Good article about the dominance of the iPad. There’s a general assumption that the iPad will follow the iPhone model, where Android eats into it’s market share, but Apple increase volume quarter-on-quarter and take a massive slice of the profits.
But as the article says, there’s an alternative future: the iPod model, where Apple dominates with 3/4 of the market for more than a decade, and only loses volume to it’s own competing product (the iPhone).
In fact, I can’t think of a single reason why the iPad would necessarily follow the iPhone model: it isn’t entering an existing market like the iPhone did (iPhone has never had 70% market share) but rather it defined a new market and dominated it from the start, just like the iPod. It isn’t sold by network operators who have pushed Android as a counterweight to the iPhone, but is sold in the ‘open market’ of Apple Stores and general tech stores, where the market is influenced to a much lesser degree (does the store care whether they sell an iPad or an Android tablet? No, as long as their profit is similar).
So the ‘Doomesday Scenario’ for Microsoft, Google, Dell, HP etc is quite feasible unless they quickly work out how to counter the iPad – another year and it could be too late.