Microsoft Says iPhone Is Irrelevant To Business 435
An anonymous reader writes "A Microsoft exec has turned attack dog, lashing out at Apple's iPhone by saying the device isn't good for business. Why? Because the iPhone is 'a closed device that you cannot install applications on.' Specifically, he's talking about Microsoft Office. 'While the entry of the iPhone (with its cut-down version of Mac OS X) into this market offers new options for consumers, Sorenson believes user familiarity with the Windows Mobile interface — and the ease with which companies can buy and develop applications for the platform — will sustain its increasing popularity and help keep the iPhone out of the lucrative corporate market.'"
WTF are you talking about? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/itpro/ [apple.com]
Here's just some of their headlines from the news box:
Apple Takes on Exchange Server
Apple's Open Calendar Server vs. Microsoft Exchange
Xserve Review
Apple's Xserve Gives an Enterprise Alternative
http://www.apple.com/itpro/solutions.html [apple.com]
Need Help Configuring Apple Solutions?
Contact Apple Consulting Services for comprehensive onsite consulting and enterprise-oriented services.
One of Apple's big enterprise selling points always has been interoperability with MS & UNIX products.
Re:Who exactly.... (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, if the Blackberries couldn't read docs and presentations none of the managers around my place would ever get around to approving any of my stuff. It's absolutely critical if they're going to be used in the corporate world at large to be able to read word documents, power point presentations, and to a much lesser extent pdfs and excel spreadsheets. Edit? Well, people can probably get by that. It must also connect to either exchange or the other ones (Netware? Domino?)that people who don't use exchange use to get appointments, mail, and contacts.
Without those features, it's going to be niche for corps.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Have you not seen Microsoft try and completely dominate everything remotely related to computers? They pretty much wiped the floor with alternative Office Suites. They started focusing on web browsers, and for a while pages were built solely with IE in mind. They've created unnecessary media formats where good alternatives were readily available. And what the hell are they doing with a search engine? It's never made sense to me that the company who makes an OS also needs to make a search engine. Then you've got the Zune, the XBox, a number of devices that run Windows Mobile. In server space they have web servers, mail servers, etc. The only thing remotely related to computers that I haven't seen Microsoft try to dominate is CAD software.
There may be a wide variety of third party software and hardware, but it's not because microsoft has just yielded the field.
Re:Request for comment (Score:5, Informative)
I've used it. It's one of the few things on WM 5.0 that actually works more or less as you'd expect it to. That said, it's really not terribly useful. I can't see any situation where it would be more useful than, say, an automatic Word-to-txt converter on the phone.
begin sort-of on-topic rant:
WM 5.0 has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen on any computing device. Inconsistent from things like the "dismiss" button which swaps sides depending on the app you're dismissing, to the utterly abitrary selection of which functions have buttons on the bottom bar and which have nice big buttons in the main screen, to the random way you quit various applications - do I click the "OK" button, or the "X" in the top right, or the "close" text on the bottom bar - the answer is different with nearly every app. Or the fact it takes 7 clicks on tiny little menu items and icons with the stylus to find the task manager to switch between running applications. Some of our more impatient and less technical users were just rebooting their phones when they ran out of memory rather than navigating that maze each time.
Then there's the flat out bugs and glitches (some of which I'm told will be fixed in some subsequent release... on a thousand dollar phone... which is a crucial business tool in my job... great, thanks, let me just bend over a bit more for you) like the way the hard buttons just stop working every so often (sometimes all of them, sometimes just one or two, like the "answer call" button). Or the screen which sometimes randomly fades to white. i.e., when you're on a call to a client and want to hang up, but the buttons don't work and the screen has gone white so you can't see where to click, the only way to hang up is to take the battery out. Prior to this I'd never seen a telephone handset that crashes and has to be rebooted.
These are the barest tip of the iceburg of the problems with these phones. They're totally unsuitable for business use or any other use where the phone needs to be relied upon. The idea of the makers of this toy dissing the as yet unreleased iPhone as irrelevant for business is hilarious.
If you need a phone to impress your friends at the bar or to play solitare on the train home from work, a WM 5.0 device is perfect for you. If you actually need to rely on it as a phone, mobile data connection, and PDA, i.e., as a business tool... I'm not sure what your other options are, but loads of phones do PDA stuff now, and plenty can do email, and although admittedly Exchange calendering integration is well-implemented and handy in WM 5, if you can give that one feature up it is well worth doing so.
These bloody things were pushed on us geeks by management and have been an unmitigated disaster from day 1. My immediate manager, not a particularly technical guy, implied I was some kind of Luddite when I expressed some doubts (fairly mild ones, as it turned out) prior to the rollout. We previously all had Nokia 8210i handsets and iBurst [iburst.com.au] PCMCIA cards for our laptops, which worked reliably and quickly about 95% of the time.
I am *not* a blind MS hater. I use and deploy their products at work, and they're much better than they once were. But WM is simply crap in the very worst traditions of half-assed marketing-department-driven Microsoft dross.
Apple would have to try pretty hard with the iPhone to make it any less relevant than Windows Mobile.
*sigh* end rant. Sorry about that, WM 5.0 has made me quite bitter.
iPhone's suckage? (Score:3, Informative)
1. No unsigned apps is a big one. This is really a damn shame, and limits the iPhone to a certain crowd (fashion-conscious blackberry users and Apple devotees).
2. EDGE?! EDGE sucks. The latency is beyond terrible. Now that Cingular has UMTS, Sprint/Verizion have EVDO, and even T-mobile is going 3G, why would ANYONE consider a "nextgen" phone to be an EDGE-only phone. This is a *terrible* decision. As much as I love Apple, I would *never* trade in an EVDO capable PDA for an EDGE one; even if you paid me to take the EDGE one. EVDO (or any low-lataency 3G) changes the way you access the internet while mobile. With EDGE, you putter around slowly, and you don't use an EDGE device while driving about 50 mph, or riding the train. With EVDO, you're always online.
As far as I'm concerned, #2 is damning. Especially now that Sprints super-cheapo SERO plans are avaliable to anyone in the know, there is no reason whatsoever to go with some crappy overpriced EDGE device, even if the UI is Nirvana (and given that its a first generation product, I'm skeptical). Don't look at the bandwidth numbers and think that your EDGE device is similar to a dialup; its not. It's more like a low bandwidth satellite connection, with roundtrip latencies approaching 2-3 seconds while the connection is maxed out (and given that its 128 kbps, thats not hard). EVDO, UMTS, and other 3G technologies blow the doors off this; both Sprint and Verizon sell PDAs and Phones that give you live streaming video, even from things like ORB and Slingbox.
Don't go with EDGE. It sucks. I worked with an EDGE phone for a long time, and now that I've got EVDO (particularly Rev A) I would never, ever go back. Even at twice the price.
the iPhone can read Microsoft Office (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not Irrelevant, But Limited in Appeal (Score:3, Informative)
You can't do jack shit with it aside from preview badly-formatted versions of presentations, spreadsheets, and documents. You can't edit anything on it in the way of fonts or any formatting beyond a basic bulletin board editor (bold/italic/center/left/color/etc.). As soon as you save anything, you destroy the document. Except for sending brief and relatively simple documents to your phone for review (in which case, why not just use HTML or PDF?) or for typing/editing quick notes and the like (in which case any notepad application works perfectly fine) or previewing a VERY SHORT spreadsheet or simple slideshow, Office Mobile is a piece of crap.
I'd happily surrender all editing options if it would simply DISPLAY the files properly (with a pan and scan zoom mode). Excel can't open 90% of the spreadsheets I have, and Word totally destroys the formatting of my pleadings to the point that they're literally unreadable jumbles of text. Powerpoint is a complete joke.
I'll probably buy the iPhone because it doesn't tease the user with a set of tools that don't even deserve "half-assed" status, they're so bad.
Re:Umm, no. (Score:3, Informative)
You must be thinking of "Windows Internet Explorer 7."