What Do the iPad and Windows Azure Have in Common?

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

Both Apple’s iPad and Microsoft’s Windows Azure, though wildly different in scope and intent, are in essence a a heaping helping of a previously successful offering. Will they succeed?

Supersizing may have gone out of style in the restaurant world, but it sure is alive and kicking in the tech industry, as recent news proved.

Apple stole most of the headlines recently when Steve Jobs announced what is essentially a supersized version of the highly popular iPod Touch. There’s no doubt the iPad will sell well to Apple fans, even though it’s not yet clear what the point of it is. When that becomes clearer, it may well sell a good deal more.

Perhaps carried away on his own rhetoric, Jobs then proceeded to supersize Apple’s importance, claiming Apple is “the largest mobile devices company in the world.” This left the good folks at Nokia a tad confused and squealing with indignation, seeing as they sell more handsets, for more money, than Apple does, and they have done so for a very long time. Seems like Jobs’ efforts to supersize Apple’s marketshare meant being a tad creative with the truth in Nokia’s eyes: He was, apparently, including laptop sales in his figure, not the “generally accepted and stable” definition of mobile devices, as Nokia calls it, that most certainly doesn’t include them.

It may be tough for Nokia, but for once I am inclined to side with Steverino. After all, why should smartphones, which are essentially ultra-portable computers, be considered different from laptops? Heck, Nokia tacitly acknowledges this with the introduction of its Booklet 3G netbook. In an enterprise context, the similarity is even clearer: Smartphones and laptops need managing, monitoring and controlling in the same way so that they can access corporate networks and carry around data without compromising security. Apple may not be much good at selling servers and desktop machines, but by combining sales of laptops, iPhones, iPod Touches and, eventually iPads, Apple can make a good case for being the world’s foremost supersize mobile devices company.

Read the rest at ServerWatch.