Everybody Loves Tablets: Tablet Ownership Surges Among Professionals

The PC-Plus era is no longer a far-fetched fantasy. While pronouncements about the death of the notebook and the desktop are incredibly premature, there’s certainly no understating the tidal-wave effect of the tablet.

According to survey data from IDG, 71 percent of IT and business professionals own a tablet, and three out of five use it for work daily.

Steve King of Small Business Labs weighed in on the great tablet race after taking in the IDG data.

This is not surprising. Apple has never been focused on overall market share dominance. They care much more about owning the segment of customers willing to pay a premium price for a premium user experience.

One wild card in this race is Microsoft's Windows tablet.

Normally I would be pretty dismissive of Microsoft's chances. But with tablets increasingly becoming work tools, Microsoft's prowess in business markets and their ecosystem of hardware and software developers gives them a decent shot.

Regardless of who wins the tablet wars, it's clear that tablets are going mainstream as work tools.

What kind of work is being done with tablets? Nearly everything you can think of. Restaurants are using them as digital menus. Taxicabs are using them for in-car entertainment and mobile payments. And banks are using them for customer service.

Tablets are taking hold in part because they’re much more interactive and shareable than their desktop or notebook cousins. Many tablets also offer constant connection if they’re equipped with 3G or 4G mobile broadband, while most notebooks require a separate mobile broadband card to do the same.

As computing devices go, the tablet might prove to be one of the most disruptive forces in IT since the smartphone. Has your company fallen head over heels for tablets yet, or are you still in the “getting to know each other” stage?