Every tech blog worth it’s digital bytes seems to talk ad nauseum about how the iTunes Store has locked in users with the app purchases and hence it will be difficult for people to move from iPhones/iPads to competing devices.
Well, if that is the way you frame an argument, you know who has the biggest, most geographically spread-out and oldest app lock-in in existance? Microsoft.
Sure, people are buying 20+ million ipads each year and that is a great thing, no doubt.
But I believe the so called 1% of the blogosphere or twitterati need to look outside their closed shell!
Every single ipad sold is an added device to an existing PC infrastructure. Again, don’t compare graphic/audio/video artists/kids/excited-gadget freaks to the actual business users who buy thousands of desktops each year)
There is lock-in with accounting apps, with custom software (some even still using Foxpro apps), with manufacturing/erp/crm tools, with calibration apps.
The apple store majority caters to the entertainment set. Not the at-work set. Sure that can change over time. As will other things.
But trying to cry out “post-PC” era today is like looking at aircrafts and crying out “we don’t need roads anymore”. It’s just not logical given the timeline, given the context and given the real-world needs.
For every person with $500 to spend on an iPad, there are a 100 people who will wait all night in line for a $10 phone or a $100 Cheap-o-top.
For all their BS in “writing about companies that looking at the big-picture”, the tech journalists forget to look at the big picture themselves. The big picture with a few billion users.
I’ve owned a tablet since 2005. Before that my first ever laptop was a thinkpad without a CD drive back in 2001, seeing the demise of optical media and proliferation of broadband. So I can look a little ahead of the curve too. And I don’t need to be a superstar tech-writer for that.