The Internet is an amusing place. After Apple announced its new iPad, Bill Gates doesn’t seem to think the iPad will have any impact and will be a flop as he feels that devices with no physical keyboard just aren’t going to be able to take the marketplace like they should. If this is the case then how does he explain the iPhone? Only one of the most if not the successful phones in existence, much better then his Windows mobile smartphones that continue to lose market share to the iPhone. Then there is the diametrically opposed side to it from Mr Wenger, the CEO of Disney who thinks there is a huge market for iPad and states the fortune of the iPhone as being proof that it can and will succeed. Of course the fact that Steve Jobs is the majority stockholder of Disney could very well have something to do with his positive reinforcement of the device

If you believe most critics, the Apple iPad is going to be a enormous flop.

Well, the unwashed masses on the Internet also predicted that the iPod
would be a failure. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

The iPad is a computer for people who don’t like computers. People who
don’t like the fancy of upgrading and adjusting their
screen resolution . Who don’t understand why
their computer gets slower and slower the longer they own it, who have
45 icons in their system tray and have to wait ten minutes for their
system to boot up every day.

For what most of these people need a computer for, the iPad is perfect.
It doesn’t do as many things as a “real” computer does, but the things
it does do it does in a way even non-tech-savvy people can figure out,
and there are far fewer ways to screw it up. So if you have managed to
persuade yourself that the iPad is a useless, locked-up DRM-laden
failure of a ‘computer’ before even touching one,

The iPad is perfect for my mother. It does precisely what she needs. It will
let her watch movies and listen to music and read books on long
flights. It will make using a computer fun instead of an annoying tribulation.

But it also won’t allow her to install umpteen news and stats gadgets
that start up on boot and slow her computer to a crawl. It won’t
all of a sudden forget how to talk to a network, or get so confound by all of
the software installs and uninstalls that you finally have to break
down and reinstall the system from scratch. finally throw off the oppressive chains of being the one guy in the.  And you know what? There are millions upon millions of people just like
her out there. They outnumber us. And they finally have a chance to
become beneficial, self-sufficient computer users instead of constantly
asking family members to fix their computers or, even worse, keeping
the Geek Squad in business.

No, the iPad isn’t for everyone. But I’m going to go on record as
saying that, for non-computer-geeks everywhere, the iPad is going to
change computing.

Going by the recent pre-orders data so far that has come in it’s estimated there are over 200,000 pre-orders already for the device! Not bad for something unproven. Now consider how many people won’t buy it until they can actually see it and then the other groups that are waiting for the 3G version or even the next iteration of the iPad and I think you can safely assume there are well over 1million buyers for this new device. Because of this I think this device truely will “revolutionize” computing.

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