Do Consumers Really Care About Tablet Operating Systems?

Do consumers pay attention to operating systems?[/caption] Kendrick says that this will be a problem for Microsoft in the future. Microsoft doesn’t make hardware, Microsoft makes software. He says that they will have to completely rely on the tablet manufacturers to do all of the marketing for Windows 8. According to him, this is why Windows Phone 7 hasn’t caught on as much as Android, iPhones, or even Blackberries have. I disagree with Kendrick. For starters, the average consumer doesn’t have and Android tablet, so they don’t shift tablets from month-to-month. The average consumer has an iPad because it’s consistent. It looks and feels the same as every iPhone out there, and there is just one user interface for iOS instead of the millions of different tweaks that every tablet manufacturer gives Android. Not to mention that consumers want what their friends want, and since most people have iPads, this will influence more people to get iPads. This is why I think consumers do pay attention to the operating systems on their tablets. Most of the time, they don’t go up to a tablet and say “I want iOS 5.1 or Android 3.2.” They look at the user interface instead. They play around with it and see how easy it is to use, what apps are available in the store, how fast web browsing is, etc. Even if they don’t know what the exact name of the operating system is, they can say, “I want the one with the tiles or I want the one with the rounded squares.” If consumers didn’t care about the operating system, more people would have bought the HP TouchPad. Instead, the TouchPad fizzled out because partially of the high price, but also because it used WebOS and there were almost no developers for WebOS. This meant very few apps which means a less enjoyable user experience. Consumers knew this. They knew that there were fewer apps and this meant that they were less likely to spend the money on the TouchPad. HP even said so themselves when talking about a possible Windows 8 HP tablet that could come at CES.  “We thought we had a good asset with WebOS and thought we could combine WebOS with a good hardware, [but] we retreated from that because of the economic conditions to enter that market,” said HP’s Yves De Talhouet. So overall, I think that consumers really do care about the operating system running inside their device, because caring about only the hardware just isn’t enough. Source 1 Source 2]]>