This CNET blog covers an interview with Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. It caught my eye over the weekend. In the blog entry, Huang gives his opinion and reasons why Android-based tablet sales trail those of Apple’s iPads. Huang has an interest in Android tablets because Nvidia’s ARM-based Tegra 2 SoC powers some of them.
Huang’s take on the topic is short and to-the-point: “Consumers want more apps for Android tablets.” Further, he says, “It’s a point of sales problem. It’s an expertise at retail problem. It’s a marketing problem to consumers. It is a price point problem.”
Note what Huang doesn’t say. It’s not a hardware problem. It’s about the apps. It’s about the channel. It’s about marketing. It’s not about hardware.
Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in GHz/Gbyte fever and forget that there are other factors as well.
Huang’s take on the topic is interesting from the viewpoint that the success story of “Windows” might not come out again as for “Android”, I think. While the standardization of OS has made up the flock of application SW, Huang’s point seems to suggest there is another success story for the smart phone or Tablet terminal. If so, I think that the userfrendly human interface must have the momentum to best seller for the small size wearable terminal, not by OS differentiation.
Good summary, remembers me on the discussion about MS-DOS in 1984 or Win31 in the 1992. What is also nice about Apple is that they have a lot of little 3rd party extensions around: adaptors, protection cases, speakers, … Android can still win, because Apple has in other things its limitations: no flash support, no built-in USB, copy-right protection stuff, very expensive iTunes shop,…