Why Tablets Are Big Business
One look at Apple’s sales figures make the above point almost moot. Whoever guessed that they would sell millions upon millions was certainly better than us at guessing the demand. A quick search showed an article which estimated that Apple would sell well north of twenty million iPads in 2011. That’s a lot of tablets for people who have smart phones, laptops, and portable DVD players already. We still recall flying not long after the iPad came out and being shocked at the number of passengers who had them out for display. We couldn’t tell if they wanted to show off their ability to obtain one or that they actually found it useful. We certainly have not been called early adopters, and so it goes with the iPad. That we don’t own one hasn’t changed our interest in the device. With the introduction of the iPad 2, we are less than a week away from doing our share to help Apple hit its sales estimates.
As old school laptop and writers of high volume, high word count content, the thought of trying to do that on the iPad is frightening. It’s one reason why we still like the Blackberry. Typing on glass is decent but still suboptimal. It isn’t just the tactile feel of the keys but the pressure associated with pressing them. It results in much less strain than a touch sensitive device where the fingers hover over the keys. But that obviously hasn’t stopped people from buying them, and judging by our inbox, it hasn’t deterred people from writing emails on them either. It also doesn’t still explain the appeal of having a large iPhone without the phone. We get it that you can watch movies, play apps, let the kids play with it, do email, surf the web, keep it with you while watching TV, etc. Wait, so maybe we just explained its consumer appeal. And, that obviously has been enough to drive demand. But, we were just introduced to the business application of the iPad.
With so many Apple products, they start at the consumer level. Many of them are still primarily only consumer devices, e.g., the iPod. We saw it with the laptops and the phones. Apple managed to crack the code to consumer demand, creating such a broad base that businesses had no choice but to adopt. It didn’t hurt that some of the most influential businesses designed and, its employees almost exclusively, use their products. One stroll through the offices of Google will turn any Apple skeptic into at least a moderate believer. The same with so many game changing firms. They are either working on Mac’s and/or developing for them. It has, as we have harped on so many times before, forced big businesses to ease their policies and adapt to Mac.
Tablets are slightly different. If a company can support an iPhone, it can support the iPad. There’s not much that the company needs to do, and they aren’t really a corporate purchase. Sure, many executives will find ways for their company to supply them one, but they aren’t going to be stocked the same way that a desktop would be. That doesn’t make them less impactful for business. It just makes them impactful for different types of business. We’re so used to thinking about technology for big business that it’s easy to ignore their impact for smaller businesses. Thinking about Groupon Now and LivingSocial Instant brought this to forefront. To anyone else, a local merchant could earn them a few thousand dollars a year. That would be a good local merchant too. They just don’t like parting with money. That’s part of what made the group coupon sale palatable. They discount, but they get money.
Instead of maybe a thousand dollars from a local merchant, someone like Groupon can average almost five thousand per merchant deal. It’s all high margin too. Today, everything is handled with the equivalent of pen and paper, but with the cost of tablets being low, there is no reason that each merchant deal shouldn’t come with an iPad. Unlike enterprise level Open Table, an iPad could come preloaded with deal management software provided by the company. It could also be used to manage and arrange for more time sensitive deals, not to mention work with other providers like foursquare. This is why tablets excite me so much. They make for a conversion tool that at even $500 a pop makes it worthwhile to give away. The business use-cases are almost limitless in all types of local lead generation.
Tablets make for such a nice self-contained package. Selling lead to a dentists office? Here is your tablet with the lead software on it. Creating a home services lead gen business – give them an iPad or an iPhone with a built in app for receiving and following up with leads. The iPad and iPad mini (iPhone) in conjunction with the app store creates a greater pool of small business liquidity for sellers. It puts them closer to the customer and alleviates today’s gap between lead seller and lead buyer. We easily see a world where everyone will carry one, the modern day version of the Nextel phone, and it will be so much more profitable for buyers and merchants to have them that sellers will give them away. What a value proposition.
