Five Companies that Need to Build Better iPad Apps Now

Companies that are slow to become part of the iPad ecosystem will pay a price in lost opportunity. The iPad platform will speed the change in the market's use patterns, and there are several companies that need to get cracking so they're not left in the dust. To date, they've either been slow to respond, or have responded weakly or not at all. Since iPad years move much faster than even web years (remember web years?), they have little time to waste.

Here are five companies that need to port critical products or technologies to the iPad platform:

IBM The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer giant has done industry-leading work in the area of on-demand computing, messaging (via its Lotus platforms), and Web 2.0 with its pioneering work in mashup software. Earlier, IBM released an app to provide some access to Lotus Domino servers on the iPhone. But IBM and Lotus need to take the next step and bring a more robust version of Notes to the iPad in an easy, native App that will extend the usefulness of its messaging, calendaring and productivity technology. Microsoft has delivered Exchange as a native messaging option on iPhone and iPad. IBM and Lotus need to work on doing the same, now, or the risk is that its platform will become much less relevant;

Oracle-Sun Ok, so Oracle couldn't hold on to James Gosling or many other Sun pioneers and executives after it bought Sun Microsystems. However, it can reinvigorate the Sun software lineup in a major way by delivering two key pieces of software - - StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and its VirtualBox virtualization software - - to the iPad platform. It won't be easy, but if Oracle could deliver virtualization to the iPad in a manner that allows for some Mac OSX, Windows or Linux apps to work on the device, it would be a true killer app. And while productivity tools like Apple's Pages are OK on the iPad, having a more full-featured suite like StarOffice on the device would be huge;

Hewlett-Packard Suddenly, HP's universal print driver isn't so universal - - at least not as long as you can't print natively from the iPad without Rube-Goldberg-like workarounds. There are a handful of apps now available for iPad that allow for printing from the device to printers via 3G or Internet, but none are particularly smooth. If any company in the business can find a way to print natively and wirelessly and easily from the iPad, it's HP. If it could become the iPad print provider, that could spell curtains for some of its weaker competitors;

Google The smartest people in the world work at Google, so why can't they get Google Docs to work natively on the iPad platform - - in a way that allows for writing and editing on the device itself? This may take some negotiation with Apple to make it happen and make Docs available natively on iPad, but if it's in the market's interest for Exchange to work on iPad, isn't it also in the market's interest for Docs to fully work on it as well?

Apple Yes, Apple could do a better job in the app department. iDrive falls far short of its potential as online storage and needs to be optimized for iPad rather than just the smaller iPhone. And while the Cupertino, Calif.-based company has done a great job with iBooks and, of course, the iPod software for iPad, Pages is a functional but ultimately weak document creation app. This is nitpicking against Apple, which doesn't want to compete against too many developers on its platform. But in some critical areas where it can take leadership, it should.