Um, first a correction - I meant 7 million
iPad owners. I'd imagine there are significantly more than 7 million iPod Touch/iPhone owners around by now.
As to whether they have a choice - OK, iPad buyers didn't initially. We'll take that for now. For iPhone/Touch owners, of course they have a choice - buy someone else's hardware. That's exactly the point I was making. They have a choice in the market and they chose the device that doesn't do flash over one that does. As far as I can see, logically, that decision must have been come to by one of the following paths
1) Flash simply isn't a criteria in their choice (i.e. they don't care about it at all)
2) Flash was a criteria in their choice, but it was over-ridden in their choice 'hierarchy' by other factors (i.e they do care about it but less than some other things).
It would be wrong to infer that people who bought iOS devices don't care about Flash
at all but it would equally be wrong to infer that those who bought Android devices did so purely because they will do Flash. My other half bought a HTC desire rather than an iPhone and she wouldn't know Flash if it poked her with a stick. The one thing we can say pretty much for certain is that for the people who have bought iDevices, Flash is not the top thing on their requirements list. Because if it was, they wouldn't have bought an iDevice, would they?
So, we can look at it this way. IIRC, in recent times, the number of iphones/touches sold and the number of android phones sold is roughly equal. Lets' say for simplicity all the Android phones sold can do Flash. So we can deduce that all the people who bought iDevices don't care all that much about Flash. This is self-evident. What I say is that also some of the people who bought Android devices don't care about Flash. In reality we know this to be true, since some Android devices can't do Flash, but anyway. This means, if you take the number of people who bought smartphones in the past recent times, more of them don't care that much about Flash than do.
This was my chain of logic that led to me stating what I did. It's pretty broad stroke and it does make a couple of assumptions, but I think they're not unreasonable ones to make. I'd be happy to change them if someone could provide a persuasive argument.
Now what I'd like to hear is the chain logic by which the head of RIM knows that 7" tablets will take a significant chunk of the tablet market in the near future.
