Daniel Eran Dilger for AppleInsider:
Jobs didn’t just unveil the iPad as a new product in 2010. He talked at length during the media event, providing a deep look into Apple’s strategic thinking on the subject of tablets. It was as if Jobs were giving the industry a Xerox PARC style tour of the secret labs inside Apple. He not only revealed the next big thing that would radically change the computing landscape but also detailed exactly what was going to make it commercially successful.
To compete for relevance and fill a valuable niche between a regular PC and a phone, Jobs said iPad would need to be much simpler to use than a PC. And to stand apart as useful next to a smartphone, it would be critical to have tablet-optimized mobile apps that were more sophisticated than a phone. These ideas may seem obvious today, but were once opposed and defied by competitors and critics.
In effect Jobs had detailed the exact x:y coordinates of the sweet spot for selling tablets to consumers. Why didn’t anyone listen? In part, it was because copying Apple strategy would require enormous amounts of work and required product development skills its competitors didn’t have.
MacDailyNews Take: And Jobs knew it. An iPad is not a Mac with a touch screen. It’s an iPad.
