Ben Brooks turned me on to an article by Horace Dediu today. I present the quotable:

“One wonders if these “media tablets” are not PCs and yet they negatively affect the purchase of PCs whether they are indeed competing with PCs.”

I often find myself talking to great ends about the nature of Apple’s success. It seems that there are a vast number of reasons they succeed, and one of them is understanding their market.

PC manufacturers (and I lump Microsoft in here) have it in their heads that people want to buy PC’s. It turns out that people don’t want to buy PC’s, and they never did. No customer wanted an IBM XT or an Apple II, they wanted VisiCalc or Oregon Trail. They want the applications, the media and the experiences that the PC enables.

Take a moment and consider the ramifications of that vantage point. People don’t want PC’s, they want the experiences they enable.

This is where Apple has long succeeded. It is why Steve Jobs pursued the Macintosh, with it’s GUI and mouse. Reduce the barrier to using a computer, advance the world out of the terminal prompt. The iPad is an evolution of that, and it took Steve Jobs many years to clarify his thinking. To quote the man himself:

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

If adding a GUI and a mouse to the Macintosh all those years ago enabled customers that much of a revolution to the experience, what did the iPad represent? It almost directly connects us to the experience. We have directly added another dimension to how we interact with these things. In the pre-iPad times we experienced our applications and media with our eyes and our ears. We now physically touch our media and applications.

We use our hands to experience the world. Touch is the very first of our senses, from almost the moment of zygote (slight exaggeration of course) we can sense through our skin. When we enter the world, we might see something first but we grab it in our hands and explore it with touch in order to fully know the new object. Touch is a powerful way to relate to an object, and most users anthropomorphize their iPads and iPhones because of this relationship.

iPads are impacting PC sales because nobody ever wanted a PC. Now that there is something genuinely BEYOND what a PC is and can do, why would anyone go back?