blah blah blah iPhone. The empty ring of the word "enterprise," and why business IT needs to understand consumer products.
LOLz to Anil Dash, who tweeted:
"To people in line for iPhone: people lined up for Windows 95, too, which was equally popular and revolutionary. In 2019 you'll understand."
Now, don't you dare run off and think the point of this post is to mock the iPhone. I'm here to defend it. As a consumer, I'm uninterested the iPhone at this moment (that was Anil's point), but as usual, I'm writing in defense of logic and reason. And the iPhone FUD going around now is ten times more ridiculous than the iPhone hype (though seriously campers, y'all crazy). And so here I am, attempting to temper the FUD, and ignoring the hype.
What's the FUD? That IT departments should not embrace the iPhone. According to who? Well, according to a Gartner Report in ComputerWorld Malaysia (I'm just saying),
“We’re telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise,” Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney says."
Uh oh! It sounds like the iPhone is not... (wait for it). Ready for the enterprise. Well, then, can we give it an award? Can businesses buy them by the barrel? Because in my experience supporting the enterprise, products and tools that are "made for the enterprise" can be as ill-defined and ill-suited for business purposes as anything else out there. And in the past few years, the most useful tools and services appeared first in the consumer space before being integrated into enterprise products. The enterprise can not be assumed to be the place where quality and reliability appear first. It's the place where entitlement and shoddiness get away with murder for years, in the shadows of years-long commitments, contracts and decision-making cycles. The enterprise is where concerns about sharing too much about internal business processes keep problems about information technology tools hidden from view.
In the consumer space, every overheated battery, every slow javascript behavior gets catalogued and squawked about upon arrival. In the consumer space, a single customer can cancel and account or return a product in a day, without fear of violating a 3 million dollar contract, leaving vendors highly incentivized to minimize horror stories. Of course, there are consumer horror stories, but consumers can speak about them freely, while enterprise organizations are paralyzed in a variety of ways from sharing their experiences.
So why again, are we afraid of products that aren't "ready for the enterprise?" I'm afraid of the enterprise ones!
Related:
John Gruber + Daring Fireball's Exchange Exchange (shuts down the whole iPhone security concern. don't even try to go there)
JayZ vs. Nas; VMware vs. Parallels. VMware answers Parallels Coherence with Unity. Mac virtualization gets competitive (No they didn't. No they did not just use C&C Music Factory in this video. They did. )
Aside from the ridic soundtrack, this video is compelling.
Yes, VMware Fusion is already available for free (in Beta). But this video shows features not currently available in the beta that you can download right now. Most notable is that VMware Fusion has responded to and one-upped Parallels Desktop's ability to have each Windows application be its own little window in OS X, rather than have one "parent" window host all guest applications.
Parallels calls this "coherence." VMware Fusion calls this "unity." They're pretty much the same, except that VMware Fusion can have each window appear individually in OS X's Expose feature, something Parallels does not.
That said, Parallels is fully released, and VMware Fusion is not. And the unity feature doesn't exist in the beta that's out. Add to that the fact that VMware hasn't announced how much/ if it will charge for VMware Fusion (its features are positioned between the free VMware Player, and $189 VMware Workstation).
