The whole Apple tablet thing makes no sense

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not going to suggest that there is now magical Apple tablet going to be announce on the 27th. Neither am I saying that Apple is barking up the wrong tree by even thinking about bringing one to market.

What I am saying is that given Apple’s past the idea of them bringing a tablet to market doesn’t jive with their DNA.

In a post here earlier today Dennis Bjørn Petersen asked a simple question

So what will the Apple Tablet do to help resurrect a business that has been sleeping for the last decade?

That got me thinking about Apple and its past moves with the iPod and the iPhone.

When Steve Jobs presented the iPod, and iTunes, to the world and forever changed the whole music industry he did it at a time when MP3 players pretty well sucked. They were expensive and for the most part pieces of crap.

Steve Jobs saw a market that already had established players in it but didn’t have a good enough product. So he gave us the iPod. Something new that shook the established MP3 marketplace to its knees.

Once the iPod had solidified its place as the market leader Jobs turned his attention to the other area where the market had definite leaders making a lot of money but whose products sucked. So once more he and Apple worked their magic and gave us the iPhone which has forever changed the way we look at smartphones.

In both cases Jobs saw an already existing marketplace that admittedly were full of competitors. In both cases he thought that Apple could do a better job than the existing players.

The problem is that when it comes to the tablet there is no existing market. Oh sure there’s a few niche markets but nothing that would even come close to the way the MP3 player and smartphone market was. There’s literally no market to shake up.

Unlike both the iPod and iPhone, Jobs and Apple are trying to create a market for their new product. They are approaching newspapers, book publishers, television networks and game developers.

In effect Jobs has created a product that he thinks is cool but there are no marketable goods for and this is totally unlike previous Apple created game changing moments.

So sure Jobs might be announcing a new creation on January 27 but it still doesn’t make sense as to why.