UPDATED 12:58 EDT / MARCH 25 2014

Mobile market in flux

ipad touchscreen user interface UI UXWith all the news about Big Data and cloud services, the mobile market has taken a back seat in the news and probably in the minds of many CIOs in recent months. But mobile remains important, both as a major driver of the other trends revolutionizing IT and as an increasing part of the corporate end-user infrastructure. And the mobile market is anything but stable and is showing signs of further rapid change in the coming months.

Over the last two years we have seen the rise of Google Android, first in the smartphone market and last year in the tablet marketplace as well. Today various market surveys show more Android than iOS devices in users’ hands, and while that shift is mostly in the smartphone area, Android is also gaining parity in tablets. Simultaneously the once fast gowing market for the iPad has stabalized. This has left IT organizations, which originally focused on delivering services to iOS devices, scrambling once again to catch up, both in terms of providing business functionality to an increasingly mobile workforce and reaching a customer base through their connected devices.

When projecting the future is is always tempting to expect “more of the same”. Android might seem poised to gain more ground against iOS in the coming year, but such easy projections are, as Mark Twain warned in “Life on the Mississippi” always dangerous. Actually the market is showing definite signs of a new revolution in mobile, with the advent of wearables and the rise of Windows 8, particularly in the tablet marketplace.

Several forces are driving this shift in the marketplace. The first, and saddest, is that Steve Jobs, certainly among the greatest technical visionaries of our time, died decades too soon. We will never know what new creative things he might have created. Without him, so far what Apple has produced is incremental improvements of the iPhone and iPad, certainly good things as far as they go. But Jobs always believed in creating things people didn’t realize they wanted until they saw them. So far Apple does not seem to have found anyone who can replace him, which is not surprising. Geniuses who combine a clarity of vision of a transformed future with the engineering, business and marketing abilities to make that future happen are extremely rare.

I’m not saying sell your Apple stock. Given strong business leadership and an innovative culture, both of which Apple has, it will continue to prosper. After Thomas Edison died, the company he created became General Electric, still a Fortune 15 global entity. But the loss of Steve Jobs opens a door for other visions of the future.

Wearables

google glass 1One of those is wearable consumer technology. So far this is a very immature area, and the big question is what functionality is appropriate on a wearable. Just as tablets are not a new generation of portable computers, so wearables are not smaller smartphones. For instance, making phone calls on a watch linked to a smartphone is a nonstarter. Wireless headsets are the better solution. On the other hand messaging through a smart watch may be useful, allowing users to leave their phones in their pockets. One symptom of the shift in momentum in the mobile market is that Google with Google Glass, rather than Apple, is the leader in wearables, along with several startups.

Tablets and Win 8

Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro-580-100 Wearables, however, are still an immature area, with another year or two of experiment ahead before they reach the mass adoption stage. Tablets, on the other hand, are maturing rapidly, and it is here that the shift, if it happens, will be most evident, and the new entrant that may drive this shift is Windows 8. The problem is that iOS and Android were developed for handhelds that are typically used for lighter apps such as social media and for consuming more often than creating media. Large numbers of users who constantly demand that smartphones become lighter thinner and in general easier to carry are not likely to then add a four pound tablet that they have to carry either in a bag or under an arm like a clipboard to their standard baggage when they go out the door unless it provides functionality they need that their smartphone does not.

For the last two years the laptop market has been shrinking, as people apparently replace laptops with tablets. But the iOS and Android tablets today really are poor laptop replacements. For instance they lack multitasking and are designed to display one application at a time. This is fine for a handheld which is used for brief periods to check social media, read an e-mail or actually make a phone call. But tablets are designed to be used for longer periods. No one gets a tablet out to glance at Twitter and then put it back. But users who are for instance reading an e-magazine or answering e-mail on a tablet may want to keep track of their social media in background or switch between a message or document they are writing and source material. That is easy to do on a multitasking platform such as a laptop, much harder on today’s tablets. Even common tasks like copying a short document from a word processor to an e-mail or Web site, which is trivial on a laptop, becomes a very difficult undertaking on Android.

Windows 8 tabletBusiness users in particular feel this lack of basic functionality they expect in their productivity laptops. Those who do carry tablets for work end up carrying laptops as well on business trips and even to-and-from work, and often their laptops are basically personal devices that they use mostly for social media and Youtube rather than for productivity. The question quickly becomes whether the tablet’s larger screen really provides a great enough advantage over the much more convenient smartphone, given that their functionality is otherwise the same, to make it worth carrying another four pound device with them. Even users who replace low-end laptops with tablets for purely personal use may find over time that the functionality of the tablet is not adequate.

Also, Moore’s Law applies to tablets as well as laptops. As new generations faster low-power use processors appear and the cost of flash storage continues to plummet, new tablets will have the same power as at least lower end laptops. This will support a race to provide more functionality.

All this opens a door for Windows to capture an increasing share of the tablet marketplace with Windows 8, and Microsoft is obviously interested in walking through that door. Nothing is certain in this market, and Microsoft has a history of shooting itself in the foot in the mobile marketplace going back to the 1990s. This time it appears that Microsoft has all the pieces together at last. IT planners should expect steady growth on Win 8 tablets in their environments, and demand from their users for the same access to business services that they have on their laptops, over the next year and beyond.

photo credit: andyi via photopin cc
photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc
photo credit: Jason A. Howie via photopin cc

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU