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!
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Labels: anil dash, apple, consumer, enterprise, enterprisey, iphone, mobile
