Will Apple iPad be end of Notebook, Netbook PC ?

[Alamaking]

I think the business world will be slow to embrace. And corp and Gov is where the money is. As evidenced from Microsoft profits, they are still making a lot of money.

Anyway, great internet cruising but not good for business. Cannot imagine using that touch pad to work with excel spreadsheets.

By buying out competitors and suing copyrights lah, Look at their OS, so many years, still same shits. 2 Steves, 1 is a visionaire, 1 is useless :p:p

 

[johnny333]

I think the business world will be slow to embrace. And corp and Gov is where the money is. As evidenced from Microsoft profits, they are still making a lot of money.

Anyway, great internet cruising but not good for business. Cannot imagine using that touch pad to work with excel spreadsheets.

IPad is only a few months old but many businesses are already adopting it. Bet that there are as many that are evaluating it.

Many people were using MS Office because it was sort of an industry standard but there are now more options out there & some don't even need such a heavy duty app like MS Office


How business is putting the iPad to work
Many small companies and entrepreneurs are finding innovative ways to use Apple’s tablet

by Joel Mathis, Macworld.com

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad in January, he pitched it mostly as a consumer device—a relaxation tool people would use to read books, play games, watch video and peruse family photos. But Michael Kanzleiter and his colleagues at Mercedes-Benz Financial saw something else: A better way to sell cars.


Traditionally, car salesmen trying to close a deal have had to drag customers off the showroom floor and back to the office to fill out loan applications and other paperwork. This summer, though, iPads were distributed to forty Mercedes-Benz dealerships throughout the country, letting dealers complete forms right next to the new cars—and, perhaps, minimizing chances that customers would get cold feet during the final moments of the vehicle-buying process.

Mercedes-Benz tries the iPad
Mercedes-Benz has distributed iPads to selected dealerships across the country. The company hopes buyers will be less likely to get cold feet if they can complete forms in sight of the car they want.

“The car is where the emotions come up, and the customer is excited about it,” Kanzleiter, senior marketing manager for Mercedes-Benz Financial in Farmington Hills, Michigan said of the pilot program. “The more you can have the process close to the car, the better it is.”

Mercedes-Benz isn’t alone in bringing the iPad into its business processes: during Apple's third-quarter earnings report, COO Tim Cook said that 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies are now using the device. But it’s also clear that small businesses and entrepreneurs are finding innovative ways of using the Apple tablet to make their businesses and professional lives run more smoothly and profitably.
Examples from the field

Paperless sales C. Lee Smith, president and CEO of Sales Development Services in Westerville, Ohio, sends his sales staff into the field with AdMall, a Web-based diagnostic tool that lets them survey clients about their local advertising needs and helps them create a business plan on the fly.

“The beauty of the iPad is that you skip a step in the process—you don’t need paper, you don’t need to go back and key it in,” he said. “You can just tap and get the correct answers.”

Furniture delivery Cleveland-based Arhaus Furniture will put iPads in the hands of its deliverymen in 14 states by November—and expects to save $100,000 a year in time and paper savings for its invoicing, signature-capture and credit-approval processes. Furniture deliverers will also be able to use the GoogleMaps app to ensure they’re delivering furniture to the correct location.

“We looked at the traditional (electronic invoice) systems that were out there. For big burly guys who deliver furniture, they were kind of tiny. The iPad was just right,” said John Roddy, Arhaus’ Senior Vice President of Logistics. “They’re excited about it, and a little hesitant. When they start looking at less paper carried around, the ability to help the customer in the home, it makes it exciting.”

Tracking data
Charlie Wood of Spanning Sync uses his iPad to keep track of real-time data about company sales, server use, and more.

Real-time stats Charlie Wood, a founder of Spanning Sync in Austin, Texas, has his personal iPad propped up next to his office desktop computer. It’s open all day to a password-protected Web page that updates constantly with real-time information about sales, server use, and other critical information for the company, which sells apps that sync Google calendars and address books with a user’s hard drive information.

“We’re sort of addicted to numbers. We’re addicted to metrics,” Wood said. “What we really wanted was something ambient—instead of looking it up, it would be a thing on the wall. You could glance over and know what the numbers are without looking them up.”

All-purpose assistant In the UK, James Burland of Anglebury Press, a small print company on the south coast of England, uses the iPad to do everything from entering job details on GoogleDoc forms, to taking phone messages, to showing artwork to clients before jobs go to press.

“It’s certainly true that we could do everything on a laptop or iPhone, but it wouldn’t be quite as elegant,” said Burland, who also writes the iPad Creative blog. “The iPad gets carried around quite a bit from office to office and even around the factory.”

Technical manuals to go In Warsaw, Poland, broadcast engineer Wojtek Pietrusiewicz uses an iPad instead of carrying a library of technical manuals with him as he services equipment.

“Whenever I do maintenance, software/hardware upgrades or full installations, I require many manuals in PDF form. Since there is rarely space for a laptop in the central apparatus rooms, I decided to use my private iPad instead,” he said.

PDF review tool Back in the United States, Wharton School Publishing editor Stephen J. Kobrin says the iPad has proven more useful than the Amazon Kindle DX at displaying PDFs—allowing him to reduce paper clutter—and more versatile than Microsoft’s line of tablets.

“It’s primarily useful for reading documents and keeping everything in one place,” Kobrin said. “It’s also very good for keeping to-do lists.”
Size matters

One common thread becomes clear when talking to people who use the iPad at work. Laptop computers are often too bulky to do the jobs described, while iPhones and other mobile devices are too small.

“The display on the iPhone is too small for media salespeople to share information with their advertiser,” Sales Development Services’ Smith said. "A laptop is too cumbersome, too heavy, and takes too long to boot up.”

Back at Mercedes-Benz Financial, the pilot program in dealerships will be reviewed at the end of the summer. If deemed a success, the company could distribute iPads to the remainder of Mercedes-Benz USA’s 350 dealerships.

At this point, that seems a likely outcome.

“We’ve received really good dealer feedback on the program. They’re very excited about it, they use it a lot,” Mercedes-Benz Financial’s Kanzleiter said. “I think it really offers a whole new range of opportunities.”

 

[singveld]

ipad cannot work without a mac/pc.
so let say you have to go on holiday or business trip for 2 weeks, you cannot leave your macbook at home, because, ipad cannot work without macbook.
no other way to transfer documents and video into it.
i hope they fix this shit. with a mobile dvd with usb port on it. which communicate with ipad by wifi.

 

[johnny333]

As for the Ipad, waiting for the next generation before I will buy one, ..

I also waiting to see what ver 2.0 of the iPad

Looks like Apple won't be releasing a 7" iPad but it should support multi-tasking.

 

[Alamaking]

ipad cannot work without a mac/pc.
so let say you have to go on holiday or business trip for 2 weeks, you cannot leave your macbook at home, because, ipad cannot work without macbook.
no other way to transfer documents and video into it.
i hope they fix this shit. with a mobile dvd with usb port on it. which communicate with ipad by wifi.

I think its fine lah, use iPad to surf net or movie streaming is suffice for me

 

[longbow]

By buying out competitors and suing copyrights lah, Look at their OS, so many years, still same shits. 2 Steves, 1 is a visionaire, 1 is useless :p:p

Cannot be bothered how MS got their technology. As long as they are still generating $4B plus profits - same as Apple then it is fine.

I am just impressed with their stable revenues.

Agree that Jobs is a lot more innovative than Balmer. But then MS has this cashcow throwing out $4B to $5B a quarter in profits. It is matter of time before they get something right.

Remember MS's old tired product lines spins off as much profit as Apple's stellar quarter that had the new Iphone 4 and Ipad.

 

[johnny333]

Trouble at Microsoft
When key people start leaving a company, you know that it's in trouble.




Microsoft software head Ray Ozzie to depart
Published: Monday, 18 Oct 2010 | 9:44 PM ET
Text Size


SAN FRANCISCO - Bill Gates' successor as Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, is leaving the company after five years.

In an e-mail sent to Microsoft Corp. employees Monday, CEO Steve Ballmer announced the change, saying Ozzie will stay with Microsoft for an undefined transition period.

Ballmer said the company is not looking for a replacement.

He said Ozzie — whose title translated into the company's top technical thinker — plans to concentrate on "the broader area of entertainment where Microsoft has many ongoing investments" before he leaves. As for his post-Microsoft employment, Ballmer said Ozzie has "no plans at this time."

He joined the company in 2005 as its chief technical officer when Microsoft bought his collaboration software company, Groove Networks. Already respected for his work with Web computing, Ozzie was asked to figure out how Microsoft could survive the sea change toward software being delivered online.

Ozzie, 54, came up with the idea for and helped build out Windows Azure, Microsoft's system for building and using software over the Internet.

Wes Miller, an analyst for independent research group Directions on Microsoft, said that Ozzie has long pushed for Microsoft to "run at a much faster pace than they may honestly be comfortable with at their age."

It's hard to tell if Ozzie was frustrated with the pace of change and wanted to leave, or was asked to step down, Miller said.

In the 1980s, Ozzie was at Lotus Development Corp., where he led work on Lotus Symphony, a precursor to Microsoft's Office package, and Lotus Notes, which let people form groups to share documents and e-mail. Notes' success prompted IBM to buy Lotus for $3.5 billion in 1995.

Ozzie then started Groove to refine his idea of "groupware" that lets multiple people collaborate. Groove made it possible for people to work together on the same virtual sketchpad, view the same video or edit documents simultaneously, all while chatting by text or voice.

This expertise made Ozzie a natural replacement for Gates as the mastermind of Microsoft's broad software strategy. Shortly after joining the company, Ozzie wrote an influential memo advocating a shift away from some of Microsoft's traditional reliance on selling desktop software and toward Web-based and sometimes ad-supported software. He urged Microsoft's product groups to make software that can run on a computer desktop, in a Web browser, on mobile devices and in game consoles, and to give users "seamless" access to their files no matter where they log on.

In Monday's e-mail, Ballmer referred back to that memo, reiterating a previous remark he had made that it "stimulated thinking across the company" and was a catalyst for getting Microsoft to concentrate on so-called "cloud" computing.

 

[GoFlyKiteNow]

I think the business world will be slow to embrace. And corp and Gov is where the money is. As evidenced from Microsoft profits, they are still making a lot of money.

Anyway, great internet cruising but not good for business. Cannot imagine using that touch pad to work with excel spreadsheets.

I will never buy Apple products for the simple reason
they make you a captive customer.

Even the iphone battery, you got to go to them to change it.
And the price is relatively very high for that and other services.

 

[singveld]

Even the iphone battery, you got to go to them to change it.
And the price is relatively very high for that and other services.

NO , there are many cheaper 3rd party repair shop that can do all these.
dun worry.

 

[singveld]

I think its fine lah, use iPad to surf net or movie streaming is suffice for me

not for me, megavideo and anime media uses flash.

 

[Alamaking]

Cannot be bothered how MS got their technology. As long as they are still generating $4B plus profits - same as Apple then it is fine.

I am just impressed with their stable revenues.

Agree that Jobs is a lot more innovative than Balmer. But then MS has this cashcow throwing out $4B to $5B a quarter in profits. It is matter of time before they get something right.

Remember MS's old tired product lines spins off as much profit as Apple's stellar quarter that had the new Iphone 4 and Ipad.

MS staff are not forward driven, instead of being innovative and thinking of new ideas, they just keep upgrading their old stuffs, for fuck? Bring back Gates pls :p:p:p

 

[singveld]

microsoft are useles, they keep making those shitty decision , like win 7 have so many difference version to confuse the user.

apple going to be biggest company in the world.

because everything they made print money. except that apple tv shit.

 

[johnny333]

because everything they made print money. except that apple tv shit.

In Spore the Apple TV wouldn't be of any use because there's nothing worth recording The problem with Apple TV is that it comes up against the Spore "system" and not the market.

Mediacorp is only interested in generating $$$ that's why they keep airing the cheap programs, locally produced junk, old stuff. The overpaid executives, actors & actresses would be out of a job if they allowed the free market to operate.

There's alot of private interests involved in keeping out the competition. These are powerful "members" who would loose $$$ if there was competition e.g. Starhub, Mio,.... Who would subscribe if there were cheaper alternatives

There is also the $$$ generated from censorship fees & the jobs of those gate keepers at stake.

 

[singveld]

In Spore the Apple TV wouldn't be of any use because there's nothing worth recording The problem with Apple TV is that it comes up against the Spore "system" and not the market.

it is worse than that. not just in singapore, in fact the rest of the world.
only in USA, apple tv can work as jobs demonstrated. It is too expensive if you get it to work with itunes card usa.

 

[kingrant]

For sure, the szie of notebooks and laptops are coming down, and the size of smartphones are going up, until they meet in between, to balance portabiliity with screen readability, weight with performance, etc.

iPads presently lack USB ports, and DVD reader/player/recorder. Of course, there is every possibility these things will change in the future.