“When Steve Jobs took the stage to introduce the iPad in 2010, he did something that he had never done in past presentations: He moved stage right and sat down in a big easy chair… He also made it very clear to the world that the iPad’s real glory came from it being a consumption device. He showed how it could be used to consume information, music, movies and games. He did not give any indication that that it could or should be used for anything other than consumer applications.,” Tim Bajarin writes for TIME Magazine. “But in a nod to the idea that the iPad could be useful to more than just consumers, Jobs had Apple SVP of marketing Phil Schiller come out and say that there would also be iPad versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers — Apple’s office productivity software. With that, Jobs and his team placed a side bet that the iPad was not just a consumer device, but one that could also be used for productivity.”
“Jobs knew that if he had positioned it for productivity and business, he would have gotten shot down by the business media. He knew they would buy the idea of the iPad as a consumer product, but would consider it way too underpowered to be used for business applications. Jobs and his team’s genius lies in the fact that they actually knew that it could be used for productivity, and from the beginning built the software tools for business app developers to create iPad versions of their products,” Bajarin writes. “For the first three months, the media and market pretty much just focused on the iPad as a consumer product and highlighted its various consumer applications. However, by the fourth month, we started seeing serious business applications written for use on an iPad. In fact, by the end of the iPad’s first year on the market, SAP had bought close to 10,000 iPads for company use; Salesforce.com also bought thousands for its workers.”
Bajarin writes, “By the anniversary of the iPad, there were over 10,000 business apps, and companies around the world were looking at the iPad as a highly mobile tool that could impact their users’ productivity. And schools had quickly seen that the iPad could be a valuable learning tool and started buying iPads in big numbers… This set off major alarms inside Microsoft.”
Much more in the full article here.
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