Apple’s iPad is gearing up to be a Windows killer, according to the financial whizzes at major start-up investment fund Y Combinator. In the fund’s latest Request for Startups, a statement to point entrepreneurs in the right direction, it points straight to Apple iPad apps.

Y Combinator believes people are getting distracted by the iPad’s tablet form and suggest that Apple’s real plan is about making the software the most common way of using computers. It says:

“We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows Killer or more precisely, a Windows transcender [sic]. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).”

Y Combinator predicts that iPad apps will be much more than simply ports from the iPhone or the iWork suite shown by Apple during the iPad launch. It thinks the iPad will create an entirely new class of applications:

“…like any new platform the iPad will allow new types of applications that don’t have any present day analogues…only people who become iPad developers will even think of these ideas, just as only microcomputer developers were in a position to think of the spreadsheet.”

Do you think Apple’s future version of the iPad and the other implementations of the iPhone OS is it is reportedly working on will kick Windows into touch in the world of work? Or are other challengers like the Google Chrome OS more worthy of watching?

Due late-March | £TBC | Apple (via Y Combinator)

  • jonjo

    Comments are never shown on this site. It’s a shame as the articles are very good. Do you just not get comments or not do the moderating required?

  • Chris Butcher

    The same experts are also predicting with 99% confidence that the sky is falling…

    • http://www.electricpig.co.uk Ben Sillis

      It’s a no lose situation for us either way though regardless. If the iPad doesn’t take off, it doesn’t, but if it does, we could see stale dekstop OSs turned on their heads.

  • cscs

    Apple are increasingly taking advantage of the blurring of home and work. The world of big company IT has for a long time struggled to keep up with home, now mobile is transforming even further/faster how we receive, organise, consume, and pay for info and Apple is helping enable it.
    Personally I think the ever growing Facebook/social media – maybe via iPhone/iPad apps but also Android (plus other?) ones – is going to lead the way in the next phase of the mobile world. Meantime it’s a pretty good time to be a consumer – the more competition the better.

Hot chat, right here!


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