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Strauss Zelnick currently serves as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., producers of the Grand Theft Auto videogame series.  In 2001, Zelnick[…]

Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, views tablet computing as a media revolution.

I think tablet computing is going to have an enormous influence on all forms of the media and entertainment business.  We’ve had small screens for a long time, you know, the device you carry in your breast pocket - you’re using it to make telephone calls and send emails and send text messages and maybe to consume little snippets of audio-visual entertainment or interactive entertainment.

And then obviously, we all know what we use the big screen for. We watch TV shows on it and motion pictures and we play video games on big screens sometimes too. Middle sized screens have been a bit more limited because typically a middle sized screen is just sort of 8 ½ by 11 sized screen has been attached to a relatively heavy device. 

The device that sits on our desks that we use typically for work, not always, but typically, some information, but primarily work-related... and then for playing interactive entertainment, depending on how you define that device. And portable devices that are 8 ½ by 11 have been laptops, which are relatively heavy, relatively cumbersome and take a while to start up and can crash and the like.

What a tablet offers is a mid-sized device that’s highly portable, that’s on-off, that connects automatically and that can supply an array of activities and meet an array of needs -- whether those are entertainment needs or information needs or computing needs or communications needs.

Given we’re still only looking at the iPad 2 right now, I think it’s easy to posit a time in five years or less when tablets are incredibly light, incredibly inexpensive, but not all that intelligent as devices go.  I believe most of the intelligence will be in the cloud. Most of the storage will be in the cloud and they will be ubiquitous. And when they’re ubiquitous they’re going to speak to interpersonal communications, information, work, as well as a lot of entertainment needs.

So, mobile devices right now, there’s more than six billion mobile devices attached to human beings, I hope, on the planet and I think you’re going to see the same thing happen with tablets. And the current uptake rate of the Apple devices implies that. 

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