“Lenovo refreshed its tablet-capable business laptop on Tuesday and made a very conscious decision not to bring out a slate device, saying customers don’t want it,” Brooke Crothers reports for CNET.
“Lenovo will stick with the tried-and-true laptop-based convertible tablet designs and not bring out a slate device due to negative feedback from customers, an indication that Apple’s iPad may face resistance at businesses. ‘We of course build plastic mock-ups that we show (to customers)…we had a slate form factor,’ Mika Majapuro, senior worldwide product marketing manager at Lenovo, said. ‘The feedback was that for (our) customers it will not work because of the need to have (a physical) keyboard.’”
MacDailyNews Take: Lenovo will stick their heads in the sand, is more like it. Gee, what a surprise that the customers who are the world’s most resistant-to-change told you they didn’t want your crappy, functionless, unimaginative, software-free, plastic mockup. Sometimes the abject stupidity of these companies and the people “working” within them is appalling.
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” – Steve Jobs, May 25, 1998
Crothers continues, “The most prominent example of a pure slate device is the Apple iPad, which has a virtual keyboard. Majapuro said the response from customers to slates was a surprise. ‘It was amazing to me. At first I didn’t want to believe (our customers) but the keyboard was such a big need for them,’ he said. Majapuro said Lenovo even got feedback from high school kids. ‘These were 14-year-old kids, who, I thought, would be most willing to try a virtual keyboard but they said no, we want the physical (built-in) keyboard.’”
MacDailyNews Take: Luddites and the companies that cater to them disgust us. Nobody wants slate devices from Lenovo and the rest of the box assemblers because neither they nor Microsoft can provide the platform that’s necessary for the devices to be useful, much less desired. This fact has been proven again and again over the past decade, as Mika and the rest of his ilk know all too well. In the related articles below, note who believes in the iPad versus those who don’t. We’re going with Steve Jobs and Alan Kay over John Dvorak and Paul Thurrott, thanks.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s to the dull ones. The luddites. The tedious. The non-achievers. The square pegs in the square holes. The ones who refuse to see things differently. They’re extremely fond of rules. And they’ll do anything to maintain the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t help but do is to ignore them. Because they never change things. They don’t invent. They don’t imagine. They don’t heal. They don’t explore. They don’t create. They don’t inspire. They retard the progress of the human race. Maybe they have to be boring, unimaginative, a-holes. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see nothing whatsoever? Or sit in silence and hear nothing at all? Or gaze at a red planet and not even see it? While some see them as the dull ones, we see criminals. Because the people who are uninspired enough to think they can never change a thing, are the ones who hold us all back.
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