IDC announced today that worldwide tablet sales growth is expected to slow to 7.2%, and that iPad shipments will decline by 12.7%, the first year-over-year decline in the history of the product’s existence. This is significantly different from their 2013 report, which showed a year-over-year growth rate of 50.6%.

This announcement coincides with what I’ve been predicting for the past two years:from an enterprise perspective, tablets and laptops will largely consolidate to a single form factor.

The drivers are clear. Enterprise users want to be able to work effectively, regardless of what device their working on. They don’t want to carry around multiple devices and companies don’t want to supply or manage multiple devices. The iPad is a revolutionary device but it’s strengths still lie in content consumption, not content creation. Another limitation is the fact that users don’t want to have to have another upgrade path on tablets that is separate from their phones and their laptops. And on top of that, companies struggle to keep up with device upgrades.

Despite prior years showing the significant growth of tablets as a device platform and Mediafly being a “mobile-first” enterprise software company, we’ve seen that our web viewer still ranks as the top platform. The device report below is from one of our enterprise customers and illustrates how important the browser is (represented by Mediafly Web Viewer).

We see a number of additional data points over and over that further justify this trend:

• Many customers and prospects are hesitant about rolling out iPads to their salespeople and general employee base as they work to reconcile the capital expense and challenges of managing another track of devices with the enablement benefits they provide.
• More and more of the new Windows PCs are tablet hybrids as well, with full touch screens, detachable keyboards, and a full-featured operating system behind it. We are eagerly awaiting OS X to support these features as well, and expect this to happen in the coming 1-2 years as tablet sales decrease even faster.
• Larger phones (e.g. iPhone 6+, Galaxy S5, and Nexus 5) are decreasing the importance of also carrying around additional devices such as tablets and laptops.

What are we doing about it?

In anticipation of this shift, we are working on a new desktop solution that will work on multiple operating systems (Windows 7 and above, and Mac OS X 10.8 and above) and support all of our mobile app features including: full offline access, offline search, intelligent syncing, and Interactives. The desktop solution will remove the line between devices and will allow an end user to experience the benefit of our solutions everywhere.

Our target timeframe for launch is Q3 2015. We’ll keep you updated on our progress and share details along the way.

(Cross-posted on the Mfly Blog)

I’m proud to have worked with my colleagues at Mediafly to beta-release Airship, the web-based content management system that we’ve been working on for almost a year.  It’s been a fantastic experience conceiving of, designing, and working with them to build the system.  I’ve learned a few things about introducing new products during this process.

• Speed is essential. The engineer in all of us on the team wants to build a robust, scalable system up front. But doing so has gotten us into trouble in the past. So, this time, we opted to build super-fast, and worry about scalability when we need to. After all, while we may have a guess as to what the scalability challenges may be 6 months from now, we could be very wrong. So it’s better to kick the can down the road at this early stage.
• Saying no to feature requests is hard. Very very hard. Especially to ones that are good ideas, but are not a part of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
• Frequent meetings and checkins are important. We met 2-3 times/week in 5-minute standup meetings, and informally lots of times/week to hash out ideas.
• What was hard in the old system is easy now.  With our old Publisher system, getting the media into the system took ages. Users had to use a user-unfriendly “filechucker” that we wrote years ago, to incrementally upload files. Or, they would have to paste a URL. This time we used highly developed open source tools, and as a result, importing is as easy as dragging and dropping into your browser.
• What was easy in the old system is hard (for now). Assign security groups to a large number of files was relatively easy. Now, (at least in MVP), it requires making changes to each file independently. While this is a short term solution, it is incredibly error prone and time consuming.

Lots more thoughts coming soon. In the meantime, congratulations team, and keep on flying!