The main news to come out of CES so far seems to be confusion on the part of manufacturers as to what sort of tablets they should be making.
Microsoft is still trying to get a tablet to run Windows, which means absurdly over-powered and over-priced near-laptops competing with actual tablets. Asus, meanwhile, has brought out four different machines in one go - big ones, little ones, Windows ones, Android ones, keyboards, no keyboards, their strategy has been widely described as just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
Which, in terms of manufacturing computers, doesn't really make any sense. You can't just punt out four different machines and then hope you'll be able to scale up manufacturing capacity on the one that gets the most traction, because the logistics of making computers require some advance warning of how many factories you need, which components your suppliers will have to produce etc. Apple can (sometimes) meet demand for its products because it makes reasonable guesses about the level of that demand and only offers one basic model in each category. The ostensible Asus plan, to go from making a few of four things to a lot of the one that works, doesn't make the same sort of sense from a logistical or value chain point of view. If one of these is the next iPad, by the time they're churning out enough of them to matter we'll be onto the next next iPad.
And from a consumer point of view, the tacit admission by manufacturers that no-one really knows where this market is going looks like a signal to hang fire on purchases for now. No-one wants to be stuck with the betamax option, and right now no-one seems to know which that's going to be.
(Photo from - and indeed of - Renato Mitra on Flickr)
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