Forrester is Wrong
December 15th, 2007The iPhone is great at allowing cracked out execs to send unintelligible email.
Research firms make a lot of money telling corporate IT departments how to avoid trying new tech that may be easier to administer. One of the biggest enemies of progress is looking at feature sets without looking at task completion. Bullet point mentality wins again. Don’t “they” know that the iPhone slices and dices? o
Tags: analyst, iphone, macalope
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December 15th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
I think that article lays it all out completely. Having worked in IT for many years, I think your analysis is a little off.
IT departments, LOVE devices that are easy to manage. The iPhone offers no possibilities of central management. This is a problem that plagues Apple’s products when faced with enterprise integration. One of IT’s main objectives is security. If it can’t be secured, they won’t/can’t support it being used in the company.
The blackberry model has been the winner in the corporate world for these reasons. They allow IT depts to encrypt the data, and also apply centrally controlled lock-down rules on the devices. True, they have lacked features and “exciting UI experiences” but that is not what business tools are about. This is why Windows is still the most used Corporate platform, that and software compatibility.
The iPhone is an awesome consumer electronic device, much like the Apple computers. But are dismal corporate/business tools for larger organizations.
December 17th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
brewcaster, comments like this are why business users almost universally hate their IT departments. Lacking features and “exciting UI experiences” really equals “doesn’t do what I need it to do” and “sucks to use those capabilities it does have.”
Until you guys understand that usability and usefulness are the keys to productivity, your users will keep ignoring your rules and getting themselves the tools they need to succeed.
December 20th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Maturity, security, and switching costs.
Give Forrester another five years. Then give the Fortune 1000 another five on top of that one.
December 22nd, 2007 at 11:50 pm
My wife has a Crackberry and she give MY left…you know.. for my iPhone but her company won’t support it.
December 29th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
brewcaster, I DISAGREE with your opinions about IT Business needs. I, too, am an IT professional and I support almost three hundred Nextel push-to-talk users and more than sixty Crackberry users. I have users that hate, hate, hate, the crackberry because it isn’t intuitive to use whatsoever. Being PC users, nothing in the operating system of the blackberry is similar at all to Windows.
I STRONGLY disagree with your statement that business tools are not about features and “exciting UI experiences. If your users hate the tools, they simply will not use them. We would campaign for using the iPhone if our central IT department supported it (they presently do not.) But being that my department is an extremity of the central IT, we don’t make those decisions.
Within 3 years, we WILL support the iPhone simply out of necessity because we are a higher education institution and we will HAVE to because students already have them. When that happens, I am confident that we will have strong employee support to replace our crackberries with the iPhone. And I will totally support that.