PC vendors and the big tablet miscalculation

Last week, Amazon flooded us with new Kindle Fire models, and finally the UK market has the slate incoming (or two versions of it, the standard Fire and 7in Fire HD). But this is only the beginning. This autumn, we'll see a glut of Android tablets on the market, and while the device is nothing new, their manufacturers are.

Tablets go back at least 20 years although up until 2010, traditional PC companies made all of them. The biggest player in tablets had been Panasonic, which created many rugged versions used in military, transportation, law enforcement, and other vertical markets where industrial-strength tablets are vital to workloads. Recently, it's interesting to note that most of the major movers and shakers in tablets are not PC companies, but rather consumer electronics companies.

This is an important distinction. To PC companies, tablets were just handheld versions of PCs since they were all based on Windows and supported Windows apps. In late 2008, as word surfaced that Apple might be entering the tablet business, it became clear that tablets were a really big deal and could have a huge impact on the future business of PC vendors.