Apple got me – and you too…

I went to Microsoft TechEd in 2001 right before 9/11. It was a great conference and the shinning star was Visual Studio 2002 and .Net 1.0 Beta 2. The sessions on ASP.Net and VB.Net signaled a clear sea change from how Microsoft had been doing business. No longer was the language important – it was the framework. We were finally free to create apps with the ease of VB but do the programming in C#. For near 10 years many of us have ridden the huge .Net wave.

There is another wave coming – in fact we are on it now. Like a surfer you have to decide if you are going to ride this one or not. The problem with this wave is it is huge – much bigger than the Internet wave in 1995 and much, much bigger than the .Net wave of 2001/2002. This wave is labeled the ‘commoditization of computing’ or the ‘computer as an appliance’ and Apple gets it. Apple is now the most highly valued public technology company. Apple has released several devices recently which may seem useless to technical savvy users. The iPad is an example of this.

As I talked with several developers and IT support people they really don’t see the point of a device like the iPad. The point is that devices like the iPad are not trying to be a device that does everything (like a laptop or tablet computer). It also is not trying to only do one thing like the Kindle. It is trying to do most of what most people do with computers today which is surf the web, email, shop online, view content (ebooks, movies, TV) and social network. The iPad is perfect for that and that is why Apple is selling 200,000 of them each week. It isn’t about a device a techie wants, it’s about a device the non-technical consumer wants.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364545,00.asp