Scoble Explains It All…Incorrectly

While I was in the midst of my lat­est attempt to prove that a man can be pow­ered by ethanol alone, Betanews ran an utterly retarded opin­ion piece by Joe Wilcox titled: The world doesn’t need an Apple tablet, or any other. There is much that is fun­da­men­tally wrong with Joe’s piece, but I don’t want to talk about that. Fortunately I don’t have to talk about Joe’s errors because the tech pun­di­tards sal­lied forth en masse to white – knight a non-existent prod­uct (remem­ber, until Apple announces the gods damned thing, it ain’t real). Amongst the herd rush­ing to defend all things “tablet” was our good friend, and absolute moron Robert Scoble.

In a pre­co­cious bit of blo­g­or­rhea titled: Oh, Joe, the world doesn’t need a Tablet? Really? Robert springs to the defense of the tablet plat­form. Sadly, he also demon­strates that what Robert Scoble under­stands about tech­nol­ogy could be writ­ten in twenty-four point font on the back of a postage stamp; with room to spare.

Robert’s attempt to defend the maiden honor or the tablet takes the form of a litany of suc­cess­ful tablet com­put­ing devices that have already suc­ceeded in the mar­ket. Items he refers to include:

• A touch-screen Point of Sale terminal
• The touch-screen inter­face of his “Oh aren’t I so much bet­ter than you peo­ple” 2010 Prius
• The touch-screen inter­face of a gas pump (ironic given the above example)
• Some touch-screen shit in a Chinese taxi cab

Anyone else notice the pat­tern here? Robert has con­flated a touch-screen inter­face with tablet form-factor com­put­ing. Here’s a clue Scooby: Lots of devices uti­lize a touch-screen. Some have been suc­cess­ful, some not so much, but merely pos­sess­ing a touch-screen does not make a device a “tablet com­puter” you fuck­ing igno­ra­mus. Seriously, go back to hawk­ing cam­eras. Hell, some of them now even have touch-screen inter­faces. Your vast expe­ri­ence with tablet com­put­ing will serve you well.