Oh well… It seems that we are making the same old mistake again. It is hard to articulate my feelings about the trending tablet business. It feels like we are traversing the same path again. To be more clear I guess we again do what we did in the past when the PC business was in its early days.
History
I’m relatively young and unexperienced character in this software business but as far as I remember from my readings about the evolution of the PC age once hardware vendors used to create their proprietary OSes running only on their hardware and some software companies were making contracts with rest of the hardware vendors for deploying OSes on their platforms. As time went by PC market changed characteristics and more consumers began to purchase PCs. Increase in demand forced hardware vendors to standardize the hardware specs so that they can build cost effective PCs. Then proprietary OSes were replaced by generic OSes like Windows and Linux distros. And today as a consumer when you buy a PC, laptop or netbook you know that you can install Windows or other Linux distributions on your hardware; you believe that it is your right and freedom to use any OS on your hardware. You should have already noted this scenario is in action right now for the tablet business.
The Future
I hope within 5 to 10 years period tablet hardware vendors like Samsung, HTC, Nokia, Sony and otheers will realize the similarity I’ve tried to articulate above and decide to produce standardized tablet hardware so that we can install either Android or Windows 8 or even better have dual boot option on our tablets.
Exceptions
Apple will not follow this trend as it was the case with PCs Motorola (well actually Google) will probably not follow the trend as well Early Adopters As of today Microsoft seems to be on right path since Microsoft has no Windows Phone or Windows Tablet hardware unit. But if rumors about the Nokia acquisition comes true Microsoft will jump in the Exceptions wagon with Apple and Motorola
Lets wait and see…