« The Sky....it's full of stupid | Main | Oh lord, now the Exchange team is doing it »
Lest ye think that I only look for crap when it comes to iPhone punditry, please, allow me to present a well-written iPhone article from Computerworld, by Jon Espenschied.
Of course, my favorite blurb, (because it's biting, well-written, and correct, a hat trick that not enough pundits pull off) is this one:
What's bothersome is the nonsense put out by analysts declaring -- sans experiential data -- that the iPhone is unsuitable for business use, essentially because it does not look like what came before it. That kind of talk is good for getting your name in the newspapers, but there are two problems. The first is that IT analysis and pundits seem to have forgotten that suitability is closely related to the notion of technical standards, and that standards are not products. The second is that some technical aspects of any device are unknown without practical use; they can't be judged by the specifications alone.
Jon does an excellent job of pointing out that popularity != standards. IMAP is a standard. MAPI is simply popular. People can call MAPI a standard all they like, but that won't make it true, anymore than the insistence of well-intentioned parents will make strained beets taste like candy. Jon makes the outstanding point that we need to be concerned with standards and protocols more than implementation, and he's so right, he'd have to turn three times to be left. Another great quote:
We choose standards because products and platforms change -- and if nothing else, for purely monetary reasons, it's handy to be able to switch technology vendors. An oft-ignored but common situation in many organizations is a change in business and functional requirements without a concomitant upheaval in the security level requirements. For example, a medical products company may choose to become a service company, radically changing its communication-use cases without any decrease in the sensitivity of data handled by the technology. If such an organization's communications infrastructure were tied directly to business function, the company would likely face a major reconfiguration or rip-and-replace event. An organization communicating with open standards such as IMAP and iCal, on the other hand, might only need to reconfigure clients or obtain new endpoint software.
If you settle on data and protocol standards that are truly standards, then your vendor going out of business, or, (as is more likely), going in a direction that is incompatible with your needs is not a company-wide upheaval. If you're using standards, changing vendor products is relatively painless, because you aren't changing your infrastructure, you're just changing the implementation of existing standards. Going from IMAP server A to IMAP server B is far less problematic than going from say Groupwise to Domino, because you can change IMAP servers with an extremely high probability that your users will never need to know, and may never really know in the first place. If you have to change client applications, that can be more annoying, but you can mitigate that with the wider range of choices, so that you have a great chance of finding a new application that won't make your users hate you. Or just stay with the old one if you like, and can live with reduced or non-existent support.
If more iPhone pundits followed Jon's lead, the Intarweb would be a far less annoying place.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, Punditry as a force for good, TEH COOL
Posted by John C. Welch at 09:30 | Permalink
Comments
Hmmm.... great in an ideal world. Unfortunately, published standards tend to be lowest common denominators in terms of functionality. So go ahead and base your firm on only ratified standards, but one of your competitors may go crazy and risk that their desktop communication requirements match up with the leading product on the market - and be better off for it.
It's also worth noting that the standard protocol is not always the best solution. What makes you so convinced that your requirements will always be aligned with the ratified standard, and not a proprietary solution? The risk works both ways, and needs to be managed in the same way.
Posted by: Joe | July 9, 2007 4:20 PM
Well, the big problem isn't that a given standard isn't good, it's that there isn't one that deals with what you need. CalDAV is a great example...it's only NOW that people in the IETF can get their acts together enough to create a decent calendaring standard?
Then they bitch about Exchange? Please, there was no real choice, and CalDAV is SO not done yet. However, where you can, basing things on published standards is a better choice, because it gives you more choice as a user and an implementor.
Posted by: John C. Welch | July 9, 2007 7:22 PM
Exactly.
This is why the Macmacs who bitch about Entourage not supporting Exchange sufficiently and want full MAPI support are MISSING THE BLOODY POINT. You don't want to be locked into Redmond for your client AND server needs (almost nobody outside of Redmond KNOWS how to write MAPI-based software, and it's a terrible pain in the ass to do it- the Exchange and Outlook folks would shoot MAPI the head if they could- but the backwards/forwards compatibility problems are nightmares). What you want are open protocols and standards (CalDAV that works, and so on), and you should be bludgeoning the Exchange team for this, AND asking Entourage folks for excellent client side implementations... and then if next week you want to swap out clients or servers, you're not locked in.
Posted by: eponymous coward | July 9, 2007 7:43 PM
Yep. It doesn't hurt that Apple is finally releasing, in Leopard, versions of iCal and the rest that aren't a joke in a groupware environment.
Posted by: John C. Welch | July 10, 2007 1:58 PM
John, this is a great point about standards, and it reminds me that when an IT admin chooses a fully-integrated, proprietary solution, he is choosing an easy solution today, but setting himself up for potential pain tomorrow. I think that the lesson here is very good for anyone selecting an internal standard, and choosing between a proprietary "standard" and a real public standard.
Pundit silliness aside, the trouble is that most people buying iPhones need to work with whatever decision their IT staff already made - even if it was a bad one.
Posted by: PeterL | July 12, 2007 4:58 PM
"...when an IT admin chooses a fully-integrated, proprietary solution, he is choosing an easy solution today, but setting himself..."! No, not just himself, but setting the whole ORGANIZATION for a potential business inflexibility and disaster.
Posted by: Viswakarma | July 15, 2007 2:50 AM
