* Reasons the iPhone will have a reasonable impact on IT departments in the New Year
Will you be getting an iPhone for Christmas? Probably not. A survey by Solutions Research Group found that the iPhone is No. 15 on U.S. consumers’ wish list for a Christmas gift. In Canada, the company found that the iPhone makes it to No. 8 on the list. GfK NOP released a study that found that only one in 50 people in Britain are considering the iPhone as a Christmas gift.
Despite these fairly meager forecasts, I anticipate that the iPhone will have a reasonable impact on IT departments in the New Year for three reasons:
* First, lots of people will get an iPhone for Christmas, the above forecasts notwithstanding. That means that lots of IT departments will receive requests to support the device in 2008.
* Second, consider that a recent Osterman Research survey found 62% of users or managers are requesting that their IT departments support additional mobile devices, and that in 72% of these organizations users are requesting the iPhone. Clearly, there is significant demand for the device.
* Third, earlier this month Apple was running an ad for a test/sync engineer to test the functionality of Outlook and Exchange with the iPhone. Apple will be smart to integrate ActiveSync with the iPhone.
Apple is a somewhat stubborn company in some respects, and I say this as a big fan of the company and as someone with a Mac and Windows machine on my desktop, both of which are used on a daily basis. For example, they don’t provide a two-button mouse with the Mac, despite the fact that this would increase user productivity. The new version of the Safari browser that comes with the Mac still isn’t compatible with many Web sites. There is no ‘Cut’ feature in Finder that will allow you to move files as easily as in Windows. This leads me to believe that Apple might be reticent to fully embrace Exchange and ActiveSync functionality soon, although ultimately they will have to do so.
In short, I believe the iPhone will be a major force in organizations over the next couple of years, and one with which IT departments will have to contend.
