Back to the Future: Lessons Learned from the 80′s Foretell iPhone’s Enterprise Emergence

by on 08/07/09 at 2:27 pm

Back to the Future: Lessons Learned from the 80′s Foretell iPhone’s Enterprise Emergence

Jeff Garbers is a software design consultant with over 30 years in the technology industry. He is also the President of XLT Software, and Editor for iPhoneCTO.

History, they say, repeats itself. But what happens when the cycles are close enough that some of the same people are involved the second time around? Can they blend their modern perspective with lessons learned and avoid mistakes of the past?

For anyone considering iPhone for enterprise use, it’s a relevant question to ask. Those of us old enough to remember the 1980′s can find many similarities and important differences between the early days of personal computers in business and today’s assimilation of smartphones into the enterprise.

It’s 1984. While some still see personal computers as expensive gadgets, forward-looking organizations realize their potential as serious business tools. The IBM PC, its design an incremental enhancement from its predecessors, dominates the enterprise. With personal productivity tools (such as Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect) and connectivity to essential corporate resources (the mainframe, via terminal emulation and file transfer software), it has become the IT department’s safe choice.

Then Apple enters the market with a bang, as Steve Jobs introduces a radically new machine: the Macintosh. The press goes wild, but many PC users dismiss its limited keyboard and mouse-based user interface as inadequate and detrimental to productivity. An enthusiastic developer community springs up, offering groundbreaking applications such as PageMaker and Excel. The Mac’s UI becomes the dominant paradigm, with competitors like Microsoft and Digital Research scrambling to copy its features.

It’s 2007. While some still see smartphones as expensive gadgets, forward-looking organizations realize their potential as serious business tools. The BlackBerry, its design an incremental enhancement from its predecessors, dominates the enterprise. With personal productivity tools (such as cellular telephony and personal information management) and connectivity to essential corporate resources (email and calendaring, via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server), it has become the IT department’s safe choice.

Then Apple enters the market with a bang, as Steve Jobs introduces a radically new device: the iPhone. The press and blogosphere go wild, but many smartphone users dismiss its onscreen keyboard and touchscreen-based user interface as inadequate and detrimental to productivity. An enthusiastic developer community springs up, offering a vast array of applications. The iPhone’s UI becomes the dominant paradigm, with competitors like Palm and RIM scrambling to copy its features.

In the 1980′s, attempts by Apple to penetrate the enterprise were largely unsuccessful. The “Macintosh Office” LAN was too little, too late. Microsoft became amazingly successful by bringing the Mac user experience to corporate-accepted hardware platforms, and the Mac receded into a small niche for many years.

In the present, here at iPhoneCTO, we obviously believe that the iPhone will be successful in the enterprise and avoid the Mac’s path to niche status. We’ve seen the parallels, but here are three important reasons why today’s iPhone situation is different.

  • Easier application development: It was hard to write software for the early Mac. Tools were primitive, and only a handful of developers had any experience with graphical user interfaces. Few enterprises could justify establishing the “exotic” skill sets needed to develop custom Mac apps in-house. In contrast, native iPhone development is at least as easy as on other smartphone platforms, and Web-based applications that work well on an iPhone can be created by anyone with Web skills.
  • Increased pace of improvement: Apple took longer than it should have to make significant enhancements to Mac hardware and software. Competitors like Dell and Microsoft took the chance to catch up and eventually bypass the Mac until the introduction of OS X closed the gap. The iPhone team, on the other hand, has delivered new features and models rapidly, making it harder for others to gain a foothold with products that compare favorably only to the previous generation of Apple’s products.
  • Attention to enterprise concerns: Both then and now, Mac and iPhone users enthusiastically petition their IT departments to support their platform of choice. This time, however, Apple seems committed to deliver tools that address enterprise requirements and concerns. The iPhone OS Enterprise Deployment Guide details dozens of features, from Exchange support to remote wipe, that clearly indicate Apple’s eagerness to overcome any reasonable objections from hesitant IT departments.

We’ll find out in the years to come whether Apple gains significant enterprise market share, or someone does to the iPhone what Windows did to the Mac. If you’re reading this site, you already know how we’re betting.

Follow iPhoneCTO on Twitter for more timely and frequent updates: www.twitter.com/iphonecto

Similar Posts:

  • http://myst-technology.com/ Bill French

    Jeff – great article.

    I remember the 80's well (er, as well as my memory serves me, I remember those emerging computing years well – sort'a ;-) .

    In 1983 I recall an IT smarty pants lecturing me on the probability of email being adopted enterprise-wide, which he generously pegged at less than 20%. Less than a year later, an executive (a board member no less) at Grid Computer (the first true “laptop”) told me that … “No one will ever want to move a lot of data between a desktop and a laptop.” Statements like this tend to inspire people and it worked well for me; LapLink was created out of spite and in the face of [seemingly] intelligent market resistance.

    I am one of the “old” lucky ones that started my computing career in 1977 first with a kit and then a TRS-80. I share your perspective and add these anecdotes.

    In 1996 I was nearly tossed out of a 2nd floor window in Sydney for suggesting that peer-to-peer services (for chatting) would be pervasive across all enterprises by the year 2000. This got the same reception (I suspect) when a telephone sales guy foretold a future where enterprise workers would each have a telephone on their desk – workers would be able to chat with whomever they wanted to all day long.

    Ironically, in 1999 I was back in Sydney at the Hilton lecturing to the Australian Computing Society; the topic was “Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die”. My presentation was intended to help us see the insanity of email as a communications medium. I posed the question – “What would email look like if we started over with real business requirements?”. Fast-forward 8 years and a few blocks down the street and you find the Google Wave team hard at work answering the question – “What would email look like if we started over with real business requirements?”.

    Another radically different aspect of today's technology landscape is agility; not just device agility, but web services infrastructures and standards that did not exist in the 80's. In the 80's you couldn't find a single vendor (hardware or software) that agreed on anything. Today we have [many] standards that rivals have been compelled to adopt – XML, PCI, hardware interfaces, communications protocols, HTTP, HTML – each providing a little more lubricant for innovation to blossom. Andy Seidl (MyST Co-founder) says – “The nice thing about standards is that we have so many to choose from”. ;-)

    Standards and defacto-standards such as RSS have emerged in the last decade to provide a “goo” of interoperability DNA. This “goo” provides a framework that makes it possible for us to create alchemies that lead to creative and cost-effective solutions. Smartly designed architectures that embrace this goo become solution shape-shifters; able to adapt to meet specific tasks at the moment they must be performed. As such, product success now depends [largely] on how well they leverage this goo.

  • http://myst-technology.com/ Bill French

    Jeff – great article.

    I remember the 80's well (er, as well as my memory serves me, I remember those emerging computing years well – sort'a ;-) .

    In 1983 I recall an IT smarty pants lecturing me on the probability of email being adopted enterprise-wide, which he generously pegged at less than 20%. Less than a year later, an executive (a board member no less) at Grid Computer (the first true “laptop”) told me that … “No one will ever want to move a lot of data between a desktop and a laptop.” Statements like this tend to inspire people and it worked well for me; LapLink was created out of spite and in the face of [seemingly] intelligent market resistance.

    I am one of the “old” lucky ones that started my computing career in 1977 first with a kit and then a TRS-80. I share your perspective and add these anecdotes.

    In 1996 I was nearly tossed out of a 2nd floor window in Sydney for suggesting that peer-to-peer services (for chatting) would be pervasive across all enterprises by the year 2000. This got the same reception (I suspect) when a telephone sales guy foretold a future where enterprise workers would each have a telephone on their desk – workers would be able to chat with whomever they wanted to all day long.

    Ironically, in 1999 I was back in Sydney at the Hilton lecturing to the Australian Computing Society; the topic was “Email is Where Knowledge Goes to Die”. My presentation was intended to help us see the insanity of email as a communications medium. I posed the question – “What would email look like if we started over with real business requirements?”. Fast-forward 8 years and a few blocks down the street and you find the Google Wave team hard at work answering the question – “What would email look like if we started over with real business requirements?”.

    Another radically different aspect of today's technology landscape is agility; not just device agility, but web services infrastructures and standards that did not exist in the 80's. In the 80's you couldn't find a single vendor (hardware or software) that agreed on anything. Today we have [many] standards that rivals have been compelled to adopt – XML, PCI, hardware interfaces, communications protocols, HTTP, HTML – each providing a little more lubricant for innovation to blossom. Andy Seidl (MyST Co-founder) says – “The nice thing about standards is that we have so many to choose from”. ;-)

    Standards and defacto-standards such as RSS have emerged in the last decade to provide a “goo” of interoperability DNA. This “goo” provides a framework that makes it possible for us to create alchemies that lead to creative and cost-effective solutions. Smartly designed architectures that embrace this goo become solution shape-shifters; able to adapt to meet specific tasks at the moment they must be performed. As such, product success now depends [largely] on how well they leverage this goo.

  • paulchen

    Hi Jeff,

    First, congrats on your first blog for iPhoneCTO!

    While I agree on your overall sense of possibilities for the iPhone in businesses, I would offer one major addition to what’s different between 1984 vs. 2007: IBM.

    For all the things that folks attribute to Microsoft's success in business, one factor stands alone – it cut the deal of the generation with IBM. While difficult to imagine today all with the behemoths that so many technology companies have become – Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, etc. – IBM OWNED the technology industry in the early 80s. The company accounted for, I once read, an unbelievable 80% of all technology revenue in the world. The closest thing to a significant other was DEC.

    Thus, to cut a deal with IBM translated to instant market share domination. There was nothing Apple or anyone else could have done to alter the balance of PCs in the enterprise after the ink had dried. Indeed, time has proven that Apple had the superior and preferred user interface, but so what? As my wise boss at the time used to say, “F=MA“ (force equals mass times acceleration). And with IBM, M=not an 800-lb gorilla, but an 8000-lb King Kong!

    So what's happening today? There's no IBM (RiM is hardly a suitable substitute) and F=MA still applies. And what Apple really has going for it is the “A.” By now, we’ve all heard the numbers often enough that perhaps we give them no more thought, but to consider the number of applications written for, and downloaded to the iPhone and iPod touch, but more importantly the rate of increase in these numbers, well it just boggles the mind. It’s beyond astounding.

    And this difference, more than any other, explains why today won't look like 1984.

  • paulchen

    Hi Jeff,

    First, congrats on your first blog for iPhoneCTO!

    While I agree on your overall sense of possibilities for the iPhone in businesses, I would offer one major addition to what’s different between 1984 vs. 2007: IBM.

    For all the things that folks attribute to Microsoft's success in business, one factor stands alone – it cut the deal of the generation with IBM. While difficult to imagine today all with the behemoths that so many technology companies have become – Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, SAP, etc. – IBM OWNED the technology industry in the early 80s. The company accounted for, I once read, an unbelievable 80% of all technology revenue in the world. The closest thing to a significant other was DEC.

    Thus, to cut a deal with IBM translated to instant market share domination. There was nothing Apple or anyone else could have done to alter the balance of PCs in the enterprise after the ink had dried. Indeed, time has proven that Apple had the superior and preferred user interface, but so what? As my wise boss at the time used to say, “F=MA“ (force equals mass times acceleration). And with IBM, M=not an 800-lb gorilla, but an 8000-lb King Kong!

    So what's happening today? There's no IBM (RiM is hardly a suitable substitute) and F=MA still applies. And what Apple really has going for it is the “A.” By now, we’ve all heard the numbers often enough that perhaps we give them no more thought, but to consider the number of applications written for, and downloaded to the iPhone and iPod touch, but more importantly the rate of increase in these numbers, well it just boggles the mind. It’s beyond astounding.

    And this difference, more than any other, explains why today won't look like 1984.