“Companies as diverse as General Electric, Wells Fargo, Mercedes-Benz and Medtronic are putting Apple’s iPad to work in their offices,” Miguel Helft reports for The New York Times. “New tablets are also expected to give the iPad, which has had the market largely to itself, a run for its money. R.I.M., which makes BlackBerry phones, and H.P. have long relationships with corporate technology buyers.”
MacDailyNews Take: A dead-on-its-feet maker of mechanical-button messaging phones and a long-ago innovator long since withered into an overpriced printer ink peddler? Shiver.
Helft continues, “For its part, Apple is hoping to stay ahead of competitors with a new version of the iPad, which may be unveiled as soon as next month. The company, which sold nearly 15 million iPads in the nine months after the release of the device, won’t say how many were bought by businesses. But during a conference call with investors and analysts in January, the company said more than 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies were using or testing the iPad, an increase from 65 percent three months earlier. Among those companies, said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, are JPMorgan Chase, Sears Holdings and DuPont.”
“For all its inroads in the workplace, neither the iPad nor any other tablet has displaced the PC, the workhorse of information workers for three decades — at least not yet. But that hasn’t stopped Apple’s perennial rival, Microsoft, from fretting over the tablet’s intrusion into the world of business computing, which it has dominated,” Helft reports. “In a series of PowerPoint slides for its marketing partners, Microsoft recently raised questions about the viability of the iPad as a business tool.”
MacDailyNews Take: As always, we love the smell of Microsoft’s fear in the morning, afternoon, and night.
Helft continues, “To a large extent the iPad’s entry into the business world was paved by the iPhone. When Apple first released the iPhone, it lacked capabilities to link up securely with corporate e-mail systems. But as executives tried the device, they often preferred it to their BlackBerrys and other smartphones, and soon began demanding support for them. Apple gradually added capabilities, and the iPhone became standard issue in scores of large businesses. Companies that waited two or three years to support the iPhone began adopting the iPad just weeks after its release.”
“General Electric has distributed approximately 2,000 iPads internally, and it developed a series of applications both for its employees and for its customers,” Helft reports. “Mr. Edling of NBC Universal also said that the 750 or so of the company’s employees who have been issued iPads still have PCs. But during a recent trip by several dozen executives to a technology trade show in Las Vegas, most brought only their iPads. As a result, Mr. Edling said he was able to dispatch just one technology person to support them, rather than two or three.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Today is Washington’s Birthday in the U.S.A., a federal holiday and, as such, the U.S. markets are closed for the day. We expect to be posting throughout the day, but lighter than usual.
Washington’s Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]