As evident from various social media interactions, blogs, tech news sites and other Google searches, the two events that clearly brought the attention of every one happened in quick succession:

• iPad 3: The much-awaited next version of the popular tablet, while the official date is March 7, already facts and rumors about the likely features and look and feel have flooded the various technical sites.
• Windows 8: Close on its heels, the Windows 8 consumer preview that happened this week also hit the attention of the technical community. The biggest talking point of Windows 8 is its shift from traditional PC Centric to being more suited for tablets and other mobile devices.

Interestingly there are huge discussions about the issue of ‘Windows 8 vs iPad 3,' while the former is an operating system, latter is a tablet device, yet the discussions are pointing to the fact that Windows 8 will facilitate other non-iPad tablet manufacturers to pose a serious challenge to iPad3.

Analysts claim that while Apple iPad3 is expected to increase the market size further in the tablet field, Windows 8 has enough features to induce a new Windows 8 tablet market that can pose a serious challenge to iPad 3. As it always happens in any kind of competition between innovative products, only time and their respective marketing strategies will provide the final results.

However, what we are seeing is that whatever is the choice in the consumer and client-side computing market, the clear winner on the server side is the Cloud, due the following reasons:

Cloud Is the Winner
In my earlier articles I have highlighted that with the increase in the usage of tablets and cloud, the thick clients market, in the form of applications running on the tablets that connect to the Cloud to perform the server side tasks, will be the future of client server computing.

I have highlighted those thoughts in the articles,

• Why Thick Clients Are Relevant in Cloud Computing
• Server to Smart Device, The Changing Enterprise Menu

Based on the analysis of both Windows 8 powered tablets and iPad3 we are clearly seeing that Cloud is positioned as the server-side mechanism either way, which highlights the fact ‘ iPad 3 vs Windows 8' and the winner is the ‘Cloud.'

The following chart explains how both the products position cloud as the value proposition to serve as an advanced user experience for both enterprise users and other retail users.

Summary
With cloud-based services taking firm place in the enterprise, we also believe the industry predictions clearly point at the growth of tablets at the expense of PCs in the near future. The latest leading industry analyst forecast suggest a many-fold increase in tablet sales, especially for enterprises.

To conclude, the computing of the future will be a combination of some piece running on a client and some piece running on the cloud, and with growing support from various client-side devices to integrate into the cloud, the cloud will be the real winner. This post does not aim to compare Windows 8 tables vs iPad3, but rather signifies the importance of building cloud-based applications to be consumed by tablets.

• A Unified Theory for Cloud Computing
• Windows 7: six months on and the winner is 64-bit computing
• And the Winner Is…

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