Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft: The Holiday Tablets Fight, Fight, Fight! - Forbes

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It would seem that we’ve got the various CEOs of the major tech companies snarling at each other as the holiday season approaches. Or at least snarling about each others’ various products with a venom more usually seen in academic disputes. However, here there’s actually something at stake as there so often isn’t in the academic slanging matches.

The Apple CEO takes pot shot at the Microsoft Surface, the Google CEO sniggers rather about Apple and so around the marketplace it goes.

Just on Thursday, Amazon compared its Kindle Fire with Apple’s new iPad mini, point by point, in its earnings release, an unusual forum to name rivals. Apple CEO Tim Cook compared Microsoft’s Surface tablet to an over-engineered car that can fly and float. And Microsoft went for the iPad, saying its Surface boasted twice its storage.
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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, in a talk this month, took a shot at Apple, which has faced a barrage of complaints about glitches in its mapping software since dumping Google’s service from its iPhone.

“What Apple has learned is that maps are really hard. They really are hard,” he said. “Apple should have kept with our maps.”

Not to be outdone in the sniping, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos took a subtle swipe at Apple’s high prices in the Internet retailer’s quarterly results statement Thursday, saying “our approach is to work hard to charge less.”

The point is that there really is something to fight over here. The general feeling is that the PC has had its day and it’s going to be some combination of the smartphone and or tablet that takes over*. This is one of those technological break points, a time when an entirely new challenger has a chance to break in and determine which OS, which ecosystem users are locked into for the next few years, perhaps decades.

OK, being a Apple iOS user doesn’t prevent you from becoming a Microsoft Surface or Android user at some point in the future: nor vice versa of course. But having 50 or 500 apps that run in one ecosystem and not the other is certainly going to influence your hardware and OS choices over the coming years. And having the field wide open, as it is now, with these four strong contenders (if we take Amazon’s fork of Android as being a different platform) is a rare event. Which is one reason why everyone’s being so serious about it.

The other reason they’re all so serious is that no one actually knows what it is that the consumer really wants. Everyone’s guessing. It might be memory, or a keyboard, or plain simplicity and ease of use, or hardware price, or apps availability or….well, who knows? That’s why the different platforms are trying different things to see which way we the consumers are going to jump. And thus why they’re all talking up the differences between the various kit, for they all hope that they are offering what it is that we want.

Remember, this time around it’s not about which toy you get for the holiday present. From the point of view of the corporations it’s which ecosystem do you sign up to for the next 5 to 15 years?

I guess all we need now to complete the scenario is Samsung to come out of their corner snarling at the rest of them.

*Of all the formats I’ve seen, and I do admit to hardly using even a mobile phone let alone play with hardware a lot, the Galaxy Note is the one that seems most intriguing to me. Small enough, just, that it can still be pocket carried like a phone. Large enough, just, that it can be used to browse rather than squint at the web. Or so it seems to me. We’re almost at the point, perhaps one or two more iterations of processors and memory away, from the point that that form factor could usefully be used (by me of course, I’m not talking for other people) as my primary computer. Something that size, with a hardware if small qwerty keyboard, plus connectors to allow adding a full scale monitor, mouse and keyboard, would actually do me nicely. As long as it also ran a version of Open Office it would do everything I currently use a computer to do. So why not? Especially as I travel a lot and I’d rather carry just the phone than a laptop.