Tim Green: What if every day was 'bring your iPad to work' day?

When tablets make it easy to do work stuff, their triumph over PCs will be complete.
There's a scene In Woody Allen's Take The Money And Run in which He passes a note to the teller explaining that he has a gun. But his handwriting is appalling.
Teller: "What's this? Apt natural?"
Woody: "No, that's 'act natural'. I pointing a gun at you…"
Teller: "Gun? That looks like 'gub'. That's definitely a 'b'…"
And so on. Of course, since the film was made in 1969 hardly anyone hand writes anything any more. But that doesn't mean mistakes don't happen.
Have you ever received an email from someone using an iPad?
It usual read somethng lik this.
But then iPads weren't meant for productivity. They're for watching videos of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpccpglnNf0 or keeping your children from ever going outside.
No one would seriously base their work day around a tablet, right?
Well, the overwhelming success of the form factor is making some people question this received wisdom.
Clever apps, like Paper, OmniGraffle and Instaviz, use pinch, zoom and swipe to create pictures and graphs.
And don't forget, when Apple confirmed its all-time best selling apps to commemorate five years of the App Store this summer, there were three productivity titles in the top ten.
In among the Angry Birds and Fruit Ninjas were Keynote, Garage Band and – top of the list – Pages.
All of these apps are re-imagining productivity without mouse, cursor and (sometimes) keyboard.
Now, for some tasks only a keyboard will do. For me, the iPad onscreen version will always be a problem. I hate it.
Or should that be: I hat it.
Still, look around you and see how many people use it anyway (or buy a Bluetooth add-on) because they simply prefer to use their iPads whenever possible.
And if you don't trust anecdotal evidence, you can have some stats.
IDC reckons Q4 will see 84.1m tablets sold, against 83.1m PCs. It projects annual sales of PCs will outstrip tablets until 2015, when the latter will finally prevail.
That must be very distressing for the vendors still hammering away at the PC market. Not least Microsoft. The hardware decline is bad enough. Now imagine if productivity software migrated over to the new devices too.
I'm not suggesting that big enterprises will start making detailed spreadsheets on the Amazon Fire, but I can see plenty of execs knocking up charts and presentations on their BYOD devices.
What a conundrum for Microsoft. It doesn't yet offer a tablet-optimised version of Office. But you can imagine the internal debate about whether it should. I wonder what the post-Ballmer era will decide.
Perhaps MS is banking on Surface. With its kickstand, keyboard cover and full copy of Microsoft Office preinstalled, it's the ideal hybrid of two great form factors, right?
Well, either that or a mongrel that nobody wants. Sales seem to be pointing to the latter.
In the meantime the tablet market just keeps marching on. If it can become a platform for people to create as well as consume content, then its triumph over PCs will be complete.
Maybe I'll write my next column on my iPad.
I might say: if I do, it will be full of spelling mistakes, bad grammar and meaningless sentences.
And you might say: an improvement on the usual shit.

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