Sarah Perez gets it completely wrong writing in a Techcrunch article entitled Retailers Aren’t Ready For iPad Shopping Trend

Now for the bad news. Despite the increases in tablet traffic, many retailers are not prepared to accommodate these new mobile shoppers. Compuware also prepared a chart showing the top retailers’ sites, and whether or not they offered an iPad-optimized website. Surprisingly, none of them do, not even Apple.com. What’s worse, Apple is also among the retailers who don’t offer a native iPad application.

She is completely wrong because the iPad web browser is a fully featured standards compliant web browser. You don’t need to ‘optimize’ for it, or replace it with an app.

Instead, Sarah has given me two more reasons to add to my You hate your Customers post:

• If your site provides an iPad optimized website for a device that has full web fidelity, like the iPad, you hate your customers.
• If your site requires iPad users to download an application to use your site, you hate your customers.

Oh, and I need to clarify

• Apple does have a store app, but it in not required to access the Apple store from the iPad.
• The only thing you need to do to make a site work great on an iPad is to use standard HTML5+CSS3 (and not to use flash). iPad optimized sites are really just crappy mobile sites made larger, instead of the real deal done right.