"Tablets Will Take Over Sooner Than You Think: Five Telling Trends"

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

On an earning conference call in January, AppleCEO Tim Cook said, “I truly believe, and many others in the company believe, that there will come a day that the tablet market in units is larger than the PC market.” (See full transcript at Seeking Alpha) “Question is when?” asked Horace Dediu on the Asymco blog. What follows was his detailed projection, with lots of yummy looking charts, that came to the conclusion, “Given these assumptions, the day when the tablet market (by units) will exceed that of traditional PCs will come sometime in the fall of 2013.”

Now all of this is about sales, not installed base. And most observers, Dediu included, consider the tablet market to be mostly additive to the PC market—many users will have both. But the point is that just as many web sites have seen their share of traffic from mobile grow, and in some cases cross the 50% threshold, so too will the remaining desktop share be further fragmented by tablets. And when Apple finally gets the iTV thing right, content producers of all kinds (not just TV-centric ones like

ESPN) will be looking at programming for four distinct screens.

But to keep the focus on the “bridge screen” for the moment, let’s look at the use trends that will drive those hundreds of millions of tablet sales:

Enterprise: Many businesses have figured out that their workforce is mobile enough and apps are sufficient enough to met some or all of their employees needs. Apple is (finally) making significant inroads in the enterprise market, but Windows 8 should have a real impact as well. The very fact of theenterprise features in Windows 8 will push Apple and Android to follow suit.

Printing: Many businesses and educational institutions need frequently updated documentation and text books. The pace of change pitted against the cost and environmental impact of printing on paper (not to mention the inconvenience of dealing with all of it) point in one direction: tablets. There are data suggesting that companies that are introducing iPads to their workforce are cutting back significantly on their printing activities. Look for that trend to sharply accelerate.

Education: As a corollary to the point about printing, and incorporating software and individualized instruction considerations, many schools, from primary through colleges, are rolling out iPad programs. According to theiPads in Schools blog, “Just over a month ago when Apple announced iBooks Author software and the iBooks textbook distribution method, Apple’s Phil Schiller said that 1.5 million iPads were in use in education settings, leveraging more than 20,000 education applications.” Look for this to ramp up quickly as well.

Entertainment: Beyond being a “companion screen” for television viewing (see my speculations about the iPad3 as a super-duper universal remote), tablets are becoming the default “sit back” channel for consuming content of all kinds, particularly in the evening hours. As capabilities increase and people use tablets more for work and school, that content consumption will seep into their days just as social media has seeped in through the office computer and smartphone.

Government: With word that the U.S. Air Force is indeed buying a squadron of  iPads (despite recent rumors to the contrary) it’s clear that the Blackberry PlayBook is no longer “the only tablet certified for use by U.S. government agencies,” as a RIM spokesperson had previously boasted. And Android (and Windows 8) are bound to get into the game soon. Government use will be driven by the economics of the top three factors above—as long as they can figure out how to limit that time-sucking fourth factor.

The rise of tablets in so many flavors on top of the other screen types to target will undoubtably push HTML5 development ahead since none but the largest of companies will be able to deploy bespoke apps for such a varied environment. And as I suggested in last week’s Windows Phone post, four main platforms in the tablet market will be the configuration that will more efficiently grow the market and get devices into more people’s hands faster. What happens to the desktop is the next question. Certainly the need to engage multiple applications simultaneously will continue to be important in some businesses (iOS and Android, with a notable Samsung exception, run just a single app at a time, Windows 8 allows you to “snap” two together on the screen at once), but a lot of work will move down to tablets and a lot of personal desktop use will migrate up to networked TVs. The desktop PC, the workhorse of the 20th century computing revolution may itself become a quaint bespoke relic.