Tech Note: 2011 will be known as Year of the Pirate

Judging by the number of announcements last week in Las Vegas at the CES convention, 2011 will be remembered as the Year of the Tablet.

That's what everyone says, at least.

The way things are going, it could just as well end up as the Year of Buyer's Remorse. That's not likely to have anything to do with the tablets themselves, since Apple's iPad has set such a high standard that its competitors seem to have cottoned onto the idea that a sub-standard device had a snowball's chance in Hades of succeeding.

The result is a lot of shiny new gadgets with large touch screens with more computing power than the Moon Missions. What is likely to turn consumers off these new wonder gadgets is the lack of content.

Digital consumers want content, they want a lot of it, and they want it cheap.

It's all Apple's fault, of course. Ten years ago this week they introduced to the world (actually, it was just select parts of the world; the one who could pay in the right currency without trampling on any exclusive distribution rights) an online marketplace that specialized in music, aka iTunes. It has since branched out into movies, TV shows, games, and books.

At the time it was brilliant and innovative. No other gadget maker could offer their customers such a service. The problem is that 10 years later, Apple is still the only place that really offers such services, at least legally. A few others, such as Amazon, have stumbled into the market, but they have nothing on Apple in terms of reach or variety.

But that hasn't stopped anyone from selling tablets with the promise of multimedia galore. Android tablets are great, but Google isn't in the business of selling movies or music. OK, you can get some books, but I wouldn't expect to find all books from the New York Times best seller's list unless you're looking at a really old list.

Aisle of confusion

It doesn't seem as if companies are paying attention to history. It's not as if we haven't been through this before. Back in the last ‘80s and early ‘90s (back before Microsoft had cornered the market on operating systems) you would go down to the software store (back when there were software stores) and have to find the aisle for your OS, with the main options then being Windows, DOS, OS/2, Apple, or, if you were slow in updating your system, the Commodore 64.

The end result was one dominant company and a lot of software that became useless — or at least seriously outdated — within just a few years.

The same is likely to happen with tablets today. A lot of people are going to end up spending Dh40 on a movie/book/app that will only run on that one tablet and can't be ported off. Or worse, they won't be able to get anything at all. Most of us will refuse to buy anything but Apple, handing them a near monopoly of the tablet market.

The real loser here will be the copyright holders. Where there is a will, there is a way, and people have shown us that is they can't buy content, they are more than willing to download it illegally.

Now I know I've been going on about how copyright holders need to open up an online site that caters to a real digital marketplace for all platforms, not just the one they have a "strategic partnership" with, but now is the time. Otherwise, I have one word for content providers: Arrggh!

You can forget about the Year of the Tablet. 2011 will the Year of the Pirate.