Big business
The big queues of consumers hoping to be among the first to get hold of the iPad 2 was no great surprise, but perhaps more so it the clamour from senior execs, according to a story in the FT.
This information came from talking to a company called Diligent, which makes software and services specifically to allow board meetings to be digital, rather than paper-based. Apparently many potential customers are delaying the move to paperless board meetings because they're waiting for more iPad 2s to become available.
It looks like, right now, the only tablet senior execs are interested in is the iPad 2, which must be especially disheartening for the Honeycomb ecosystem, let alone the recent Windows tablet launches that specifically target business users.
But Apple seems to have the problem everyone else would love to have - meeting demand. How much of the apparent shortfall in supply is down to Japan-related component shortages and how much is simply due to overwhelming demand, but if this anecdotal account is to be taken literally, it's not just mainstream notebook OEMs that are threatened by the popularity of the iPad.
A telling part of the story concerns an unnamed company that is waiting for iPad 2s it ordered on the day of launch. Apparently it has already started having paperless board meetings using notebooks, but it speaks volumes that it's still so keen to move to tablets.
