Ready for Prime Time

Blogger: Bob Blakley

“The iPhone isn’t suitable for enterprise use.”

How many times have you heard this old chestnut?  It was only two years ago that the Blackberry wasn’t suitable for government or critical infrastructure use.  Palm Pilots were unsuitable for enterprise use too; remember when CIOs were talking about banning their use?   And cell phones?

Two of the most popular arguments against use of the iPhone in corporate environments are just nonsense:.

1. It’s insecure.  Yep.  So is everything else you’re using in the enterprise, including your much-dumber-than-i-Phone with a digital camera built into it.  Until you ban removable media and wireless access, stop complaining.
2. It doesn’t continuously update email via a push protocol.  Yep.  Get a prescription for Ritalin.  If you need something right now – check it out!  The iPhone has a keyboard!  CALL!

But it’s the third argument that’s the really important one: “The iPhone doesn’t integrate with my enterprise protocols.”  Like the other two objections, this one is accurate. Unlike the blackberry, the iPhone doesn’t slice your enterprise open, pull its guts out over the air, and hook them up to a little colostomy bag in your pocket.

This is the most important argument in favor of adopting the iPhone.

Your enterprise is a lot like a nuclear missile base; it’s a collection of silos filled with expensive, dangerous, decaying equipment built by a previous generation to respond to requirements different from those of today.  Most of your enterprise’s software is fundamentally incompatible with the Internet and other modern infrastructures.  It’s inflexible and it locks you into buying more software and services from vendors who innovate slowly.

The truth is, the critics have it backwards: it’s not that the iPhone is unsuitable for enterprise use – it’s that your enterprise is unsuitable for iPhone use.

If your enterprise already ran all its business on Web 2.0 protocols, assumed that the network is the system and that the browser is the operating system, and used Software-As-A-Service applications, you would pick up the iPhone and say “of COURSE this is the smartphone we should use.  It’s functionally exactly the same as our existing platform – but much smaller, much cheaper, and much more convenient for travelers.  It also makes phone calls without having to resort to Skype. And it connects to the web even when there’s no WiFi.  Brilliant!”

That’s the future you’re headed toward anyway.  Steve Jobs just saw it before you did.  He also knew that if your company doesn’t already get this, it’s almost certainly organized like Stalinist Russia, and won’t be able to make the necessary changes top-down.  But that’s OK, because (like its predecessors the cell phone, the PDA, and the laptop) it won’t be introduced into enterprises by management.  It will infiltrate the enterprise through the individual users, and it will be unstoppable.

Here’s my advice to CIOs, software architects, and security professionals: get an iPhone and use it.  Take it on a trip and leave your laptop at home.  This IS the future.  If you do not have an iPhone, you cannot and will not understand the future.  You need one of these to do your job.  Not your job as a telephone and web user – your job as one of the people who takes the enterprise into the future.

If you use an iPhone, you’ll learn that things which live in your house or your pocket are small, expensive, slow, and administered by amateurs.  Things that live in the cloud are big, fast, cheap, and administered by professionals.  You’ll learn that it’s much better for you if you let someone else install applications on their servers instead of making you install them on your tiny little machine.  You’ll learn that patching works much better if you do it on 5 servers than if you do it on 50,000 laptops (and don’t do it on the other 10,000).  You’ll learn that if the only thing two applications have to share is the presentation layer, they’ll conflict a lot less than if they have to share memory, ports, interrupts, disk, the registry, drivers, and so on.  You’ll learn that if you pay for actual capacity consumed rather than peak capacity, you can get a better deal.  In short, you’ll learn what terms like “Web 2.0” and “Web native” really mean.

If, on the other hand, your organization bans iPhones, it will fall behind its competitors who embrace them.  And if you don’t use one, you’ll wake up in two years like Rip Van Winkle and wonder how the world could have changed so much while you slumbered.

Comments

[John Domenichini]

Bob,
What big teeth you have!
This is the most entertaining blog entry I've read in a while.
I don't know enough about the details of which you speak to comment with any level of confidence.
Does make me want to go out and buy an iPhone, though.

[davebirch]

The reason that I just chose a Nokia N95 over an iPhone is that iPhones are locked to AT&T. I will never buy a phone that locks you to a single operator.

P.S. The Nokia N95 comes with active syncrhonisation and works fine with my company's Exchange server.

[Mel Pullen]

What a fantastic blog. How on earth can you top this one? So incisive. I loved the comments about silos; straight from the Knowing Doing gap.

I also liked the software as services comments. But surely, in the limit, won't it be just services? The only device you'll need to carry around is one that will provide authentication and then you'll use any I/O device that is around (your seat). So in fact the iPhone teaches you that you need an XGA or larger screen overlaid with a graphic tablet wherever you are. I thought IXI mobile's personal router concept would have been the best, but it'll be a good few years before we have the infrastructure in place to completely replace all those tethered machines humans use directly.

[Spoof Card]

I hate my iPhone, it broke in less then 1wk. I sent to have it repaired 2 weeks ago!. .. still without a phone :(