Joe2

Some Troubling Data For Apple and SanDisk Shareholders

Shuffle prices were slashed by $30 recently, and capacity was upgraded to 2GB. This means increase in shuffle unit sales, and when coupled with increase in capacity on some of those units, I don't get the iSuppli announcement. It doesn't fit what we all see out there.

What are we missing?

Employees Determine iPhone Success in Business

Carl,

I love your dream that Apple products in general, and iPhone specifically, would be "allowed" by corporate IT departments. But I am not as optimistic just yet.

Lets take the iPhone (since your article was about that device).

Most people in a company use the blackberry for 4 purposes - email, phone, calendar and address book. Of course there's a host of other things like surfing the net, playing games and so on but I believe the four uses mentioned dominate.

Now lets take each one and check if the iPhone - TODAY AS IT STANDS - does the job adequately. EMail: corporate Outlook not supported, even if you ask Apple (I have). Phone: only Cingular in the US so if your company's phone plan (assuming your company is paying for the cell phone monthly charges obviously) is with TMobile you are out of luck. If your company doesn't pay for cell phone charges or if you can expense Cingular, then this is fine. Calendar: sync with Outlook works great but you can only sync when you are tethered to your PC / Mac and when you are not, you can't send meeting requests to colleagues from your iPhone. In a corporate setting, this is poor at best. Road warriors travel and to only see if you have meeting conflicts when you sync is not adequate. And finally address book: works great, if you are tethered to your PC or Mac but I believe the address book sync etc limitations are not a deal killer so to speak.

These flaws, when combined, are enough to prevent substantial iPhone penetration in corporate markets. To counter this, Apple has recently allowed third party apps and we see the Google App as example #1. I am sure we will see many more, including (hopefully) fixes for the limitations mentioned above. Until that happens, I believe Apple will be stymied in their desire to enable iPhone to enter Corporate America as the successor to Blackberry.

Full disclosure: I use (only) an iPhone and I love it. I run a small business and it is Mac / iPhone based. However the myriad of limitations around security and lack of connectivity to the PC world test our patience, that's for sure.

I am optimistic that's for sure for the future though.

iPhone Browsing Market Share Shows Importance of Usability

Yes, I agree on the usability argument. There's no comparison between the OS's either (and yes I use an iPhone too).

That said, we shouldn't forget that almost all of SAP users are people who work for large F500 companies (and this newly announced CRM module is a integrated to their large company ERP offering only anyway). These large company users use blackberrys not iPhones for work related stuff. iPhones don't work with Corporate exchange servers and VPN connections and so on. So it just seems like a very strange decision for SAP to FIRST support the iPhone BEFORE spporting the Blackberry... anyway time will tell it was a wise one or not.

iPhone Browsing Market Share Shows Importance of Usability

Carl - Blackberry usage in businesses is substantially higher than iPhone usage in businesses. SAP's move doesn't make sense given that most of it's CRM users are likely to be sales and marketing people - who tend to use Blackberrys are their primary work-related mobile device vs iPhone.

I don't get how you conclude your second paragraph from your first one. Can you please help connect the dots on why windows mobile and iPhone browsing behavior translates to SAP's decision to release CRM capability on iPhone AHEAD of Blackberry? Just because iPhone used more for web browsing than windows mobile devices?

Thanks,

Apple Joins Microsoft in Fear Factor; Look to Lenovo

I have Vista Home Premium (I think that's what it's called) running on Parallels on my Mac. Vista is the being piece of crap that I have seen in a while. I could write a book on flaws in this OS. The funny thing is, I worked in the product side of a large enterprise software company, and this company's products were routinely criticized as being ugly / unuseable / etc. When I used Vista, I realized that even this much maligned enterprise software company actually did quite well in terms of useability and robustness when compared with Vista! That's quite a statement...

To even somehow compare this to Apple's products and to assert that there is fear and loathing with Apple much like there is with Microsoft is absurd.

I, for one, am a thrilled Apple product user. And yes, I am completely aware of the restrictions that an Apple product set brings, but compared with the headaches that Vista brings, these restrictions are well worth it.