The "i" habbit

Today I found myself in a mobile phone comparison conversation. Unusually none of the people in the conversation were using iPhones and yet they were all very happy about that. Travelling on the train to London yesterday though iPhones seemed to be the device of choice. This could be down to the fact that todays grouping was all techies and they tend to be more motivated by technological cool than fashion.

What was clear though is that the iPhone has elevated smart phones to the device of choice, something I forecast in the early 2000’s. It took a ridiculously long time to get to this point and when it came it was the consumer pressure that forced the device into business. This was the opposite to the way that Smartphones were previously being marketed.

Flushed with that success Apple came up with the iPad, a media portal device with limited input capability that looked like a giant iPhone. Many commentators laughed and assumed it would never catch on, but as I expected it has become a staple of many houses. Though many houses have much more powerful laptops to hand the iPad with its always on capability has become the device to use. One colleague told me the other day that his gets at least 2 hours use a day but normally much more.

In corporate IT we have already seen the edges of this device making it’s way into the corporate world. Purist technologists will fight this, but they will be driven back by the weight of the corporate managers seeking to move the convenience of their home experience into the workplace. This will apply not only to the iPad but also to the plethora of other tablet style devices that are appearing. Microsoft’s Windows 8 will provide for much improved windows tablets but this is appearing quite late in the day and it is yet to be seen whether it will become a challenger. I hope it will because I need a tablet that I can write on, but I fear the “i” habit will by then be too deeply ingrained. If this is the case then we could be on the edge of the days where Microsoft’s operating system is no longer dominant.

If you are reading this thinking that corporate IT will remain the same despite all this you need to learn the lesson that Apple taught us. Every corporate user, no matter what their rank, is also a consumer.