After reading about how to compete with the iPad I thought to myself, "How would I build a super-cool tablet device?"

My biggest disagreement comes here:

Closed system. This is the very opposite of what your customers care about. The percentage of your customer base who make a buying decision based on the openness of a system (in terms of system-level customisation options, use of open source software or otherwise) is vanishingly tiny. They’re very vocal, certainly, but commercially they’re irrelevant. Pandering to this segment will most certainly damage your penetration into the market. Be extremely wary about sacrificing large-scale appeal for the sake of a tiny but noisy technical minority. The tablet space is in no way designed for or aimed at such users.

I must admit, I'm slightly bored by hardware. I obviously want the fastest processor with the most memory downloading with lowest latency on any device I own. But hardware is static, and software is not. That's why closed systems aren't as much fun as open ones: because as soon as you open a device up to the millions of interested parties, you increase innovation. Software is the key and the most fun thing that can be explored.

Microsoft, for instance, has ignored open systems for years, with the result that the "noisy technical minority" has soured on them and begun to adopt Linux. To bring them back into the MS fold, Microsoft has vocally begun to invest heavily in open-source communities (codeplex comes to mind). Yet even when Microsoft was at its ham-handed-nest, Apple was building a small closed system.

Want to build your own computer? From parts you had lying around? Microsoft would sell you the software. You could choose your processor, memory, storage, etc. Would it look as nice as something you could pick up from Apple? Maybe not. You sacrificed better built quality for the ability to choose your own parts.

When it comes to tablets, the idea that "users are idiots" and need to be led into a walled garden makes me remember back to the early days of the internet. Then, as now, large companies said "Users are too simple to use the internet...they need to be led". AOL, Compuserve and others made billions of dollars targeting the "dumb users" group.

In the end, they lost. The openness of the internet broke down barriers erected by the large walled garden players. In much the same way, I hope that tablets will be able to run iPhoneOS, or Windows Courier, or Android, or MeeGo. By locking hardware to software, the iPad doesn't just tick off "highly technical users", it sends a message that openness is bad.

In the end, I hope that message comes back to haunt them.