Extinct species remain in the footnotes, but Dynabook is different. It was a concept for a handheld personal computer before the adjective ‘personal’ got linked to the word ‘computer’. Till 2008 it remained just an ideal — a battle scar on the legacy of Alan Kay, the creator, and two legendary venture capitalists, Vinod Khosla and John Doerr, who invested in Dynabook Technologies. But now, the world is ready for the concept.
Like the spread of great religions, deadly viruses and Himesh Reshammiya tunes, the modern avatar of Dynabook, the tablet, is everywhere. And it is bringing about a fundamental change in the way people ‘negotiate’ technology.
Take just two examples: Kishore Biyani, the retail honcho and Gaurav Mathur, a private equity investor. Biyani’s interaction with the computer used to be limited to reading emails. Now silly trifles seem to interest him. Mathur was an intensive user of technology but the computer kept him so busy that he had “stopped listening to music and would only occasionally see a film”. He now uses a US cash card to buy US television serials, songs and even films. “I have started buying music again,” he says.
Companies like Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Bharti Airtel see it as a way to boost their data revenues because tablets consume 10 times as much data as smartphones do. It has content creators like Contest2Win excited because teenagers now have something more exciting than just the SMS! “Indian kids are over policed. My grandmother can still question me on why I come home late. Now imagine you have a device that you can take to your own room,” says Alok Kejriwal of Contest2Win.
D for Desire
Till the tablet came along, there were two clear divisions in the personal technology space: Personal computers and consumer electronic devices.
For most people, the PC is just a thing to be negotiated. In the last two decades, only three computer and software products have captured public imagination: The launch of the new Windows in 1995, Google search engine and Google mail. Conversely, consumer electronic devices — game consoles (Wii, Xbox, Playstation and now Kinect) and gadgets like iPod and iPhone — are the ones that have pushed the “desire” hot button in people’s minds.
Computer makers have only themselves to blame because none of them sold simplicity, vanity, envy, pride or even plain greed. All they sold was a box with the sex appeal of a thermal power plant.
Now, the tablet is mixing the two spaces together. It is a desirable fun gadget and a functional device that lets you access work-related data. What allows it to do this is the Internet and cloud computing.
Paul Maritz, CEO, VMware, a cloud computing software company, says that the shift to tablet is profound. “Young workers of today — they work with streams of information. They filter it, recombine it with other inputs and then stream it back out again to the Internet,” he says.
People do need files and folders, but the increasing proliferation of cloud architecture does away with the need for carrying gigabytes of data. The data and the logic sits on a remote industrial-strength computer, and users can tunnel through it on their tablets. They can interact among themselves because the Web enables that, and then work on that data.
A tablet is particularly handy for CEOs, CIOs and CTOs who are consumers of corporate information and not its creators.
A Tonic to Boost Sales
(This story appears in the 06 May, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)