And the prize for head in the sand goes to...

This won't replace an iPad

The whole history of computing is littered with people making wildly inaccurate predictions. Famously Thomas J. Watson, Mr Big in the early days of IBM, believed that there was only a worldwide market for about five electronic computers. If we ignore things like washing machines, but include smartphones, games consoles and PVRs, we must have around three times that in our house alone.

Even so, you would think by now that some computing bigwigs would learn their lesson. But no. The head honcho of struggling mobile manufacturer BlackBerry, Thorsten Heins has announced that tablet computers - iPads and Kindle Fires and all those other Android equivalents - will be dead within five years. A flash in the pan. A short term craze that will go the way of hula hoops (the toy, not the crisp) and clackers.

Apparently Thorsten said 'In five years, I don't think there'll be a reason to have a tablet anymore... Maybe a big screen in your workplace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.'

No, Mr Thorsten, BlackBerry tablets - the much derided 'Playbooks' - were not a good business model, because they weren't very good tablets. But to expand your experience to the whole market is ridiculous. Thorsten sees mobiles like their latest, the BlackBerry Z10 (which is basically BlackBerry just about catching up with Apple and Samsung) replacing tablets. I'm sorry, they won't.

The fact is I have a very nice smartphone, and I can read books and PDFs on it, or do spreadsheets or Word documents - and I do when all else fails. But I don't most of the time, because it's so much more practical and productive on my iPad. I can see it's quite possible that laptops will only still exist for power users as they are replaced by tablets for most people - but not tablets replaced by phones. I have now abandoned laptops and only use my iPad for mobile computing - and I know increasing numbers of people who do this.

Tablets are taking the domestic market by storm, but inevitably they are slower to penetrate in business, BlackBerry's heartland, because business IT departments are (often sensibly) very conservative, but they will come. Of course there will always be power business users who do serious graphics, or write all day who will want a 'real' computer, but I can see an awful lot of business computing eventually done on next generation tablets.

I don't know if there is a head-in-the-sand award for business, but if there is, I know who should get it.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...

Search This Blog