It’s time for tablets to be less boring
The SUV wasn’t even supposed to happen.
Back in the 80s, carmakers fitted a passenger car onto a truck chassis to create the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Ford Explorer years later. In doing so, they were taking advantage of a regulatory loophole: Certifying these vehicles as light trucks helped them skirt the lower emissions standards of passenger cars. The SUV — a historical accident — was conceived as a “tweener” product, a crossover between two separate categories — but managed to capture the best of both worlds. It combined the ruggedness and visibility of trucks with the comfort of passenger vehicles. And it did some things even better than trucks and cars — they were roomier and seated more.
But even more crucially, these vehicles held emotional resonance. We’ve all seen their commercials: A driver hops into the vehicle, cruises down a solitary urban boulevard, his journey melding seamlessly from cityscape to vistas of forest, mountains or desert. This was the dream of the SUV — you could go almost anywhere. It appealed to our subconscious urge to be sporty, to be constantly mobile — and to get away from it all. We projected our aspirations, self image and our ideals onto this car.
Like the SUV, the tablet computer is itself a hybrid product, a cross between the smartphone and personal computer. It also grew quickly. In 2012, modern tablets were hailed as one the fastest-growing technology categories ever.[1] This was 3 to 4 times faster at reaching a 10% adoption rate in the US than any other technology, including that of the smart phone, the Internet, computer or radio. It took television more than 10 years to get to the point that tablets got in 2.
Then the tablet market hit the brakes. And everyone since, from retailers to manufacturers, has been left in the wake of this decline to pick up the pieces. So what happened? Are they going to continue to lose relevance with consumers? Before we even begin to address this, I believe we need to look at how the tablet resembles the SUV in historical development.
Like the SUV, the fact that the tablet even worked as a consumer product is a minor miracle. They weren’t even considered a bona fide success until five years back. Prior to this, there were multiple iterations of the tablet– the Nokia 700, Apple’s Message Pad and the Palm Pilot.
But when Apple first released the iPad in 2010, there was one specific thing in mind — to beat the laptop and the smartphone at a number of tasks that consumers were then using them for. Namely, seven tasks: browsing, email, photos, video, music, games and e-books (apparently, netbooks were not the answer — they did everything poorly). What consumers decided in the end that tablets were good for, of course, would be a bit different. They ended up favoring tablets over smartphones for tasks like games, reading e-books, online shopping and watching videos.
It didn’t matter, of course, that other brands had rolled out similar products in the past — it was Apple that honed in on the idea that the iPad itself was better at those tasks than the laptop or smartphone. But there was also an emotional appeal at the core of why tablets became one of the most successful cross-over products in computing history.
The iPad was literally and figuratively a blank slate to fill up and color in with our imagination, and it evoked associations of mobility and adventure. Being able to do everything you could on a PC while on the go made for a powerful mental image: Watching a film while backpacking across barren wilderness, putting the finishing touches on a presentation while en route to a meeting, reading a New York Times feature story on a flight to Istanbul. They allowed us to do almost anything, anywhere they wanted — bounded only by our imagination. It didn’t matter, of course, that most tablet users didn’t take their devices outside the home, just as it didn’t matter that most SUV owners never took their vehicles off road. It was the promise that mattered — the promise of something that went beyond the purview of our day-to-day lives.
But unlike the tablet, the SUV has continued to redefine itself, tailoring to consumer aspirations over time as it evolves.
Redefining the tablet
Industry commentators have offered solid reasons as to why tablets have declined, so I won’t spend too much time on this. As a media consumption device, the accepted wisdom is that the replacement cycle for tablets has settled into a holding pattern similar to that of TVs or PCs, rather than smartphones, which are replaced every 1–3 years. Beyond that, everyone in North America who had wanted a tablet in the first place has already picked one up — so the market for first-movers — the first 10% — has been addressed. More importantly, there has been no compelling innovation that would convince the user to upgrade.
Furthermore, the opening remarks at the launch of the iPad were made at a time before phones and laptops began to mimic tablets. In the five years since, phone screens grew in size, while 2-in-1 hybrid laptops with touch screens have grown in popularity. The success of pure tablets meant that the other two categories had to evolve to become more like tablets themselves, so that the tablet’s traditional strengths — browsing, social, email, video, shopping, games and e-books — started to erode. The promise of unlimited mobility and functionality was co-opted by two other devices.
What we’re facing right now is a product that needs to redefine itself in an environment in which its core advantages are being squeezed in from both sides. How do we do this?
Taking a step back
Let’s frame a few key facts into historical perspective first. The first modern tablet, the iPad, was released in 2010. Since then, tablets have enjoyed little in the way of evolution. Few brands have truly innovated in this category — it’s almost as if they’ve given up hope for the future of the product. But I believe the reality is that we’ve only scratched the surface of what tablets can deliver.
Tablets have been, and still are, one-dimensional up until this point. From the standpoint of the manufacturer, they were designed as a one-size-fits-all product. The tablets we’re seeing on the market nowadays are designed to meet the needs of a broad spectrum of consumers. That’s understandable when we’re at an early stage of a technology, because you don’t really know how the consumer will eventually use the product — you can only guess at it. But it’s been five years already. As we look back at everything that has followed the launch of the modern tablet, you’re left with screen after screen that’s delivered in a relatively thin form factor. And we’ve just left it up to the consumers to do whatever they wanted with them.
Compare this with SUVs. Since its introduction, the category has branched out into a wide array of designs, sizes and use cases, from the electric to the crossover. The tablet, in comparison, has seen remarkably little evolution, staying essentially in the same form and configuration for the past five years. I believe that in order for the tablet to stay relevant, it needs to start adapting to evolving consumer and enterprise needs, like the SUV did, and find another reason to exist. I believe it’s time for a change.
I’ll reveal my biases here. I’m personally invested in the success of the tablet because of my role at Lenovo. But if we look at the tech industry objectively, we can still make the reasonable case that tablets are here to stay. And what we actually need is to open up the next phase in the evolution of this device that can propel it to a greater market adoption and answer more user needs.
The key is innovative specialization
The original tablet was meant to be something for everyone — it was a note pad, a gaming device, a TV and a productivity tool — and it appealed to a huge demographic as a result. So it was with the SUV. In the beginning, the Ford Explorer offered a bit of something for everyone. But instead of stagnating, the SUV evolved, growing more and more specialized. These days, you can find a vast array of SUVs with numerous subcategories, including crossover SUVs, luxury SUVs, compact SUVs, mid-sized SUVs, full-sized SUVs and performance SUVs. Why should tablets be different? No longer can one tablet have pretensions to be everything to everyone. Consumers want a device that appeals to their own interests, behaviors and identities.
As we also evolve, smart players in this market are starting to come to terms with this reality. Lenovo has taken its first steps on its own path of specialization, with the YOGA line of tablets, which isolates and supercharges the tablet’s strengths in entertainment and multimedia. We asked our users what our tablets could do better, and they told us they used their tablets for multimedia content consumption. What our consumers wanted was a device made specifically to deliver a better entertainment experience, beyond a stripped-down $50 budget tablet to watch Netflix or play Minecraft — a flat screen in the traditional form factor. So we had to figure out how we could deliver an entertainment experience that beat and went beyond anything that the laptop or smartphone could offer: A tablet that replaced TVs as a device for watching video with family and friends. So we built a product that projected videos onto walls, had a killer screen and captured 360-degree cinema sound through Dolby Atmos.
But we plan to keep on probing, to drill down on exactly what different consumer and enterprise experiences can teach us — to reclaim the tablet from the limbo that it’s in right now.
We can start by asking the next generation what they want. One of my daughters uses her tablet like it’s her notebook. She uses Google Docs to write her reports, various cloud-based applications to check her grades or send in her homework, and language software on her tablet for her Mandarin courses — listening to recordings and reciting them back as part of her homework. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most kids these days don’t even know how to interact with a computer that doesn’t have touch screen functionality.
And unlike someone of my generation — who would struggle to type a report without a keyboard — toddlers to 25 year olds are actually using their tablets to create things. Those who are below 14 years of age — the post-millennials — have never truly encountered computing technology that they could not touch to interact with. And while I don’t want to overstate this, their comfort level with touching a screen or any kind of touch surface is much higher than my age group, accustomed as we are to traditional laptop keyboards.
Call them Generation Touch — a silent demographic movement that will eventually transform the workplace and the home. Post-millennials have become as adept at typing and creating sketches on the tablet’s keyboard screen as they are with a physical keyboard. That’s why we need to start thinking about how we can adapt the tablet for them: a tablet built for creating reports, programming code, drawings, videos, music, screenplays, 3D models, designs — all without having to touch a physical keyboard or mouse.
Crossroads –evolution or disruption?
With the decline in sales, the tablet is now at a crossroads, branching out in paths that may diverge even further, as Cloud, touch technology and network connectivity grow in sophistication and become more commonplace. We as an industry can take the tablet down one of these paths — a productivity replacement for the PC, a single-purpose enterprise device, a pure entertainment medium, a budget screen or maybe something else entirely. We could also continue down the circular path we’ve been going down right now, and keep making tablets that try to be everything to everyone. Or instead, we could reject the very notion that the tablet needs to look and work in a certain way, and focus rather on redefining what a tablet can potentially become to each individual user.
The industry may end up offering differing responses to this challenge in the coming years. But I think we can all agree that we need more innovation than what’s industry players are bringing to the table right now. The first five years of the tablet — while defined by its explosive growth — was uneventful creatively. And with the waning of this growth, we need more creativity to reach escape velocity and start on phase 2 in the evolution of the tablets. How we handle this phase will make the difference in whether we can follow the SUV model in truly differentiating the tablet from its competitors, or lose our relevance entirely.
And I promise you’ll hear more from us on this very soon.
