Microsoft and Intel will fail in Tablet Market

Microsoft and Intel are working together to push Apple's iPad to less than 50 percent of the global tablet market by 2013. Currently iPad market share stands at 60% of the tablet market share. Although it is possible that iPad market share will drop below 50% in the next year, I don’t see Intel or Microsoft having much success in the tablet market.

Windows Tablet is too late to market

Microsoft has little chance of succeeding in the tablet arena with Windows 8. They are entering the market more than 2 years after Apple launched the iPad. At this point consumers already associate tablets with Apple and the iPad and Microsoft has a history of poor performance at trying to dethrone companies with dominant market share. Think about Microsoft’s attempts with the Zune in the mp3 player market, Bing for search engines, and Windows Phone for smartphones. None of these products have been able to make the significant progress one would expect from a technology heavyweight such as Microsoft. As a late to enter player in the tablet market, Microsoft will be fighting upstream to try to get developer support. Microsoft will have to compete with the iPad which already has over a hundred thousand iPad specific apps to download. After watching the disappointing failure of Windows Phone, app developers will be weary of putting effort into Microsoft tablet apps until the platform has proved itself.

The final reason Microsoft will fail in tablets is because they poor quality software and they don’t focus on the consumer experience. Because Microsoft has to create OS that will work on an infinite set of combinations of hardware, their OS have a tendency to have a lot of bugs and crash frequently. The success of iOS and the growth of Mac computers in recent years shows that consumers are willing to pay for a better customer experience, and that is what Apple offers, not Microsoft. Windows 8 will probably be large, clunky and inefficient which will cause hardware manufacturers to put in more expensive processors and more ram just to be able to run Windows 8 smoothly. This will lead to Windows 8 tablets that will be large, heavy and expensive, and that is not what today’s customers are looking for.

Intel needs to improve power efficiency

Intel has been unable to gain a footing in tablets. Intel has traditionally excelled at building fast x86 based processors for laptops and desktops. Although their processors are hast, x86 processors have the downside of using significantly more power than ARM based processors. This isn’t a problem for traditional computers which are plugged into a wall, but for phones and tablet which are expected to be small and have a long battery life this is a big issue. Until Intel is able to provide similar power efficiency as ARM based processors with the same speed, Intel will not be able to compete in the tablet and phone market.

Capital One cuts banking jobs, evolving into digital bank

Capital One announced it will be cutting hundreds of jobs in its retail banking branches including approximately 500 assistant manager positions. Capital One also consolidated their market regions from 14 to 8 in order to reduce the complexity and get rid of an entire layer of management.

I am not at all surprised by this announcement. As a former employee who left 6 months ago I knew that this move was going to happen sooner or later. Retail Bank infrastructure has been a leading cost for the bank ever since Capital One bought its first bank in 2005. Ever since overdraft fees income was removed, all banks have been under pressure to reduce the costs of their branch network and find new sources of income. One new source of income has been service fees for checking accounts. Over the past 2 years nearly every bank has either completely gotten rid of free checking or have put huge restriction on free checking accounts including minimum deposit requirements.

Capital One has been trying to evolve into a more innovative, future oriented bank for some time. Capital One Direct was launched nearly a decade ago in order to provide funding for their credit card portfolio. In resent years there has been a large push to grow Capital One Direct, including the launch of online checking. Capital One now offers free online checking through the direct bank for customers who do not live in their retail branch footprint. The direct bank is the second largest online bank in the United States, second to ING Direct which was acquired by Capital One during 2011. The acquisition of ING puts Capital One miles ahead of the competition in terms of internet banking.

In addition to Capital One's online bank, in 2011 Capital One launched new model banking. A hybrid of traditional branch banking and online banking. They have already opened up branches in several cities and plan to move to more areas over the next few years. The theory of new model banking is that there is a subset of customers who rarely use a branch and would be willing to do most of their transactions through the online bank and only visit a branch on rare occasions. This will allow the company to cover an entire metro area with only 4 branches instead of hundreds. The cost savings will allow Capital One to offer better products and higher interest rates. I strongly believe that this model will be very successful and will help Capital One Bank to become the most profitable bank in the United States. The banks that cling to a dense branch infrastructure will eventually put themselves out of business due to the monstrous operating cost associated with maintaining so many locations. In the future I see Capital One continuing to close underperforming branches and expanding their new model bank.