Preshow: Madness + 5 Months
NOW: iPhone-friendly pages!
(Historical or hysterical: Predictive? Moi?)
The 8-ish Months update is after much real iPhone experience. Updates in color.
In the last few days of the run up to intro, everybody has crawled onto the internet claiming to have the Real Dope on the iPhone. Some may have gotten it wrong.
Now that it has settled in, here are the updates, based on a volume of experiences from all over.
Idea: It Sucks for Biz Peeps. Gartner (consultant firm): We're telling IT exex to NOT support it because Apple has no intention of supporting the enterprise. It's just a cellular iPod. Plain and simple.
Biz peeps are folk. Folk communicate. Unlike all other cellular anythings, the iPhone communicates. What part of "easily, completely, invitingly and synergistically" wasn't working for you?
Previous "enterprise" solution-berries were solving a tightly defined set of communication challenges in ways they felt were Good and Right, but the number of folk who really used or appreciated all the esoteric $#!+ in there was in the 15% range, if that.
The iPhone appears to circumvent the arcane and invites its users to get hip to its myriad features, which synergistically cross-connect and make intuitive sense. When you get frustrated learning it, turn up the volume and take a YouTube break, then continue tweaking your contacts, ideas and life.
The iPhone is a New Thing. Did you ever notice how combining sodium and chlorine--two toxic substances--created the salt of the earth? The point is that Combinations Count.
It does things differently from prior enterprise devices. But regard it with awe. As in "Aw, now the IT department is going to have to get off its duff and learn something new." Well, where's the fun in that?
"Just a cellular iPod???" What idiots. Plain and simple. Gartner has lost credibility with predictions like this. Big Time. Next time Garner says "sell," you buy.
3/19/08: Gartner turned around. The new prospect of an Enterprise iPhone has finally crossed their threshold of acceptable. This after finding out that the majority of Internet access from ALL smartphones of every stripe has completely gone over the iPhone.
The iPhone 2.0 (entirely predictable that it would come to this) now sports all the bells, whistles, fog horns and claxtons it takes to make a Blackberry killer.
Blackberry has had 41% of the market as of January. When the complete iPhone 2.0 software hits, IT departments will have no more excuses to deny its existence. Which didn't happen anyhow. The CEOs who have one have seen to that...
Idea: It is Limited in its Biz Abilities. It doesn't get Lotus Notes! No firewalls! The keyboard is non-buttational! Where the hell is the PBX?
It does do things that previous boysenberries never dreamed of. Everything Google. Everything customized for it by Web 2.0 apps. How unsecure is it? We don't have one in our hands, either (yes, we do, for 4.5 months already), and hackers will look at it as a challenge, so how's this for strategerie: Play with it for Month #1 and let the waters seek their own level.
Double thumbing isn't precluded. Security isn't thrown to the wind. How you use it is meaningful and for the folk who need iron-clad guard dogs, solutions will abound.
Why just today --still a week away from launch-- Apple included Word and Excel support. Just to cheese off the idiots at Gartner.
It turns out that biz folk have embraced it Big Time. A phone that can churn stock quotes at you WHILE you chat is not perceived as a crippled, sub-human gizmo.
3/19/08: All of this is up in smoke. Every legitimate or Status Woah excuse has been flattened with iP 2.0's map. In six months none of the memory of all the resistance to the iP will have been buried.
Idea: IT People Hate It.
Of course they do. At this hour they don't understand it, so in a very human-like manner, they FEAR it. After all, fear will get you through times of uncertainty better than anything else. Right?
"Oh, gawd, now some new little bug-eyed monster will be crawling all over my lap. What to do? What to do?"
Truth is, they feel like the Wicked Witch of the West soaking in Dorothy juice, and they imagine their feet melting into the parapet. What a world.
Suggestion to IT department bosses:
Get ready to hire the newcomers you always wanted--those young and eager ones who have the new ideas.
After all, your supervisor and her supervisor both have iPhones.
Bull chips. Here's the straight dope: People with iPhones communicate like crazy. Other "berries" may have features that the IT folks like to control, but the iP crowd is blowing past them.
IT people may hate it, but anyone who loses dominion over their little fiefdom hates the offending force that cut them back to size. It's IT nature.
People people love it. In factoid, the iPhone turns out to have beaten ALL the other Internet-capable smart phones, in terms of web pages accessed, in five months of '07. Here.
3/19/08: IT people in record numbers are embracing the iPhone, now. Some of this has been due to natural turnover and some due to evolution.
In spite of IT departments' trying to turn corporate acceptance of the iP away at first, too many key people can't live without it now.
Idea: The Market Is Limited. MarketWatch: ...but its limited distribution...
...being limited to not selling in every pharmacy, gas station and casino, I suppose. Geez.
Only every Apple store and every ATT store will have them. Let's say you are at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and suddenly you get a twinge that can only be satisfied by purchasing an iPhone. You are SOL, mister.
Limited. To how many they can make. It's the fastest selling cell phone ever.
iPhone was THE most often searched for term in 2007.
3/19/08: The iPhone was THE most active mobile Internet search device by the end of 2007.
Idea: iPhone Stolen: There go the office secrets...
At the security settings practiced on most boysenberries, this is a non sequitur. A stolen iPhone is a trackable iPhone. The thief won't have a clue how to shut it off and the Apple Police will be on the first few perps fast enough to take the iPhone off the endangered species list.
I hope.
But, just to be safe, for the first six months, be aware of who's looking when you use it. Keep it in a shoulder holster.
Use a secure email scheme with a novel password for the hard copy. A four-character code can have 1,679,616 unique passwords with letters or numbers. That will keep a hacker/thief busy for an average of 1.6 years if they try three prospective passwords per minute for eight hours per day.
3/19/08: New to iP 2.0 is the idea of remotely erasing all critical files from an iPhone before it can wander due to loss or theft. Hmm.
Idea: It's Too Good to Be True.
No doubt about that.
But the Big Secret Feature hasn't been announced. The iPhoneChat, or as kids will call it "iGaggle".
Two cameras are in there. One that points the view out--or blink--toward your own face. A thumbnail of other iPhone users appears at 8 frames per second in a little 80 pixel square window in the upper right. Just where the camera icon is in today's ads.
Ok, kiddo, you said you were over at the library studying? Pan that camera around you now!
As you talk, you can shoot out the front and beam the shot to the other half of the iChat.
Okey dokey. This was a provocative outright lie. Or wish.
Or was it. Turns out that the iPhone contract has a clause in it about Video Phone use...
Then some blabbermouth at ATT let Schrodinger's cat out of the freezer. Steve Jobs was did not return our calls.
3/19/08: Looks like iVideoPhone will have to wait. Or will it?
You heard it here. First.
Or maybe that was (it was!) the iPhone 2 3:
