iPad 2 shortages delay paperless meetings, article.
European companies, including at least one Swiss multinational, are being forced to delay a move to paperless board meetings because of the shortage of Apple’s recently launched iPad 2 tablet device .
Company secretaries in Europe and elsewhere quickly embraced the original iPad and a specialised iPad app called Boardbooks from Diligent, a New Zealand-based software developer, as a money and time-saving alternative to sending out bulky packages of board papers to directors each month. [...] “Almost all of large organisations are now requesting their board papers on the iPad. The big problem Apple faces in the short term is meeting enterprise demand for the devices,” he said.
Astonishing.
And I think this market, perhaps more than anything, will push the need for an "iPad HD", with a larger screen with higher resolution. It's really necessary if they are to show a full letter-sized documents with many details.
2 comments:
I always have serious doubts about top-down moves like this. Sounds like an excuse to pass out iPad2s to the board members on the company dime.
From my experience, when the top executives adopt trendy technology it seldom ends well.
I'm keeping an eye on the bottom-up adoption. Tablets have tremendous potential for meetings once integrated with projectors and smartboards following ubiquitous computing principles. Monolithic tablets have only a fraction of the utility of tightly coupled tablets.
Check out the second page of the seminal Ubicomp paper. As usual, PARC was 20-30 years ahead of the rest of the world. The crucial thing is that they worked out the underlying infrastructure and architecture and then worked out the hardware in response to the needs.
Upon reflection I revise my observation. The stuff that really changes things comes from the bottom up from necessity and scares the crap out of the executives.
Think about it, e-mail, ethernet, spreadsheets, desktop publishing etc. They all started with small overworked teams smuggling the tech in and taking flack from the top. Even the most corporate of tech, the IBM PC was slapped together by a tiger team in 2 weeks at the ESD division in Boca Raton.
The other danger of early executive adoption is the curse of the PalmPilot. The Palm was a remarkably nice tool, particularly in its later incarnations, but it never could shake the image of being a Yuppie toy/status symbol.
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