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I think that the Enterprise has better communicators than the iPhone already.

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.

Isn't it a little early to write this thing off as a business tool? Does anyone actually have one in their possession? Most of the executives with Crackberries use them for email, so I fail to see where the requirements for entry are real high. If the thing is deemed to be more of a status symbol than a Blackberry, executives will want it and it will be used as a business tool. AT&T might just be trying to keep it from being perceived as a toy, or "for kids". All it has to do is be a good email platform.

That said, I'm skeptical that it will make a good email platform without a real keyboard :)

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.

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."

Here's an idea...Write a web app!

It's so ingenious, I'm going to patent it. :D

I imagine you'll be able to store files locally and if you can access them thru Safari on the phone, than just do that. If not, write some security and put it on an extranet.

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".

1. Take grain of salt.

2. Read Gartner analysis.

3. Consume Ripple as required.

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.

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?

"...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.

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.

Certainly, Jobs has indicated that the iPhone will only, at least initially, support Apple-approved signed applications. He has not said, that I know of, that third parties could not develop apps and get them approved by Apple, or that there would not facilities to alter the subset of Apple-approved apps available on different iPhones, such that those to the general public would allow all "general" apps, but not apps only approved for a particular enterprise, while an enterprise user could restrict its iPhones to only allow a subset of general apps and its own enterprise apps. This seems to be rampant speculation with little basis passing itself off as informed commentary. Note: I'm not saying the iPhone will have these features, I'm just saying that there is no indication, that I am aware of, that it won't, so simply claiming that enterprise users won't be able to install their own apps seems to call out for some reason to believe it.

Dunno about the US but I'm almost certain that here in Europe the iPhone will be a big hit among the suits, especially early on when they're a curiousity and too expensive for most consumers. Never mind the features, it'll be a little status symbol and a bit of style you can buy. It's not like corporations have carefully weighed the pros and cons of all available cars and decided that only Mercedes, BMW and Audi have the features that suits need most, yet that's what 99% of them drive. As long as Apple can't bring down the price of the iPhone enough to make it a mass product like the iPod, it needs to target this market which will pay a premium for a prestige product. They would need a bigger range of iPhones then, and make sure the more expensive ones are visually distinguishable, to cater to the whole corporate hierarchy.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: ActiveSync is an essential ingredient for the success of any smartphone device in the Enterprise market (and will eventually be the death knell for RIM). Even Palm has realized this with the addition of ActiveSync support in the Treo 650 and later. ActiveSync support is even more crucial now since Outlook Mobile Access (OMA) is not included in Exchange 2007. Nay-say MS all you want, but Enterprise customers live or die by groupware connectivity, and Exchange is the king of the hill right now.