…than being paid to be right.
Al Sacco writes for ITBusiness.ca
Apple made some progress on the iPhone security/management front, but it has a looooooong way to go before truly satisfying enterprise concerns – or becoming a suitable alternative to BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, for that matter.
This is the thing about being a pundit.
- If you throw your support behind something and it succeeds, no-one really cares.
- If you throw your support behind something and it fails, you never live it down.
- If you ridicule something in the face of conflicting evidence, you don’t win or lose.
Therefore, for a pundit, it’s safer to just be blindly sceptical. You don’t need to watch Keynotes, read specifications, talk to the company, do any research or actually admit you’re wrong. It’s a perfect job for the journalist who can’t talk with authority on anything.
The company really didn’t mention anything about how administrators will remotely troubleshoot and resolve individual iPhone users’ hardware or software issues. And who will iPhone administrators call for support when they encounter an Exchange issue they can’t solve on their own?
This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how technology works – Al is obviously an end user and not actually involved in IT support. You escalate to vendors where required. If I have an iPhone or a BlackBerry and it runs into an Exchange sync problem, I can pretty quickly decide who to call. If the problem is connectivity, call the carrier after testing on WiFi. If the problem is software based, call the vendor. Try a different handset with the same account details. This is IT Support 101 and it’s no secret.
How the iPhone integrates with your internal services is going to depend on a few things. The main one is if you actually hired decent web application developers. If your web app only works with Internet Explorer or your stupid entrenched IT department only supports IE6 and FF2 (yeah, you know who you are) then no, the iPhone is not a good fit. To be honest, you should fire your IT department. And if you are the IT department, shame on you.
Having spent the bulk of a year working on Windows and having to deal with IT services which only work on IE6 (not even on Firefox), I’m thoroughly tired of poorly built web applications. I was recently shown a web site which worked with IE6, worked poorly with Firefox and didn’t work at all with Safari. Considering the standards-compliance of those web browsers it’s like the web application developers created a site designed to frustrate – it was all ordered so that it would work worse the more standards-compliant your web browser was? And they got paid for this work?
It’s not about whether the iPhone will be great or not. It’s about the attitude of journalists who see it as a safe bet to junk something before it appears because there’s no recourse. Welcome to junk journalism.