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AT&T to Target iPhone to Enterprise
narramissic writes "AT&T is reportedly preparing to market the iPhone to business users and is scurrying to ensure that its backend enterprise billing and support systems will accommodate the device when it ships. Analysts are baffled by the move. In addition to running an OS X-based operating system, which enterprises may be reluctant to adopt, the iPhone is also expected to have a number of shortcomings for business users, including not having a removable battery and not having buttons, which would make it difficult to dial while driving says Gartner's Ken Dulaney. Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at Current Analysis, also thinks the iPhone won't be a good option for enterprise customers because enterprises won't be able to write applications for the phone."
I think that the Enterprise has better communicators than the iPhone already.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
I dont think businesses will care what it runs
I think businesses will be concerned with how it integrates with the things they need/do. Will it be able to open Office files? Will it be able to synchronize with Outlook? Does it make phone calls? Will it be able to synchronize contacts and such?
None of those should be beyond the capabilities of the phone... it is all just a matter of what actually is implemented (or implementable with minor work) when the phone is released.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
which would make it difficult to dial while driving
That would be a "feature" not a "bug".
Please punch the first suit you hear complaining about that.
#!
Hum. I thought that you were not supposed to use a cell phone while driving because it distracts you from the more important task at hand which is guiding upwards of several tons of steel safely down the road without killing any one.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Implementing a horrible idea that is doomed to failure because they still think they're the only game in town? Cingular really is the new AT&T.
How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
I recently purchased a pocketpc based phone device. I really toiled with waiting until the iPhone comes out and getting that, but I heard some pretty sadening news - that Apple/AT&T will only allow signed programs to be installed on the phone. Unless they make that a pretty simple process, which I can't imagine they will - this will severely limit access to developers and software other than Apple sanctioned devices.
This is the main downfall of the iPhone. I have no doubt it will be popular with home users as well as business users who use their devices solely for email/calling. It will be a status symbol. But unless they open their source and allow developers to really get into the nitty gritty, I don't see it becoming the "one device to rule them all".
All the iPhone will need to do is:
Connect to a POP / IMAP Email system (it does).
Read PDF files. The image zoom functionality will work fine for reading PDFs.
Then on the backend, the iPhone uses will get a special email account where all Office attachments are automatically converted to a PDF file before being sent to the phone.
Fairly trivial thing to do.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Interesting that's third on the list of requirements for a mobile phone.
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If businesses let employees pick their phones (and this is a choice) then they'll go for this nice phone. Who wouldn't.
The implication being that the Blackberry has done so well because of all of the corporate PCs and servers running the Blackberry OS?
It doesn't integrate with Exchange Server, it has a music and movie player, and it can operate as a hard drive. This isn't an "Enterprise" product, this is a consumer product. This should be marketed as a replacement for your phone and your iPod, not as something middle-management uses to interfere with the folks who do the real work.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
"...because enterprises won't be able to write applications for the phone."
It's too bad that companies can't write apps that run on websites.
It's too bad that the iPhone won't be able to browse websites with a fully-functional web browser.
Oh. Wait.
Some companies learn lessons the hard way - by failing. Apple's had a number of large failures, but has managed to learn from those failures and make better things with higher margins.
Most companies in the tech industry can't handle more than one or two failures; they tend to go bankrupt. Those companies that survive product failures tend to try and forget about them instead of learn from them. For example, Microsoft could have learned a lot from Micrsoft Bob, if they so desired. Instead, they buried old Bob in the back and abandoned all attempts to do any radical user interface changes for Windows.
Apple, on the other hand, has a large number of failures to draw from, all of which are extensively documented. Apple also has a large number of successes, most of which probably haven't been documented enough. Why has the iPod really succeeded? Why and how has Mac OS X (and the Mac) been an unstoppable locomotive of progress?
The Enterprise market is smaller than you think, and requires substantial investments with questionable returns. Allowing developers onto your platform incurrs substantial support and infrastructure costs. Enterprise demands also tend to warp your perspective, as large accounts exert greater leverage on the development process than thousands of individuals. They also don't pay retail, and tend to demand substantial up-front and back-end discounts.
Apple has bypassed this in a simple manner, with a simple question: why have your enterprise apps on the phone when you have a live browser connection? If you can get to salesforce.com, google apps, and your custom web-enabled apps, who cares whether you can install a binary or not? In fact, not having to install anything is much better - no management issues. It's the freaking web, already. Everything that's important has been webified. Anything that isn't yet will be in 5 years. Everything that isn't nobody cares about.
The only "enterprise" feature of the iPhone would be the ability to hard-wire it to your corporate network instead of using the public network. That's it. If the iPhone can do that, then the internal IT guys can do the rest.
From the summary: Analysts are baffled by the move.
From a 2001 article on the just-introduced iPod: A big yawner, you say? Perhaps. After all, there are plenty of MP3 players out there. (Compaq Computer (CPQ), for example, offers one for $149.99 on its Web site.) But while Apple's latest debut might not score high on the significance meter -- particularly according to Wall Street analysts hoping for a splashier announcement -- it does offer a glimpse into the tactics computer makers are beginning to employ as demand for their core products wanes. When it comes to Apple, if the analysts can't make heads or tails out of a new product, it's almost certain the product will sell. Usually when you've caught the analysts off-guard, you've moved to an area of consumer savvy marketing that has a life all it's own.
A friend in the EDA industry who has been marketing these tools for twenty years notes that analysts are consistently wrong about the marketability of new products in established markets - he says: "those who can't sell, analyze."
Give me the choice of an iPhone and a plain black-and-white nokia bar-of-soap... I'll take the Nokia.
Look at the iPhone's battery life on apple.com.
Apply an adjustment for pre-release optimism.
Apply a reality adjustment - the only way to get listed standby times is to run your tests next to a tower.
You're gonna want two extra chargers, for the car and the office, because that's pitiful battery life even BEFORE you apply those adjustments.