Even for hardcore Mac users iWorks can't even come close to cutting into Office for Mac.
Yes, the MS suite is more feature-rich than iWorks. But most of those advanced features are used by maybe 10% of users.
Again, the 80/20 rule. 80% of users utilize 20% of the features in Office, and all of the 20% is in iWorks.
I set my Mac up to open all .xls and .doc documents in iWorks and have had zero problems. Macros? I disable those upon opening anyway. Nothing but virus vectors.
As far as graphing, iWork is frankly superior, and for day-to-day home (and, frankly, work) use, I prefer iWork.
...My company used Lotus Notes for years and I hated it. That is, until last year when we migrated to Microsoft Outlook. I now long for the days when we used Notes.
...If the iPad takes off even half as well as the iPhone you'll have millions of folks using [iWork] and some of them may even like it better than what they use back in the office. People may start to learn that there are better alternatives to Microsoft products.
Nod nod. It's been years since I've used Notes but found it great for company e-mail and instant messaging, I remember the calendar wasn't such a hot feature but that's probably changed.
Although Office is still the de facto desktop office suite, it's really becoming feature-heavy IMO, and the interface changes every few years.
Perhaps Apple needs to release a PC version of iWork.
Just as I've always maintained (and been criticised for saying here a few times), there is really no evidence that "eye strain" is caused by reading from a screen as opposed to paper, or that ePaper is any easier on the eyes than an LCD. It's basically a popular misconception.
Its a misconception grounded in a bit of outdated truth. Once upon a time reading in a CRT was actively fatiguing. The brightness, fuzziness and literally -- EM radiation radiation shot straight at your face -- were truly not the best way to read.
A good quality high contrast flatscreen with brightness appropriate to the setting is a far different beast, but the act of reading from a backlit screen is hard to separate into good screens and old bad screens in the minds of most folks.
Lotus? As in 1-2-3? They still exist? I haven't heard of them since the 80's. Who even uses them? Excel is the industry standard anyway.
I've been working in a Notes environment for the past year, and while I never thought I'd hear myself saying it, I can't wait for our conversion to Outlook. Notes is the biggest POC I've ever had to use.
Backlighting is my biggest peeve with LCD displays, I'm looking straight at a light source rather than reflected light (which is how we usually see).
Adjust the backlight to an environmentally appropriate level. The eye hardware doesn't care whether a photon came from the sun, a light bulb behind you or a backlight. But how we have each configured makes a really big difference.
It's just that the first two you subconsciously adjust the lighting conditions to as optimal as possible without even realizing it. Now that we are getting into an era of good quality LCD screens we will learn the same techniques in the new paradigm. It will take active conscious though to do this for awhile, and may not be as good an end result as you want every time, but we have the same problems with the other lighting methods too, we just accept the limitations.
We don't read in too bright sunlight directly on a white page, or in a too dark room with light only behind the page as opposed to light directly on the page, we adjust ourselves or the lighting conditions. When we can't we don't criticize the sun of the room, we just accept that the conditions are unfavorable and come up with other alternatives. Manipulate the LCDs the same way and many of the previous faults seem less like faults and more like what we already deal with.
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
I think it was just a made up talking point. I use an LCD for reading at least 12 hours a day and have no strain. I'm not a fan of e-ink or newspaper print because it's black on grey, not on white. I'd say that reading any type of book outdoors with the sunlight reflecting off everything is worse than reading an LCD indoors under controlled light.
I bet a lot of folk don't realize that they can manually turn down the brightness of the LCD display, independently of the ambient light sensor. Once she discovered that, my niece became absolutely addicted to reading on her new iPhone. (Project Guttenburg on Stanza was another big draw for her.)
I keep the monitor of my Mac on the lowest setting, I can work on it all day without eye strain, as long as I remember to keep text enlarged. Yet it is painful for me to look out the window, even though my office faces north. So go figure.
I think that business is really going to like the iPad.
If IBM, through it's Lotus division, is already see demand then I suspect that business will be looking very closely at iPad. While everybody complains about the lack of a camera and a few other features this is exactly what would be requested by an IT group in a major corporation.
IPad could become the vehicle through which Apple penetrates the corporate gates.
Yes, the MS suite is more feature-rich than iWorks. But most of those advanced features are used by maybe 10% of users.
Again, the 80/20 rule. 80% of users utilize 20% of the features in Office, and all of the 20% is in iWorks.
I set my Mac up to open all .xls and .doc documents in iWorks and have had zero problems. Macros? I disable those upon opening anyway. Nothing but virus vectors.
As far as graphing, iWork is frankly superior, and for day-to-day home (and, frankly, work) use, I prefer iWork.
Keynote blows Powerpoint away, IMHO.
YMMV.
I've been doing a few reports in Pages lately, and to grab a screenshot, drop it in and re-size, move around, etc. is much simpler and smoother than trying to do it in Windows 7 with Word '07. Actually, the whole Pages experience is much better than Word IMO. With more and more time spent in iWork, the more I realize Office could easily die (the one caveat is Excel). If Apple puts out iWork for Windows and gets Numbers on par with Excel, maybe they will have a nice Office killer.
Of course, they'd have make Pages much slower and bigger too.
Well, for starters, the iPad is not competing with any Microsoft product so far. And even if Bill does not like the iPad, it would still be stupid for his software company not to cater for the iPad.
Exactly! One sometimes has to seriously wonder what mindset drives the leaders of this company .....
Even for hardcore Mac users iWorks can't even come close to cutting into Office for Mac.
I don't know where this idea comes from, iWorks isn't perfect (niether is Office) but it is more than suitable for the vast majority of Mac users. If that doesn't do it you have NeoOffice too. The idea that Office is a requirement for any sort of professional usage is a myth. There is such a wide range of needs that need to be accounted for, thus it becomes obvious that no one suite can take care of all needs. Not to mention that simplicity wins over complexity for many.
Lotus? As in 1-2-3? They still exist? I haven't heard of them since the 80's. Who even uses them? Excel is the industry standard anyway.
TEKDUD? As in TECHSTUD ... or .... TechDud? He still exists? I haven't paid much attention to him since ...ever. Almost any other poster here is a better "industry standard anyway".
Your perspective on Excel is right on and frankly makes it possible for MS to sell word. That is the vast majority of Office installs are done primarily to have Excel available. It is one of a few well done apps from MS.
This makes it hard to compete with as it has a well deserved reputation. So how does Apple address Excel and compete with it. I think refactoring what a spreadsheet is might help a bit. One thing that I really would love to see is a spreadsheet that turns every cell into a Python script or function. That is turn the power of a scripting language loose in every cell. There would likely have to be limitations on those scripts, but for the most part each cell would be a Python script returning a object for that cell. This is somewhat like VBA in MS products but in this case Python would be the native way to enter a cell formula.
Enough of that. What I'm trying to point out here is that beating Excel will be tough and as such you need to innovate past Excel. This is something Apple is capable of doing with the idea above being one possibility.
Dave
Quote:
Originally Posted by technohermit
I've been doing a few reports in Pages lately, and to grab a screenshot, drop it in and re-size, move around, etc. is much simpler and smoother than trying to do it in Windows 7 with Word '07. Actually, the whole Pages experience is much better than Word IMO. With more and more time spent in iWork, the more I realize Office could easily die (the one caveat is Excel). If Apple puts out iWork for Windows and gets Numbers on par with Excel, maybe they will have a nice Office killer.
Of course, they'd have make Pages much slower and bigger too.
I don't know where this idea comes from, iWorks isn't perfect (niether is Office) but it is more than suitable for the vast majority of Mac users. If that doesn't do it you have NeoOffice too. The idea that Office is a requirement for any sort of professional usage is a myth. There is such a wide range of needs that need to be accounted for, thus it becomes obvious that no one suite can take care of all needs. Not to mention that simplicity wins over complexity for many.
Dave
I don't often agree with you, but on this subject I could not agree more ... congrats on cutting to the "heart of the matter".
Me thinks this is total propaganda by Apple! (And I'm disgusted.)
Having used an iPod Touch for over a year, now owning an iPhone and played with several eInk devices, I can testify to the fact that the backlight on any LCD equipped device held quite close to the eye causes eye strain, as does the fact the screen is not really '1D' (one dimensional) like paper or eInk displays.
Try reading for more than 30 minutes on an LCD at close range in low light and you will get a headache. You won't reading a book. If one did, they would not exist.
There is also the issue of resolution. The iPad (sadly) is at 135 or similar DPI, while print on good paper offers 200 to 300.
All said, the iPad uses a new technology, so only time will tell whether it will also cause eye strain.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
IBM just released its Lotus software for the iPhone and has now turned its attention to the iPad, while a new article explores the facts and myths of LCD eye strain from reading books on devices like the iPad.
IBM planning Lotus for iPad
IBM Lotus Notes Traveler Companion was released for the iPhone and iPod touch last month. And this week at the Macworld 2010 expo in San Francisco, the company also announced Lotus Connections for social networking inside companies and Lotus Quickr for sharing documents would be coming to the iPhone.
An IBM official told Forbes that the company not only wants to reach out to the small-but-growing number of iPhone users in the enterprise, but also use the new applications as a starting point from which to build App Store software for the forthcoming iPad.
"Our customers are looking at the iPad and they're excited about it," said Alstair Rennie, IBM's manager of Lotus software. "No one quite knows its use patterns yet, but it's our intention to deliver as much of our portfolio as possible on it as fast as possible."
The applications from the corporate collaboration software will be designed specifically for use on the iPad, and are planned to see release sometime near the debut of the hardware, scheduled to arrive in late March. Rennie said IBM expects the iPad to be popular among executives who plan to use the device for both personal and business purposes.
"Peoples' lives don't segment neatly between work and home," he reportedly said. "The iPad gives people what will probably be a home device, but they're still going to want to access a full suite of business software on it."
The news follows comment from Microsoft officials who said the software giant is considering the possibility of bringing its Office suite to the iPad. Apple has already revealed multi-touch version of Numbers, Pages and Keynote -- all part of its iWork suite -- are coming to the hardware.
Sources have also told AppleInsider that Apple intends to target business users by offering added features on the iPad, including direct network printing from within applications and support for accessing shared files from a local file server.
iPad eye strain explored
While conventional thinking suggests e-ink readers like the Amazon Kindle and its black-and-white display are easier on the eyes, a new article from The New York Times suggests LCD panels, like on Apple's iPad, may be no better or worse.
Dr. Travis Meredith, chair of the opthalmology department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said such screens are not bad for peoples' eyes, but physical fatigue can come from not blinking often enough. And while paper can offer more "physical sophistication" than a computer screen, certain types of paper -- like cheap newsprint or paper in softcover books -- is actually said to be an inferior reading experience.
The article also notes that current LCD monitors offer much better viewing angles and superior clarity to those of years ago. They are also less tiring on peoples' eyes.
The biggest problem for the iPad, the article notes, might be its reflective glass screen, which could prove to be an issue in brightly lit situations. Apple has encountered the same issue with its MacBook Pro line, where it converted to glossy screens that can be difficult to view in direct sunlight. Last August, the Mac maker began offering matte screens for $50 extra on the 15-inch MacBook Pro line.
The iPad has a 9.7-inch LED-backlit screen that employs IPS technology for its LCD display. The technology, developed by Hitachi in 1996, offers improved viewing angles over traditional LCD.
The device will mark Apple's entrance into the e-book market, with the new iBooks application and its included iBookstore offering bestselling titles from some of the top publishers in the world.
These days IBM makes its money by selling specialised management consultancy services. It then sells the systems and hardware on the back of that. One of their main markets is 'Big Pharma'. It will have become blindingly obvious that the iPad is going to be a huge hit in medical vertical markets. on the ward and in research depts. There are deals to be done. Pretty smart move by IBM.
I'm starting to get that tingly feeling about the iPad release.
Me thinks this is total propaganda by Apple! (And I'm disgusted.)
Having used an iPod Touch for over a year, now owning an iPhone and played with several eInk devices, I can testify to the fact that the backlight on any LCD equipped device held quite close to the eye causes eye strain, as does the fact the screen is not really '1D' (one dimensional) like paper or eInk displays.
Try reading for more than 30 minutes on an LCD at close range in low light and you will get a headache. You won't reading a book. If one did, they would not exist.
There is also the issue of resolution. The iPad (sadly) is at 135 or similar DPI, while print on good paper offers 200 to 300.
All said, the iPad uses a new technology, so only time will tell whether it will also cause eye strain.
These days IBM makes its money by selling specialised management consultancy services. It then sells the systems and hardware on the back of that. One of their main markets is 'Big Pharma'. It will have become blindingly obvious that the iPad is going to be a huge hit in medical vertical markets. on the ward and in research depts. There are deals to be done. Pretty smart move by IBM.
I'm starting to get that tingly feeling about the iPad release.
Good call. Also note that Oracle (led by Steve Jobs' buddy Larry Ellison) is trying to acquire Sun Micro to compete with IBM in this type of business. If Oracle were to integrate iPads into their offerings, that would be another potentially big deal.
Comments
Even for hardcore Mac users iWorks can't even come close to cutting into Office for Mac.
Yes, the MS suite is more feature-rich than iWorks. But most of those advanced features are used by maybe 10% of users.
Again, the 80/20 rule. 80% of users utilize 20% of the features in Office, and all of the 20% is in iWorks.
I set my Mac up to open all .xls and .doc documents in iWorks and have had zero problems. Macros? I disable those upon opening anyway. Nothing but virus vectors.
As far as graphing, iWork is frankly superior, and for day-to-day home (and, frankly, work) use, I prefer iWork.
Keynote blows Powerpoint away, IMHO.
YMMV.
...My company used Lotus Notes for years and I hated it. That is, until last year when we migrated to Microsoft Outlook. I now long for the days when we used Notes.
...If the iPad takes off even half as well as the iPhone you'll have millions of folks using [iWork] and some of them may even like it better than what they use back in the office. People may start to learn that there are better alternatives to Microsoft products.
Nod nod. It's been years since I've used Notes but found it great for company e-mail and instant messaging, I remember the calendar wasn't such a hot feature but that's probably changed.
Although Office is still the de facto desktop office suite, it's really becoming feature-heavy IMO, and the interface changes every few years.
Perhaps Apple needs to release a PC version of iWork.
Just as I've always maintained (and been criticised for saying here a few times), there is really no evidence that "eye strain" is caused by reading from a screen as opposed to paper, or that ePaper is any easier on the eyes than an LCD. It's basically a popular misconception.
Its a misconception grounded in a bit of outdated truth. Once upon a time reading in a CRT was actively fatiguing. The brightness, fuzziness and literally -- EM radiation radiation shot straight at your face -- were truly not the best way to read.
A good quality high contrast flatscreen with brightness appropriate to the setting is a far different beast, but the act of reading from a backlit screen is hard to separate into good screens and old bad screens in the minds of most folks.
Lotus? As in 1-2-3? They still exist? I haven't heard of them since the 80's. Who even uses them? Excel is the industry standard anyway.
I've been working in a Notes environment for the past year, and while I never thought I'd hear myself saying it, I can't wait for our conversion to Outlook. Notes is the biggest POC I've ever had to use.
Backlighting is my biggest peeve with LCD displays, I'm looking straight at a light source rather than reflected light (which is how we usually see).
Adjust the backlight to an environmentally appropriate level. The eye hardware doesn't care whether a photon came from the sun, a light bulb behind you or a backlight. But how we have each configured makes a really big difference.
It's just that the first two you subconsciously adjust the lighting conditions to as optimal as possible without even realizing it. Now that we are getting into an era of good quality LCD screens we will learn the same techniques in the new paradigm. It will take active conscious though to do this for awhile, and may not be as good an end result as you want every time, but we have the same problems with the other lighting methods too, we just accept the limitations.
We don't read in too bright sunlight directly on a white page, or in a too dark room with light only behind the page as opposed to light directly on the page, we adjust ourselves or the lighting conditions. When we can't we don't criticize the sun of the room, we just accept that the conditions are unfavorable and come up with other alternatives. Manipulate the LCDs the same way and many of the previous faults seem less like faults and more like what we already deal with.
I think it was just a made up talking point. I use an LCD for reading at least 12 hours a day and have no strain. I'm not a fan of e-ink or newspaper print because it's black on grey, not on white. I'd say that reading any type of book outdoors with the sunlight reflecting off everything is worse than reading an LCD indoors under controlled light.
yep.
I keep the monitor of my Mac on the lowest setting, I can work on it all day without eye strain, as long as I remember to keep text enlarged. Yet it is painful for me to look out the window, even though my office faces north. So go figure.
I think that business is really going to like the iPad.
If IBM, through it's Lotus division, is already see demand then I suspect that business will be looking very closely at iPad. While everybody complains about the lack of a camera and a few other features this is exactly what would be requested by an IT group in a major corporation.
IPad could become the vehicle through which Apple penetrates the corporate gates.
Dave
Yes, the MS suite is more feature-rich than iWorks. But most of those advanced features are used by maybe 10% of users.
Again, the 80/20 rule. 80% of users utilize 20% of the features in Office, and all of the 20% is in iWorks.
I set my Mac up to open all .xls and .doc documents in iWorks and have had zero problems. Macros? I disable those upon opening anyway. Nothing but virus vectors.
As far as graphing, iWork is frankly superior, and for day-to-day home (and, frankly, work) use, I prefer iWork.
Keynote blows Powerpoint away, IMHO.
YMMV.
I've been doing a few reports in Pages lately, and to grab a screenshot, drop it in and re-size, move around, etc. is much simpler and smoother than trying to do it in Windows 7 with Word '07. Actually, the whole Pages experience is much better than Word IMO. With more and more time spent in iWork, the more I realize Office could easily die (the one caveat is Excel). If Apple puts out iWork for Windows and gets Numbers on par with Excel, maybe they will have a nice Office killer.
Of course, they'd have make Pages much slower and bigger too.
Well, for starters, the iPad is not competing with any Microsoft product so far. And even if Bill does not like the iPad, it would still be stupid for his software company not to cater for the iPad.
Exactly! One sometimes has to seriously wonder what mindset drives the leaders of this company .....
Even for hardcore Mac users iWorks can't even come close to cutting into Office for Mac.
I don't know where this idea comes from, iWorks isn't perfect (niether is Office) but it is more than suitable for the vast majority of Mac users. If that doesn't do it you have NeoOffice too. The idea that Office is a requirement for any sort of professional usage is a myth. There is such a wide range of needs that need to be accounted for, thus it becomes obvious that no one suite can take care of all needs. Not to mention that simplicity wins over complexity for many.
Dave
Lotus? As in 1-2-3? They still exist? I haven't heard of them since the 80's. Who even uses them? Excel is the industry standard anyway.
What is Lotus Notes? Is that like Evernote?
The combination of inability to read and seeming inability to do a web search, as displayed in these two posts, is really pretty shocking.
Lotus? As in 1-2-3? They still exist? I haven't heard of them since the 80's. Who even uses them? Excel is the industry standard anyway.
TEKDUD? As in TECHSTUD ... or .... TechDud? He still exists? I haven't paid much attention to him since ...ever. Almost any other poster here is a better "industry standard anyway".
This makes it hard to compete with as it has a well deserved reputation. So how does Apple address Excel and compete with it. I think refactoring what a spreadsheet is might help a bit. One thing that I really would love to see is a spreadsheet that turns every cell into a Python script or function. That is turn the power of a scripting language loose in every cell. There would likely have to be limitations on those scripts, but for the most part each cell would be a Python script returning a object for that cell. This is somewhat like VBA in MS products but in this case Python would be the native way to enter a cell formula.
Enough of that. What I'm trying to point out here is that beating Excel will be tough and as such you need to innovate past Excel. This is something Apple is capable of doing with the idea above being one possibility.
Dave
I've been doing a few reports in Pages lately, and to grab a screenshot, drop it in and re-size, move around, etc. is much simpler and smoother than trying to do it in Windows 7 with Word '07. Actually, the whole Pages experience is much better than Word IMO. With more and more time spent in iWork, the more I realize Office could easily die (the one caveat is Excel). If Apple puts out iWork for Windows and gets Numbers on par with Excel, maybe they will have a nice Office killer.
Of course, they'd have make Pages much slower and bigger too.
I don't know where this idea comes from, iWorks isn't perfect (niether is Office) but it is more than suitable for the vast majority of Mac users. If that doesn't do it you have NeoOffice too. The idea that Office is a requirement for any sort of professional usage is a myth. There is such a wide range of needs that need to be accounted for, thus it becomes obvious that no one suite can take care of all needs. Not to mention that simplicity wins over complexity for many.
Dave
I don't often agree with you, but on this subject I could not agree more ... congrats on cutting to the "heart of the matter".
Having used an iPod Touch for over a year, now owning an iPhone and played with several eInk devices, I can testify to the fact that the backlight on any LCD equipped device held quite close to the eye causes eye strain, as does the fact the screen is not really '1D' (one dimensional) like paper or eInk displays.
Try reading for more than 30 minutes on an LCD at close range in low light and you will get a headache. You won't reading a book. If one did, they would not exist.
There is also the issue of resolution. The iPad (sadly) is at 135 or similar DPI, while print on good paper offers 200 to 300.
All said, the iPad uses a new technology, so only time will tell whether it will also cause eye strain.
IBM just released its Lotus software for the iPhone and has now turned its attention to the iPad, while a new article explores the facts and myths of LCD eye strain from reading books on devices like the iPad.
IBM planning Lotus for iPad
IBM Lotus Notes Traveler Companion was released for the iPhone and iPod touch last month. And this week at the Macworld 2010 expo in San Francisco, the company also announced Lotus Connections for social networking inside companies and Lotus Quickr for sharing documents would be coming to the iPhone.
An IBM official told Forbes that the company not only wants to reach out to the small-but-growing number of iPhone users in the enterprise, but also use the new applications as a starting point from which to build App Store software for the forthcoming iPad.
"Our customers are looking at the iPad and they're excited about it," said Alstair Rennie, IBM's manager of Lotus software. "No one quite knows its use patterns yet, but it's our intention to deliver as much of our portfolio as possible on it as fast as possible."
The applications from the corporate collaboration software will be designed specifically for use on the iPad, and are planned to see release sometime near the debut of the hardware, scheduled to arrive in late March. Rennie said IBM expects the iPad to be popular among executives who plan to use the device for both personal and business purposes.
"Peoples' lives don't segment neatly between work and home," he reportedly said. "The iPad gives people what will probably be a home device, but they're still going to want to access a full suite of business software on it."
The news follows comment from Microsoft officials who said the software giant is considering the possibility of bringing its Office suite to the iPad. Apple has already revealed multi-touch version of Numbers, Pages and Keynote -- all part of its iWork suite -- are coming to the hardware.
Sources have also told AppleInsider that Apple intends to target business users by offering added features on the iPad, including direct network printing from within applications and support for accessing shared files from a local file server.
iPad eye strain explored
While conventional thinking suggests e-ink readers like the Amazon Kindle and its black-and-white display are easier on the eyes, a new article from The New York Times suggests LCD panels, like on Apple's iPad, may be no better or worse.
Dr. Travis Meredith, chair of the opthalmology department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, said such screens are not bad for peoples' eyes, but physical fatigue can come from not blinking often enough. And while paper can offer more "physical sophistication" than a computer screen, certain types of paper -- like cheap newsprint or paper in softcover books -- is actually said to be an inferior reading experience.
The article also notes that current LCD monitors offer much better viewing angles and superior clarity to those of years ago. They are also less tiring on peoples' eyes.
The biggest problem for the iPad, the article notes, might be its reflective glass screen, which could prove to be an issue in brightly lit situations. Apple has encountered the same issue with its MacBook Pro line, where it converted to glossy screens that can be difficult to view in direct sunlight. Last August, the Mac maker began offering matte screens for $50 extra on the 15-inch MacBook Pro line.
The iPad has a 9.7-inch LED-backlit screen that employs IPS technology for its LCD display. The technology, developed by Hitachi in 1996, offers improved viewing angles over traditional LCD.
The device will mark Apple's entrance into the e-book market, with the new iBooks application and its included iBookstore offering bestselling titles from some of the top publishers in the world.
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
I'm starting to get that tingly feeling about the iPad release.
Me thinks this is total propaganda by Apple! (And I'm disgusted.)
Having used an iPod Touch for over a year, now owning an iPhone and played with several eInk devices, I can testify to the fact that the backlight on any LCD equipped device held quite close to the eye causes eye strain, as does the fact the screen is not really '1D' (one dimensional) like paper or eInk displays.
Try reading for more than 30 minutes on an LCD at close range in low light and you will get a headache. You won't reading a book. If one did, they would not exist.
There is also the issue of resolution. The iPad (sadly) is at 135 or similar DPI, while print on good paper offers 200 to 300.
All said, the iPad uses a new technology, so only time will tell whether it will also cause eye strain.
Methinks this is total trolling by Oflife
These days IBM makes its money by selling specialised management consultancy services. It then sells the systems and hardware on the back of that. One of their main markets is 'Big Pharma'. It will have become blindingly obvious that the iPad is going to be a huge hit in medical vertical markets. on the ward and in research depts. There are deals to be done. Pretty smart move by IBM.
I'm starting to get that tingly feeling about the iPad release.
Good call. Also note that Oracle (led by Steve Jobs' buddy Larry Ellison) is trying to acquire Sun Micro to compete with IBM in this type of business. If Oracle were to integrate iPads into their offerings, that would be another potentially big deal.