplement our suburban farming knowledge. For today’s work, there’s a bucket of warm water and some clean towels nearby, and an iPhone in my hand with a Web page loaded that contains step-by-step directions on assisting with a goat delivery.

Birth went quickly. In moments, the first two kids are on the ground breathing and starting to move around. I let out a sigh of relief, wipe the sweat from my brow, and sit down on the ground near the newborns, taking a minute to admire them. I imagine the faces of my daughters when they arrive home from school that afternoon and see the newborns.

I pat myself on the back that my digital assistant and I managed everything so neatly. That was premature, of course. Betsy begins to push again. I expected twins but she was carrying triplets, which I later learned is uncommon. I roll up my sleeves for the next delivery, but an hour passes and she’s not progressing. Something is wrong.

Betsy is pacing, and she is trying on her own every position that she can to get the baby out. I start searching for delivery position complications. It takes minutes, but I find a forum that helps me diagnose the situation: the third kid was positioned poorly and Betsy can’t get it out on her own.

The reality of what I have to do next hits me along with a jolt of adrenaline. I’m about to get my soft, uncallused expert-typist hands dirty. I have to work up the courage, and it takes a few minutes of deep breathing to get there. Betsy looks exhausted. She’s been through an hour of hard labor, and if she could talk she would say, “Are going to sit there and play on your phone or are you going to help me, you idiot?!”

Reluctantly and cautiously, I reposition the kid and give a gentle tug to get the process started. I watch and wait impatiently. At last the kid emerges and breathes on its own. If I was the goat’s midwife, then the iPhone was mine.

No kidding

That was years ago, and while I’m not yet grizzled, I ride a tractor, wear cowboy boots, and occasionally snack on the wheat berries that grow in my pasture. Often new neighbors or friends from San Jose and beyond come over to see what we are up to and ask how to do it themselves. When people visit the first time, I usually have one rule: they have to try to catch a chicken. Purely for my entertainment purposes, of course.

I think back to Betsy’s first delivery at times, and remember my reaction when it became complicated. I didn’t call a vet; the thought never entered my mind. I’m a problem solver, and it seemed natural to turn to the same repository of information that serves my career to serve Betsy.

I probably should have had a vet’s number on hand, but being new to the community I didn’t yet know who to call. To save Betsy and the baby, I knew I had to act fast. That was where the Web came in, and it’s turned out that every fundamental bit of information we’ve needed to run the farm we’ve been able to find on the Internet, often from far-flung pocket farmers like ourselves, who share information that our grandparents and great-grandparents would have learned firsthand. The scale of a hobby farm has let us more recently connect in person, too, with local 4-H clubs, rather than the resources that family and larger farms rely on.

Every year around delivery time, I reflect on how a process that once seemed so foreign has now become second nature. Since that time, we have birthed 14 happy and healthy baby goats and I’m now the old hand. Neighbors come to consult me in similar situations, where I gladly offer any knowledge I have or teach them how to effectively use the Web for their needs.

Betsy is doing well to this day, and we have added more goats (and a sheep) in the years since and have helped them deliver happy, healthy newborns. Since moving we have also added ducks, geese, turkeys, and bees. But unquestionably, the highlight of our year is when baby goats arrive on the farm. Now, on to cows.

The tablet category is quickly becoming a tricky one to analyze. As in the early stages of any technology category we are seeing the tablet market segment or splinter into separate markets.

While I like to point out how large the tablet category is, one can’t accurately analyze the tablet category without peeling back the layers of its onion.

As I, and others have continued to point out, the tablet market is really two separate categories. In fact, it may actually be more than that. The challenge that we have is that the generic term ‘tablet’ is actually a term that means many different things to different segments of the market. For example, a tablet that is purchased only to mount in a retail store is lumped into the tablet sales estimates with products like the iPad, Nexus, Kindle Fire, Samsung tabs, etc. So while point of sale tablets will be counted among tablets that get sold to end users and are used, we have to wrestle wit the question of whether they should or not. ((The other question we have to deal with is whether the dedicated kids tablets should be counted as tablets, or the white box ones primarily being used as TVs))

The same is true with the many low-cost tablets that are flooding the market but not showing up on anyone’s radar. These devices, to the best of our knowledge, are really more appliances and dedicated-use tablets that have low-specs, low-res, screen, cheap casing, and are primarily being used in emerging markets to just watch movies. These tablets do not go online, don’t connect to anyone’s services, don’t download apps, etc., so should they be counted in the same numbers as iPads, Samsung tablets, Kindle Fires, etc?

This is the challenge we are faced with in understanding the tablet market. When you study it as I do, you see what is happening in the market but also know it is somewhat disingenuous to make a bold claim of how big the tablet market is or how many tablets we are selling when not all tablets are created equally or being used equally.

This even complicates things even more with the tablets are replacing PCs narrative. For example, here is my chart including historical sales, current estimates and our forecasts for PCs and tablets the next few years.

When you look at this picture, it looks very bleak for the PC. And there is some truth to this. However not all these tablets are being used to replace the PC. I believe a percentage are but not all of them. In many cases, the bulk of tablets sold are being used to compliment PCs. Then there are those being used in markets by people who do not own a PC, and these devices are not being used in PC like ways at all. More importantly, they couldn’t even if the person wanted to use it more like a PC. In this light, and for the moment, comparing tablet sales to PCs is more inaccurate than it is accurate.

Now while there is some truth to the critique that sometimes people buy PCs and don’t use them to do PC things either, the counter point is that those same consumers are using a machine which is capable of compute even if they are not using it. The low-cost tablets which I am pointing out do nothing but watch movies, are not capable of doing much more due to their low-cost underpowered CPU and are not capable of much computing.

In this regard, I propose we look at low-cost tablets in a similar light as Netbooks. If you recall, a Netbook was in essence a truncated PC. It looked like a PC but failed miserably when someone bought it and tried to use it like a PC. Hence the astronomical return rates we saw in the early Netbook days. Netbooks were treated as second-class citizens to PCs by everyone who made them and by retailers. The term itself was invented to try and call these devices out separately as to not confuse consumers into thinking they were PCs.

The same issue now exists with these low-cost tablets. Consumers who have bought them and tried to use them like higher priced tablets were disappointed. These devices are simply weak tablets in the same ways the Netbook was a weak PC. Both barely sufficed at a few tasks and were extremely limited in their use cases.

Now, while there is a place for these devices which are dedicated consumption devices primarily, we can not confuse them with the big shift of computing from notebooks to tablets capable of more computing like the iPad Air or the Surface Pro or any number of more powerful larger screen tablets coming from the Windows ecosystem.

As you can tell from some of the reviews of these tablets, like this one from Walt Mossberg, you see that these devices are being described very similar to Netbooks. People need to understand the difference between a budget tablet and the ones that are capable of more things. For some who just want to use a tablet in very simple ways, perhaps a budget tablet is the way to go. But in this regard they are being bought for a specific purpose. Where other tablets are capable of being more general purpose computing devices.

For those of us who track and count these things, the tablet market is more complex and filled with variety than many other segments we have tracked before. The key to understanding the tablet market is its layers. And it has more layers right now than any other.

With the introduction of the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display, Apple has given customers more freedom than it (as well as other manufacturers) ever did with desktop computers. It’s not freedom of choice, but rather freedom from choice.

I know, it sounds like Apple has taken choice away, which usually results in a disappointing and often frustrating experience for the consumer. However, what’s happened here is Apple has taken the headache out of purchasing a line of its products, which I predict will spread in the coming years to its other categories. It’s no longer a paralyzing decision between bigger and faster vs. smaller and slower. Now, we just need to know how big we want our screens.

As Engadget’s Brad Molen points out in his iPad mini review:

This year is a different story. Not only did the iPad (now called the iPad Air) get redesigned to look just like the mini, but it also offers virtually the same specs as the smaller model. In many respects, the smaller tablet is now a scaled-down iPad Air — precisely what Apple seemed to be avoiding last year when it debuted the original mini with inferior specs. Now, the company wants its tablets to be equal in everything but screen size, so you don’t have to feel like you’re making any sacrifices by choosing the mini.

When we buy a new computer, be it desktop or laptop, we’re always asking ourselves the same questions. What will I use it for? How fast should it be? How much RAM do I need? Which screen size is best? When I purchased my MacBook Air in 2011, I asked myself all of those questions before and *during* the transaction, then followed them up with, “Did I make the right choice?” and “Should I have gotten more RAM?”

But Apple is changing the game now. Ben Bajarin writes:

With the new iPad Mini Retina being available, I know many are still wrestling with which iPad to get. My true sense is that for those computer users who are stationary for long periods of time and use a notebook or desktop in that context they will favor the iPad Mini as a companion to that computing context. But I share my experience for those who are more mobile than they are stationary and are looking for a device that lends itself to more heavy lifting while still being extremely mobile friendly. Which for me is the iPad Air.

The question of, “What kind of user am I?” once involved the level of power required of one’s device. Are you a music or video producer? Perhaps a Mac Pro or a fully decked-out iMac are your go-to computing choices. Maybe you’re a student looking to write papers, watch Netflix, and play Candy Crush at the back of the class. In that case, a 13-inch MacBook Pro might be up your alley. Or a MacBook Air. But which size? 11-inch? Thirteen? It’s maddening.

Now, with the iPad, the “What kind of user am I?” question really only applies to the types of activities you plan on performing. Are you a heavy content consumer focused on reading and watching movies on your daily train commute? Maybe you want something to accompany you to the doctor’s office while you wait to be called. The mini could be for you. Or you might be the exec-on-the-go, required to take notes during meetings and create numerous documents for an upcoming client pitch. Or you’re a novelist who actually enjoys writing in Pages (I’ve heard those people exist…somewhere) and you just need a lot of room to read your words. I bet that Air looks pretty good right now.

And if you plan on podcasting, or recording an indie album, or editing a home movie, or any number of formerly processor-intensive tasks, either model works. They’re nearly identical in power and speed, just not in size. Both devices are equally capable at running the same apps and doing the same things–it just comes down to preference of size.

Federico Viticci at MacStories puts it best:

You don’t hear people saying that, because of the size differences, the 13-inch MacBook Air is for consumption and the 15-inch MacBook Pro is for creation. The new iPads should be treated just like MacBooks: choose the size you prefer, and expect creation and consumption capabilities from both.

The 2013 iPads represent a new era of computing where the the hassles of checklists and charts have been removed from the equation. Of course, this will irk some who think we’re increasingly dumbing things down for the end user, but I see this as a necessary evolution of technology. Computers are tools, like hammers and cars and OXO’s version of the Slap Chop (seriously, I haven’t had to dice onions with a knife in years. Look into it.) Geeks and the more computer literate may care how much RAM or raw processing power is available in the latest iMac, but we’re getting to a point where that won’t matter for the majority of users anymore.

One day, we’ll be able to walk into an Apple Store and step up to a table with three different laptops on it–one at 11-inches, one at 13-inches, and one at 15-inches. They’ll all have the same processors, the same graphics capabilities, the same RAM, and the same form factor. It’ll just be a matter of which size fits us best. Will that annoy those who require more flexibility and customization from their machines? Absolutely. But then again, they weren’t the intended audience anyway.

So, while we wait for that day to come, let’s prepare by visiting the table across the aisle.

Jeff Bezos’ interview with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes accomplished three things. It told the world that Amazon is a true technology company, not just a giant retailer.  It took attention away from unpleasant subjects, such as working conditions in Amazon’s fulfillment centers or the company’s chronic lack of profits. And it established beyond a doubt that Bezos is the true successor to Steve Jobs as the tech world’s premier visionary and magician.

The interview showed Bezos to be better than Jobs, because Steve could only create his reality distortion field in person. Judging by the sometime rapturous reception given to Bezos’ promise of  drone-driven Amazon Prime Air, he can do it just fine over the airwaves. Although there were some misgivings in the cold light of Monday, most initial responses sounded as though Bezos had made a real announcement of a real product. “Amazon Chief Reveals Drone Delivery System: Unmanned delivery aircraft could be ready within five years” reported the normally sober Time Tech. “Amazon’s Drones for Delivery,” read the headline in an unquestioning Wall Street Journal report. and Bezo biographer Brad Stone, while expressing at least a dose of skepticism, wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek:

“The aerial drone is actually the perfect vehicle—not for delivering packages, but for evoking Amazon’s indomitable spirit of innovation. Many customers this holiday season are considering the character of the companies where they spend their hard-earned dollars. Amazon would rather customers consider the new products and inventions coming down the pipeline and not the ramifications of its ever-accelerating, increasingly disruptive business model.”

In fact, the Bezos announcement belongs to the same absurd-but-taken-seriously genre as Udacity founder Sebastian Thurn’s proclamation  that the success of massive open online courses would eliminate the need for all but 10 universities in the world, and the reporting of it mostly without a bit of critical analysis reveals a major failing of tech journalism.

Economic sense. For example, just about no one who wrote about the Amazon idea bothered to consider the economics of drone delivery. Until we have fully autonomous drones, and that is a lot further off than Amazon’s five-year horizon,  each of those cute octocopters is going to need a remote-control pilot. Piloting a drone to deliver on a customer’s front porch (and we have no idea of how Amazon plans to make deliveries to multifamily residences; maybe the drones will be able to open the apartment building door and fly straight to your doorstep) is vastly less efficient and thus far more expensive than a traditional truck route. The number of purchases for which drone delivery could make sense will never be more than minuscule.

Small, cheap drones are a fascinating technology with huge potential. But their most likely use seems to be in a large variety of remote-sensing roles (which themselves could be good or evil), not delivering packages.

The techno-ethusiasm that greeted the Bezos interview  is hardly unique. We have seen the same sort of reaction to 3-D printing, which at least has the advantage of being real and available today. 3-D print is also a very exciting new technology that enables many things once thought impossible. But it has also inspired a vast quantity of tech journalistic nonsense: 3-D printing will replace conventional manufacturing, families will meet all their needs for manufacturing objects with home printers; or, my favorite, we will solve the problem of hunger by printing food. These breathless predictions uniformly ignore the limitations of both technology and economics, not to mention the fact that after 40 years, old-fashioned 2-D printers remain the most unreliable pieces of tech equipment that most of us own.

Interesting experiments. Similarly with the crypto-currency Bitcoin. It’s fascinating experiment in a privately, indeed collectively, issued fiat currency with no government or central bank to stand behind it. But despite a lot of techno-enthusiasm, the chances that Bitcoin will replace the dollar or the Euro, or even become an important medium of exchange, a nil.

I give Jeff Bezos all the credit in the world for the PR coup of 60 Minutes. He launched the holiday shopping season by getting everyone talking about Amazon, in a mostly good way, at the cost of producing a clever video. But it’s time for the tech commentariart to show the ability to do more than parrot outlandish claims.

As a technology industry analyst, I spend a lot of time on airplanes both domestically and internationally—demonstrated by my freshly minted United Airlines Premiere Million Miler Card. On the majority of those flights, I make a point to walk up and down the aisles of the plane, glancing at what types of devices people are using. While it certainly doesn’t qualify as a rigorous or scientific research methodology, I find it to be a fascinating way to see what’s hot and what’s not. It’s also an interesting way to get a sense of not only what people have bought, but what they actually find important enough to carry with them and use.

Over the last few years—probably to no one’s surprise—I’ve seen a lot of tablets, most of them featuring a fruit logo on their shiny silver back side. People were using their iPads to watch movies, play games, read e-mails and even run other kinds of applications. I’ve seen a few other tablets too—often Kindle Fires—as well as a reasonable number of black-and-white eReaders, like Barnes & Noble Nooks as well as black and white Kindles, and a reasonable sampling of smartphones of different brands. Other than eBooks, most all of these other tablets were used almost exclusively to watch videos, from what I could tell, whereas the smartphones were primarily used to play games. Interestingly, for a long time, it seemed like the odd man out was actually the notebook PC.

But things have changed quite a bit over the last 18 months or so. Now, as I walk down the aisles of my flights what I see primarily are notebooks—and lots of them. The number of tablets—while still reasonable—has made a noticeable decline, particularly as a percentage of the total devices in use. I’m not quite sure when this phenomena started, but during my last several trips I was actually surprised by how many notebooks there were in active use—with most all of them being used for work purposes: e-mail, presentations, spreadsheets and other types of business-focused applications. Now, this could just be a reflection of people focusing more on work as the economy improves, but I actually think it portends a bit of a renaissance for business notebook PCs. Indeed, the most recent US commercial PC shipment numbers from big data houses like IDC and Gartner show several quarters of positive growth—this after several years of declines.

The mix of notebooks in use is interesting as well. The vast majority are traditional clamshell form factor Windows 7-based PCs and a fair number of them appear to be very non-Ultrabook like (a polite way of saying pretty big and thick). Of course you’ll also see a decent number of Macbooks (both Pros and Airs), a few Windows XP-based systems and an increasing number of Windows 8/8.1-based PCs—though I’ve seen very little touch-based usage. I’ve also yet to see very many 2-in-1 devices which, in theory at least, are attempting to bridge the gap between notebooks and tablets. All told, it’s frankly a pretty fair reflection of today’s total PC installed base.

But the key point here is that—far from being dead—business notebooks appear to be very much on the rise. It’s almost as if after people finished their initial tablet “flings,” they’ve rediscovered the practical value a notebook offers—particularly for business travel. That’s not to say PCs won’t continue to see challenges from tablets, phablets and other interesting new form factors, but it’s going to be interesting to watch how the device wars continue to evolve. If you want to see where things are headed yourself, just do an aisle check of your own on your next flight.

All this happened, more or less.

The Wednesday before Thanksgiving I am sitting in my office when a tall, skinny man wearing glasses comes in delivering my mail. This is unusual because I usually walk out to the front to pick it up. We’re into the lean startup thing which means lots of walking.

“You’ve got mail!” he says, winking at me.

I’m still pondering how he made it past the door that needs an electronic key fob to unlock, but I’m a sucker for trivia and he seems harmless, so I ask: “the AOL kind or Meg Ryan kind?”

“The free shipping kind,” he says and then pauses before adding in a stage whisper, “I never really thought she’d make a good ambassador.”

I looked at him for a full beat, wondering just what was going on. “Meg Ryan? She’s an actress not an ambassador.” And I am startled to realize I’m actually engaging in a conversation with a pasty faced stranger about Meg Ryan and AOL. It’s 10 am, and I feel like I need a drink already.

“Oh right!” he says. “She’s still an actress now. Right…” He continues quickly almost to himself. “Sorry, I’m a bit unstuck.”

I’m a little scared. He’s clearly off his rocker. “Look here, who are you and how did you get into my office?”

Instead of answering, he reaches into his pocket and hands me a card. It reads:

Dr. William Pilgrim
Optometrist

“Ok,” I say. “Dr. Pilgrim, what are you doing here? Can I help you with something?”

“Billy,” he says. “I go by Billy.”

I am stumped by the Billy thing. Who calls their optometrist, Billy? “This still doesn’t tell me where you’re from or what you want with me.”

“I’m from upstate New York, but that doesn’t matter. I want you to help stop something that is going to happen in your future. I’m here to try to get you to see what’s coming.”

“Now, just wait a minute,” I stammer. “You want me to stop something that hasn’t happened yet?”

“Right,” he says. “Just like it says on the card.”

“It says ‘optometrist’ on the card,” I point out.

“Yes!” He exclaims. “Optometrist. I help people see things more clearly. Get it?”

“You mean like a metaphor? Or is it a simile?” I couldn’t remember which was the right one, and I was never very good at the parts of speech. I’m still embarrassed by my SAT score in English.

“It’s a metaphor,” he says.

“So now I’m supposed to believe you’re a metaphor from the future? Ok, that’s it. I’m calling the cops.” I turn around and reach for my desk phone.

“You disconnected that last week,” he says.

He’s right. It’s that lean startup thing again. Landlines are so 2000. I pat my pockets for my cellphone.

“Wait!” He yells. “I can prove it!”

“That you’re a metaphor?” I am still fumbling for a phone. “That makes no sense at all.”

“No! That I’m from the future. I can prove I’m from the future.”

I have my phone out now but my hands are so sweaty, the damn fingerprint sensor won’t unlock the phone.

“It gets really cool on version 7,” he says knowingly. “Retinal.”

“What? But how can…”

“No time!” He says. “Well actually… lots of time… infinite really. But no time in this now. Here! Quick, look!” And he tosses the pile of mail down on my desk.

It looks like regular mail to me, until I look at the postmark. November 29, 2015. Two years from now. “Come on! You expect me to fall for this? Anyone can fake a date on an envelope.”

He smiles. “Look closer.”

I look again and then I see it. I thought it was hand drawn at first. Underneath the cancellation mark there’s an arc of an arrow curving to the right.

“You’re an Amazon Prime member aren’t you?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Free shipping… Great deal.” I’ve been gripping my phone so hard, Siri is asking me if I need help with anything. I still think he’s crazy, but there’s something in his eyes that makes me sit still. “What’s Amazon got to do with my mail?”

“Everything,” he says. “That’s why I’m here. They bought the U.S. Postal Service last year… Sorry. They buy the postal service next year. You have to stop them.”

“Amazon does what?” I exclaim.

“They buy the post office. Bezos is a crazy big thinker. Too big. It’s the first step and he must be stopped now while it’s still possible.”

I know that Jeff Bezos is the CEO of amazon.com, but whatever… Billy the eye doctor is clearly whacko. “Why the hell would he do that? They lose money, they’re almost constitutionally incapable of making a profit. They don’t make a profit because their mission to deliver to anyone anywhere in the U.S. for a flat rate is too big. They…”

He looked at me, arched an eyebrow and asked, “Is that Amazon or the postal service you’re referring to?”

“Oh…” He had me on that one. Clever.

“Right.” He continues to speak as if I hadn’t interrupted. “Bezos was planning this all along. Brilliant… “ His voice trails off. “Bezos saw the same problem the telcos did in the 90’s. He was the one to see the answer was concentrated in one spot, so he grabbed it before anyone else could.”

“Saw what?” Against my better judgement he had my attention.

“The last mile! The U.S. Postal Service has built out distribution to every home in the U.S. They own the physical last mile; be it an apartment in NY or a cold fishing hut in Alaska. They’re beyond huge. They deliver 40% of the world’s mail! 31 thousand buildings that can be used as drop off and pick up points. 80 million packages picked up! 200 thousand vehicles! Even FEDex and UPS use the Post Office for a bunch of their shipping. Bezos saw he could get everything in one spot, so first he worked a deal to keep them open on Sundays to test his idea out before buying the whole operation.”

“I guess it makes sense,” I said, rising to the debate. “The post office needed someone to keep it from losing more money.”

“No!” he shouts. “Bezos needed the U.S. Postal Service more than the Post Office needed him. He played the loss making thing up in the public. Why do you think he bought a newspaper? Come on man, think! A Washington newspaper? He needed it for the public debate he knew he was going to have!”

“You’re telling me he bought a newspaper so he could buy the post office?”

“You’ll see. The Unions, the Senators, even the President himself–Bezos outwitted them all. The newspaper was the beginning, but it was the semi-independent platform he needed to talk about why leasing the U.S. Postal Service was such a good idea for everybody, and it worked.”

“Wait… Leasing? I thought you said ‘bought’.”

“Well, it’s a 99 year lease, but he took over the whole thing and is running it for them. The government got shares in Amazon worth way more than it was costing them to run the place themselves. It was the greatest public to private transaction in history. Mail delivery is seven days a week now and Amazon prime members can mail anywhere in the U.S. for free—they call it “prime class mail” now instead of first class. Bezos even did this thing where you could print out postage from your amazon.com account. It wasn’t until later that people figured out he had raised postal rates by making it a flat subscriber fee.” His voice picked up pace, and he was looking at the ceiling. He seemed feverish. “It was brilliant, he said, just brilliant. Because FedEx and UPS depend so much on the U.S. Postal Service, he was able to use his new leverage to reduce all of Amazon’s shipping costs before he wiped out the big retailers, all with the help and blessing of the U.S. Government.”

“You’re telling me he did all of this just so he could ship consumer goods?”

“Think strategically! He didn’t do it for shipping, he did it for taxes. He took over the postal service, and he got tax exempt status for everyone buying from Amazon in return.”

This was too much. “Give me a break!” I said. “If Amazon lets me ship for free and lets me buy things tax free, it sounds like a great deal. Everyone should be happy except Amazon’s competitors.” I had forgotten for the moment that this was not a rational conversation.

“That’s what the Walton’s argued before they started shutting down all those Walmarts. They sued. Get this: amicus briefs from all fifty-one states on behalf of Amazon. The states got a cut of the deal, and it sailed through anti-trust because Amazon was a quasi-governmental-company-hybrid. Like Fannie Mae, except instead of backing mortgages it was shipping hand soap. The last case got to the Supreme Court in 2018 and the ruling was a doozy. You’re a businessman, you’ll love it… Takes the whole “corporations are people” thing to its logical conclusion. Look, I’ve got to go. You’ve got enough warning. Just stop him before it’s too late.”

“Warning? Too late? Too late for what? Too late to get him to pay taxes?”

He looks at me for a moment as if weighing what to say next. “After Amazon took over all the back end services from the CIA, it was easy to win healthcare.gov and lots of the little stuff. They finally took over the IRS in 2020. Do you see? They know everything, and it all shows up on your Amazon home page. They know you need statins and that you deduct for a home office. I’ll let you guess what they do with all that big data… Let’s just say that at one point Amazon’s ‘recommended for you’ became very, very creepy.”

Billy reaches down and grabs the mail off my desk. “Can’t have any paradoxes, can we? I’ve got to go, Montana’s waiting. Stop him. Now, answer that call and tell her not to worry, you don’t need a new water heater.”

I don’t even get to ask him why he has to go to Montana. My phone rings, and I look down to pick it up. It’s my wife calling to tell me that there is a puddle of water under our water heater in the garage. When I look up, Billy’s gone.

So there it is as best I remember it. I guess we shouldn’t let the free shipping lull us into a false sense of security. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

So it goes.

The list of recent of accomplishments at the Federal Communications Commission is pretty short. Although President Obama and his FCC chief, Julius Genachowski, took office with a lot of bold talk, very little has happened in the past five years. One reason is that the FCC has gotten mired in the same partisanship that has crippled policymaking in general.

But the FCC has wasted a tremendous amount of time and energy fighting old battles that no one was willing to let go of. Should anyone really care about rules governing the concentration of broadcast ownership at a time when online media are exploding and broadcasters are losing their relevancy? And the FCC’s network neutrality rules, which are likely to be struck down by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, deal with a threat that, after 20 years of the commercial internet, remains much debated but almost entirely theoretical.

A savvy insider. Things may be about to change. After his confirmation was held up for months for no particular reason, Tom Wheeler has taken over as FCC chair. A savvy Washington insider who has won the respect of most of the interest groups that shape communications policy, Wheeler is off to a fast start. And he is setting an agenda of issues that matter for the future.

The two items at the top of Wheeler’s list both deal with the way internet and wireless technologies have revolutionized communications and lest policy gasping to catch up. The one that certainly has the tech industry’s attention is the need for more spectrum to support the burgeoning use of wireless data. The other, which has been largely off the public radar but which is vitally important to the future of communications, is what to do about the expensive and increasingly obsolete public switched telephone network. Wheeler declared his interest in taking on the telephone issue in a blog post in which he announced it is time for what he calls a“Fourth Network Revolution.”

AT&T Gets the Ball Rolling. The process was actually set in motion last year when AT&T formally petitioned the FCC for permission to abandon its traditional wireline phone network. Wheeler plans to begin formal consideration of this in January. There is little doubt that the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and much of the regulatory regime that have grown up around it over more than a century are relics of an earlier technology.

There’s a widely held misconception that the phone system is analog. In fact, AT&T (the old AT&T, not the company that now uses the name) began experimenting with digitizing truck calls in the 1930s. Today, only the “local loop,” the bit of the system that connects “plain old telephone service” ((This is actually a standard industry term describing traditional residential service.)) subscribers is analog. All the links between switches that form the backbone of the system,as well as most business connections, are digital. The question is, what kind of digital?

Packets or Circuits? The internet runs on a technology called packet switching. Messages, including digital voice services such as Skype or Vonage, are broken up into short packets. Each packet finds its way to its destination independently; the packets need not follow the same path, nor need they arrive in order.. A TCP/IP network is based on what is known technically as “best effort delivery”; the network will do its bet to deliver each packet in a timely fashion, but no promises.

The PSTN works very differently. When you make a traditional call (or when your wireless call is connected to the PSTN), an SS7 switch at your central office contacts a chain of SS& switches at other central offices along the way to create a dedicated circuit for the call. This circuit, which has a bandwidth of 64 kilobits per second, is devoted exclusively to you call until you hang up. ((The circuit is not actually a physical wire. AT&T developed a technology called time division multiplexing decades ago to allow multiple calls to share a wire. And these days, the “wires” are almost all optical fibers that can handle thousands of calls.)) The legacy landline telephone system delivers very high reliability and good voice quality (though the sound fidelity is artificially degraded by frequency limits that go back decades), but makes very inefficient use of the network.

 Although the number of land lines in the U.S. has dropped considerably from its peak, the decline has flattened out in recent years and there are still about 150 million lines in use (chart.) A fair number of these lines are already IP-based. If you get a land line from a cable company, AT&T Uverse, or Verizon FiOS, you already have IP phone service.

What Sort of Regulation? The biggest question facing the FCC as it considers the IP transition is what sort of regulatory regime should apply to the new system. Even most libertarians will agree that some things will still need to be regulated, such as 9-1-1 emergency services. Universal service, the idea that telephone service should be available to every American and, if necessary, at a subsidized price that even the poorest can afford, is a political reality that will not go away. There will be arguments, however, about just what sort of service is required. There have already been disputes about Verizon’ efforts to substitute wireless service for landlines in some isolated areas in the wake of hurricane Sandy.

What should the rules be for interconnections between phone systems? Should they be like the unregulated market for internet peering, or like the heavily regulated system of traditional phone interconnects? How reliable does the system have to be? The legendary “five nines” of the Bell System, 99.999% reliability, allowed for an average of only five minutes of downtime per year. No internet provider offers a service level anything like that because the cost of doing so is so high. How much reliability is enough in an era when nearly everyone can pick up a mobile phone when the landline is down?

Questions like these, and many, many others, will dominate the debate over the IP transition, and the answers will shape U.S. telecommunications policy for decades to come. It is probably the most important question the FCC will face for a long time, and it’s a good thing that Wheeler is giving it a very high priority.