April 24th, 2007
AT&T Aiming iPhone at Enterprise Customers
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
What? Enterprise customers? AT&T, you’ve got to be kidding. The device only has a virtual keyboard, no removable battery, a closed operating system … why would any corporation want this?
The idea of marketing the iPhone as an enterprise product baffles some analysts.
If AT&T announces that it will be marketing the phone to enterprise customers, “we’d be against it,” said Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner, who said he hasn’t heard of such a plan from the operator. “We’d immediately tell our customers that’d be a very serious mistake.” Source: InfoWorld
We Say: The marketspace I work in gives me insight into this … no executive is going to want to keep up with their corporate email on a device without a static keyboard. And heavy users are going to run out of battery power and want to swap out the battery .. not possible with this device. Marketing this to corporations? A big mistake.
Peter says:
If they’re really going to “market” it to enterprise customers, then I suspect AT&T didn’t really like the deal they made with Apple after all, and is going to just sort of kill the phone off with this move — especially if they made sure no consumers would be able to afford the plans that goes with the iPhone. Either that, or the only plans in AT&T’s “big box o’ plans” that would support the iPhone are the “enterprise-level” plans. Either way, bad news for Apple…
April 24th, 2007 at 4:31 am
Steve R says:
The sealed battery and closed OS are only 2 of several reasons why the iPhone as it was advertised won’t be an enterprise solution. I’m an iPhone fan from day 1, but I wouldn’t even suggest to my company that I get one as corporate phone.
That said, we’re still talking about an unreleased product, and AT&T. If AT&T plans to push iPhone as an enterprise product, I would assume (hope) they’re going to add (or help Apple add) some branded features to it, to make it attractive. They’d have to add
* a selection of push Email systems (to work with existing MS Exchange or Blackberry or competitive services).
* an email client focused on large volumes of email (see http://www.smstextnews.com/2007/01/apple_iphone_push_email_is_probably_not_for_me.html )
* a text-entry system that’s at least as fast to use as a keyboard
* integrated support for viewing and minor editing of Word, Excel and Powerpoint
* a web browser integrated with the corporate-style email, and with working cross-app copy/paste
You get the idea. It would be a somewhat different product, but not necessarily impossible to achieve on this hardware.
April 25th, 2007 at 1:02 am