We’ve got a fair amount of iPhone 3G coverage, including the basics from Monday’s unveiling by Steve Jobs.
We’re trying to approach it, as we did a year ago, from the viewpoint of enterprise networking and IT professionals.
In prepping for this week’s news, I contacted Apple PR. I wanted to talk with them about two network-related issues. One was ‘what are the issues Apple sees in optimizing a 3G connection for enterprise users.” The second was “what were the design decisions Apple made in crafting the iPhone’s Wi-Fi interface.”
The PR spokeswoman told me that Apple doesn’t talk about un-announced products. I pointed out that, at a stretch, one might consider the first request to fall into that category but the second one certainly didn’t.
Then, she told me that Apple doesn’t go into that level of technical detail. Which, I confess, surprised me. I asked why.
I’m paraphrasing here because I didn’t jot down her exact words, but what she said was very close to this: “We think our products are cool and we want people to focus on the coolness.”
Good luck with that in the enterprise market.
Most everyone likes cool stuff. But enterprise IT departments like cool stuff that, you know, works.
And “works” is a term that in the enterprise context has a certain depth and richness of meaning. The device has to behave well on my network, meaning not mess it up, as well as meaning be optimal for the enduser. It has to be secure. It has to be manageable. It has to be “integrate-able” since a personal device that can’t or won’t tie into enterprise applications and data is pretty useless.
Those requirements are, as they say, non-trivial. And to be assessed, a vendor, even one as cool as Apple, needs to go into a level of technical detail that would put many consumer end-users to sleep. And rightly so: they just want it to work. Enterprise network administrators need to know a bit more about HOW it works.
One of our bloggers, Alex Lewis, is feeling the love : the iPhone is just plain exciting for a lot of people, and for all kinds of reasons.
But NW blogger Mitchell Ashley considers the iPhone 3G is still outclassed by RIM’s BlackBerry. RIM simply has more experience on both the mobile enduser side, and the enterprise management side.
Somewhere in between is our Cool Tools Editor, Keith Shaw, who’s taking a wait-and-see stance on the hype, while noting that Apple seems to have paid attention to some enterprise needs.
That certainly is evident in the new iPhone configuration utility, available as either a Web application or a native application on Mac OS X. You use it to create profiles (XML files) that download to the iPhone and automatically impose a bunch of application and security settings.
That’s a big step forward, but Apple will need to do a lot more. Otherwise enterprise IT professionals will keep choosing blackberries not apples as their favorite fruit.
