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.

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.

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.

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.