iPad is to “tablet” as Starbucks is to “coffee shop”

When a product becomes synonymous with the general term for the item itself, it can own the market.

To paraphrase Ra’s Al Ghul from Batman Begins, “If you make yourself more than just a tablet, if you devote your circuits to an ideal and if they can’t stop you, you become something else entirely – a legend.”

Such is the case with the Apple iPad as it now accounts for 94.64% of all tablet web traffic. It accounted for 2/3rds of the tablets sold in 2011 despite a surge by the Kindle Fire around Christmas. Just like Starbucks, people often interchange the word “iPad” with “tablet” when discussing the mobile device.

The Samsung Galaxy tablet is the 2nd-most common, and yet there are fewer than 1.3 Galaxy tablets for every 100 iPads. Game over. Apple won.