If you want to get to the corner store & back for a loaf of bread or a beer, you can walk, ride a bike, drive a car etc... they sell a lot more shoes than bikes, a lot more bikes than cars. They sell more pencils than pens, more pens than printers too.
They sell a lot more cell phones than laptops or PCs -- with the exception of upcoming win8 tablets with a lower end PC CPU, tablets today are essentially smart phones with bigger screens, poorer cameras, & often wi-fi only. They can & do sell more of these devices, cell phones & tablets vs. laptops/PCs, because of cell phone service, because many [most?] are cheaper, because they're more portable, & because they're new -- if you need a laptop or PC, chances are you already have one.
So, will the do-over, trying to recreate the [failed] netbook craze with tablets work? With the exception of Apple's products I don't believe anyone knows yet, but Apple's customers have always been a bit different [I don't mean necessarily in a bad way], e.g. willing to pay top prices for cell phones that won't make phone calls [iPods]. Netbooks did disrupt the market, though not in a good way for all the companies making/selling laptops who found themselves losing all sorts of profits. Nor did consumers come out on top, as reportedly most found they really did need a laptop to begin with, that they were sold false promises. This time everyone, every biz seems to have thought things out quite a bit better...
One, rather than try to sell a more mobile PC/laptop replacement, they're trying to sell you on the idea that you don't really need a PC/laptop any longer. Instead of designing & building a cheaper, smaller laptop that's not up to the task & can't make them money, they're trying to sell the idea that all you really need is a tablet's lower end capabilities. You don't really want to play Diablo III, you want to play Angry Birds. :)
Two, they're focusing as possible on making sure everything about, everything used in a tablet is sort of off-the-shelf -- it's tech that's both readily available & can be used in other products. It's not coincidence that so much is shared by cell phones & tablets, nor that the ARM processors most use are turning up, will continue to turn up in all sorts of appliances, devices, even cars/trucks. If the whole tablet thing dies out down the road they've got the least possible amount invested in things like R&D, & the results of any investments they have made can be used elsewhere.
Three, the focus is on tablets as a content delivery system, a way for you to continually buy something, each company hopes from them. Sales of Kindle books subsidize both Kindle R&D and lower selling prices. Microsoft is subsidizing development of their app store with win8 -- I think it will work both ways with their Microsoft branded tablets. Selling apps/games, movies & other video, books, magazines etc. is a continuous revenue stream Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, & even Samsung would like to monopolize -- they all have stores for you to buy all sorts of content. Frankly it's the idea of the ad-driven web site taken to the extreme. They're still hedging their bets though -- Apple's proven that selling content to cell phones is a long lasting & profitable biz, so Microsoft & Amazon are each coming out with cell phones too, and like Apple, Google, & Samsung they'll still have a market if tablets do fail.
Everything else is self-serving marketing hype... Qualcomm's Mollenkopf most likely makes $ if Qualcomm's stock prices go up. The ARM chips Qualcomm makes have a slight fraction of the power in the latest Intel PC CPUs, & sell for something like 20 times less -- an article in the last issue of Wired talks about Intel breaking into the cell phone/tablet processor biz, & how in that particular market Intel will have to shift strategies from making high profits per chip to low profits on much higher volume. Sure, someday some company may develop an ARM powered PC, & someday there may even be software comparable to what you run now available for it, but those somedays aren't happening anytime soon -- every Windows' app & game has to be rewritten or re-ported from x86 to run on ARM, or some sort of emulator would have to be developed... emulators are less efficient & slower.
Microsoft has been saying touch is the future -- they've hardly been saying anything else. They've had touch since win7 -- outside of being used by some news shows on TV [& AFAIK soon after abandoned], how's that worked out? Touch laptops have been available for years -- how many have you seen on display &/or in actual use? According to http://www.worldometers.info/computers/ there were 1 bill + PCs in use in 2008 -- they have current figures for sales this year, & at this moment that constantly increasing figure is 247 mill plus. The [likely vast] majority of those have/use keyboards & mice or equivalent [e.g. touchpads]. Does MS honestly expect anyone to believe that all these people are idiots? If touch worked so much better, wouldn't the free market reflect that? Wouldn't sales &/or use of touch hardware reflect that, & the same for 3rd party Windows' desktop replacement apps designed for touch? Some people like or need to use touch -- Great -- but for most people it's something for kids who've not yet developed motor skills, &/or for devices like smartphones, where there's no physical space for an alternative pointing method/device like a touchpad, & too many choices for something like the buttons on a digital point & shoot camera. Microsoft's hardware folks apparently feel the same way -- they've developed new keyboards & mice designed for tablets, anticipating there's enough of a market among users wanting more than to play Angry Birds.
