Eszter Morvay from IDC on tablets-n-targets

1. Where is the market?2. iPad Surprise in 20103. Are All Tablets Equal?4. View All Pages

So, for a woman who spends 365 days a year analysing market flow, what was the biggest surprise of 2010?

“Without a doubt, the biggest surprise in 2010 was the speed of uptake in the tablet PC market”, said Morvay. “IDC had just launched a new Media Tablet tracker that closely follows the market developments of this category.  This new system was clearly THE Christmas present to have in 2010″.

Logically, Apple’s gain will be someone else’s loss. Where did the iPad hit hardest?

“Microsoft enabled the tablet PC around 10 years ago, when it started to include touch as part of the Windows interface. The uptake has been minimal and focusing largely on certain vertical sectors”, said Morvay. “In 2010, there was a boom in the market for a product that was not new and for which no one had previously seen such a requirement. It seems to have caught the netbook manufacturers completely by surprise”.

Morvay explained “In the UK and Germany, there had been a lot of Telco deals for netbooks. This means that instead of buying a netbook outright, one of the mobile phone chains will bundle it with a mobile broadband contract that you pay for monthly on a 2 year contract. This had been a huge driver for netbooks. After Apple came to market and created the iPad class, the drop off in netbook sales was amazing. We saw a drop in the UK and Germany of around 40% with the Nordic countries even worse at around 60%”.

“Even more surprising was the way that the new iPad market cannibalised sales of mainstream computers, desktop and laptop”, said Morvay. “Armed with £600, the consumer can buy a wide variety of solutions. Some of them have really similar functions, for example high end netbooks and low end PCs or laptops”.

“The tablet market is different. It's what we call a completely different usage model”, she explained. “So whilst media tablets hit netbook sales from a usage standpoint, desktop/notebook demand also started to suffer – this time due to budget cannibalization. The available money was simply being spent elsewhere”.

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