Ever since Steve Jobs showed off the first iPad on TV 18 months ago, tablets have captured the buzz in the end-user computing market. The phenomenal monthly iPad sales figures, the appearance of entirely new, dazzling products such as the digital editions of major magazines, starting with Time, and the decline in the sales of low-end consumer laptops in subsequent months has constantly fed that buzz. And the almost immediate appearance of iPads in businesses, often in the hands of senior executives, has created speculation on the place of tablets in the office, with some predicting that tablets will replace laptop and desktop computers. And that speculation has not been confined to tablet promoters, as a recent posting on HP’s Enterprise CIO Forum titled “Tablets, smartphones, mobility change IT” by John Dodge.

But will tablets really replace (rather than supplement) “traditional” laptops and desktops in business? Honestly, as a long-time PDA user who has used a Windows tablet (a Sony Vaio UX running Vista) for six years, I do not think it will. I do not mean that tablets have no place in the office, far from it. But I think that the vast majority of business tablet users will continue to want laptops as well and will use both. Here’s why:

Apple and Android tablets are not primarily designed for business use. Apple makes it very clear that the iPad is a consumer product. Similarly, Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, are being sold primarily as consumer products. The only tablet that is actually being marketed as a business tool today is the RIM Blackberry Playbook, and significantly so far it has not had outstanding sales.

Certainly iPads and Android tablets are being used in offices, but are they being used for business activities or mostly as personal devices? Are users reading business e-mail on them or accessing information from core corporate systems such as ERP, CRM, or financials? In most cases, no. We know this because neither Microsoft Exchange nor core business software have iOS or Android clients, so unless your e-mail and office calendars run on RIM and your tablets are Playbooks, your users cannot do these things. If your company uses SaaS services that work through Web browsers, then your executives may be using their tablets to consume those services. Otherwise these tablets are mostly personal, used for instance to access personal e-mail and Web sites.

But if those core systems did have iOS and Android clients, or if a viable Windows 8 tablet does appear in the next year or two, would users prefer tablets? Well, that depends on what they are doing. It is certainly easy to imagine people whose jobs require a large amount of mobility either inside or outside the firewall to quickly adapt tablets. They are potentially tremendous tools for outside sales and support personnel, to the point of providing competitive advantage in head-to-head sales situations, and companies should be looking at what they need to do to empower their sales teams with those tools. It is easy also to visualize executives using tablets at meetings and while traveling on business, and plant foremen carrying tablets when moving around a production floor.

But when these same users need to produce reports, write e-mails of more than one or two sentences, or enter data into the front-ends forms of ERP, CRM and other systems, they will prefer to use something with a keyboard, which in most cases means a laptop. And many knowledge workers whose jobs involve heads-down data entry, analysis, and report writing will certainly want to do that on laptop or desktop computers rather than tablets.

Services Angle

Tablets are designed mostly for consuming media rather than processing data or other traditional computing tasks. As such they are potentially excellent tools for consuming SaaS-type business services, both from the public cloud and private clouds, and particularly by mobile workers. However, they are not a replacement for laptops or desktop computers, and IT should not expect to see a large drop in the company laptop/desktop population as tablets become more common in the office and iOS and Android OS clients for core business systems appear. Executives traveling to conferences or the board room to deliver presentations may prefer to carry a tablet with them, but they will want a laptop to create the slides when creating that presentation.