I feel like there really only one primary cause of iOS's (unexpected) enterprise success: it's a prestige phone.
We can wax poetic about the democratization of corporate IT processes, or specific technologies, but IMO those are all herrings, or minor causes at best.
At the end of the day, Apple introduced an incredibly prestigious product at the very highest end of the market. It had cachet and desirability, and when your SVP buys that drool-worthy envy-of-the-office phone, he damn well wants to use it with his email, and damned what IT thinks of it.
I suspect Android's success in the enterprise space hinges on a similar product - if someone can come up with the "oh my god I must have it" phone in Android-land, the enterprise support will follow.
I disagree. They are the best product, without a big price premium.
We have a strong preference for Verizon at my place, due to the geography of our operating area vs. coverage. We have about 5,000 devices, and we started introducing Android to replace Blackberries. It didn't go well -- more support calls, a pain to manage, and very inconsistent. If we issued users a phone that the vendor decided to not support, users were not happy.
The iPhones just work. Users love them. Our guys have minimal support load, etc. The biggest problem is that people keep trying to do new things, so there's some chaos with apps, etc.
None of that rules out the iPhone status symbol angle.
What the "best product" is, is so completely subjective and since when did that matter anyway? You probably think that Macs are the best computer...why aren't those the biggest in the enterprise space?
The BlackBerry was also a "status symbol" for a long time. Big whoop.
In the enterprise space, BlackBerry was the "best product" because it was manageable, easy to configure, easy to encrypt and reliable for it's purpose -- making phone calls and email.
As the iPhone and Android devices became popular, users started expecting a rich web and app experience that BlackBerry just couldn't deliver -- but IT guys like me still pushed BlackBerries, because the new devices weren't managable.
Then, that changed. iPhones can be managed, encrypted, etc by an IT department with little fuss. Androids can be too, but it's more complex -- I need to buy a 3rd party app to encrypt email, and keep up with the various features of 8 different vendors and 30 different phones. So, if I buy Android devices, I need to deal with the carnival of device choices that confuses users and increases the likelihood that my people will screw something up. Or I can buy an iPhone, which costs the same or less than the Android deivce, and everyone is happy.
Sounds like the "best" choice to me.
RE: The Mac -- I am a Mac user personally, but wouldn't buy them in a medium or large business. Why? Three reasons: Macs don't have a mature (where mature == working) integration with authentication and authorization services (ie. AD or LDAP/Kerberos). Apple is a single-source, mercurial supplier. All business apps work on Windows -- 10% work on Mac.
> Macs ...why aren't those the biggest in the enterprise space?
Rhetorical question, but here's the actual answer:
None of the reasons that had hindered Macs on the uss-enterprise apply to iPhones. It's compatible with common network and mail systems, there's management software, it has the biggest application & developer base, and the (huge) profit margins are hidden in the carrier bills.
Unless you want to surprise me with a link to some high quality research about ease of use and enjoyment of smartphones, I don't think that is any sort of fact.
You'll find plenty of users who think otherwise and it is not worth the time to argue over which bit of anecdotal evidence or which opinion is correct.
What do you mean exactly when you say that the iPhone "is a prestige phone", that it is "at the very highest end of the market", and you use this to explain the iPhone's popularity? Do you mean:
1. It's the most expensive smartphone?
2. It's the smartphone with the highest specs?
3. It's the most popular smartphone? (which would be a tautology... it's popular because it's popular)
"Desirability" and "cachet" are outcomes, not first causes. To what cause are you ascribing the iPhone's success?
IMO, it's more Apple Incorporated's prestige driving executive sales rather than simply the products themselves. Business people respect things like stock prices and profit reports, and ever since Apple rose to being the largest tech company, there's been a certain mentality that "they make the most money so they must be doing it right". (It actually reminds me a lot of the adulation of Microsoft in the late 1990s.)
And from an IT standpoint, Android sounds like a bit of mess due to uneven support from different vendors. Obviously there's ways to work around that, but Apple may not necessarily be the worst "enterprise" choice.
In my experience that's pretty much the exact opposite of how enterprise IT works. That's why we tend to end up with so much miserable hardware/software. It's usually a calculation of cost/technical adequacy/ease-of-support. User preference or usability in general is not a big concern. Many companies have only recently begun to replace BlackBerries on a large scale. If you were correct we would have seen huge adoption of the iPhone 3G in the enterprise 4 years ago or maybe the iPhone 3GS 3 years ago. It's a trend that has really picked up only in the last 2 years or so on a large scale.
We have an IT company that is outsourced to handle all this stuff for us and they only deploy iPhones. They recommend replacing BB/Android devices via forklift upgrade. They actively do not support Android. If you're using anything other than BB/iPhone you're on your own. This is just one company out of probably thousands that provide similar services so maybe it's not a common policy. It was pretty sobering to me though. It reminds me of the Mac in the enterprise in years past. If you somehow managed to sneak one in the backdoor you wouldn't actually be allowed to use it. If this is becoming a common policy for Android devices then Google has a huge uphill battle. These types of companies aren't going to be re-evaluating their policies very often.
No one, not even Google, the carrier or the manufacturer can guarantee if you'll be able to install a security update on that Android phone you deployed to 2,000 sales people 6 months ago.
One of Apple's claimed differentiators is that they're a vertical operation. I'm confident an Apple rep would say that the iPhone was a prestige product because Apple produced both the hardware and software; that the "cachet and desirability" of their products are a direct result of a single editorial voice.
I haven't used any Android-based phones, so I can't say whether or not existing offerings match the fit and polish of an iPhone. Judging by your own comments, I will assume that none currently do, which makes me ponder a few questions.
Question One: If an Android-based phone were to achieve a level of integration between hardware and software comparable to the iPhone, would that put the lie to Apple's claims that keeping everything under one roof is their recipe for success? Or would a hardware manufacturer have to "own" the operating system for this to occur? Will Amazon eventually achieve Apple-like user satisfaction with the Kindle Fire because they forked Android?
Question Two: Is Jony Ive really as talented as the business press claims? Is he - or, more generally, is superior industrial design - Apple's secret weapon?
Question Three: Assuming question two is true, is Ive's level of design talent really that rare, that Samsung, HTC, Amazon, or Motorola cannot find an individual with competing skill?
Question Four: (Again assuming Ive's talent is a significant differentiator) Given that Ive was marking time, unrecognized and unappreciated, within Apple until Jobs' return, is it likely that a company requires a (hopefully benevolent) Dictator For Life in order to achieve the greatness that so often eludes decision-by-committee? Are there examples of best-of-breed products (in a similar or related industry) produced antithetically to Apple's methodology?
This was probably modded down for hyperbole, but if you look at any enterprise IT publication, it's full of news like "Symantac announces anti-virus solution for Android! blah blah Chinese app store blah".
I can imagine the average IT manager rubbing his temples and taking this sort of doubt, uncertainty, and fear seriously.
I've often heard it said that (nearly every time Apple in the Enterprise comes up) the conventional wisdom is that Apple doesn't experience larger gains in the enterprise because of the culture of secrecy whereby it doesn't give advance information to large corporate buyers any more than it does to the average consumer. It's something of a surprise to me that this wasn't mentioned in this article.
Doubly so because a number of the other vendors of Android devices (Samsung, Sony, LG, ASUS) have a much more favorable history on releasing information about upcoming products so that enterprise support can be ready for them. Also, a lack of that culture of secrecy would seem to be more favorable for sharing more technical information up-front for deeper integration with corporate partners. Whereas I don't get the impression that Apple really views any enterprise customer as a partner, but rather as another customer.
Conversely, Apples does have a history of long-term support for the products they do release, so in that sense, the future is extremely predicable ... more so than other players in the mobile space. The predictability of support is perhaps more valuable than the predictability of new shininess.
This is much more the case for Apple in mobile than in their other products. The churn from OS 9 -> X, PPC -> Intel, and multiple breaking changes to APIs etc over the same time period made supporting Macs at the "enterprise" level quite challenging.
As a member of an enterprise IT, and one that has been involved in out testing and decision making I'd put it down to three things:
1. Android support for Exchange is generally awful. I can't speak for ICS, but many of the android phones we tested wouldn't do calendar sync, or would randomly stop receiving emails, requiring hard resets, or would have little to no global address lookup. In contrast, iOS has had very good exchange support since at least iOS 3, and it is rock solid.
2. Android still doesn't work with our Cisco VPN, iOS has since at least v3.
3. Beyond the internet and PIM software, we have been more successful finding quality apps. Too many apps on both platforms are lightweight things without much use in a business environment, but there are some decent application to be found on iOS (the Omnigroup apps come to mind.). There is also better support from business focused companies like VMware, ESRI, Autodesk, and all the conferencing companies like WebEx.
I must be walking under a silver lined cloud; I've had an original droid since launch day over 2 years ago, and now an ICS Galaxy Nexus since launch day, and the Exchange integration has been better than my Windows PC, by and large. I've never had any of the issues you mention. I don't doubt you've had them, but I have not. I frequently get "dinged" on my phone for new email before Outlook. (I will admit that deleting a mail on outlook takes up to 5 minutes to "be gone" on the Android.)
But never any calendar issues. Never any dropped mails. Never any needs to "hard reset". Lookups work as well on my phone as they do on outlook, for me.
The fragmentation mentioned in the article to me highlights one of the main reasons why enterprises shy away from Android. On iOS, there is ONE email/calendar client with a known set of features/limitations. On android, almost every manufacturer has their own email client and their varying feature sets and bugs are not documented anywhere. For example: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4760 How many posts in there are from google employees stating that it's not their problem because the email client the person is complaining about isn't written by google?
I feel like one of the major changes in a Steve Jobs-less Apple is going to be an increased emphasis on the corporate market. This was historically one of the major differences between Apple (focused on end-users) and Microsoft (primarily focused on corporate enterprises--Paul Allen has a lot to say about this in his recent biography). To see Apple succeeding in this market is pretty exciting for them.
Working for a company that serves big pharma, I have the following observations:
The iPad is the game changer for the mobile worker (pharma reps). Companies are taking away their sales reps MS laptops/tablets and replacing them with iPads. Why?
1., Unbreakable compared to classic hardware. Both in hardware as in software. No moving parts, light, powerful enough, so easy to use that reps can't claim anymore to be baffled by it. Cheap. No enterprise MS tablet PC comes close.
2., Far lower TCO, as the IT overhead is far lower. Virus Scanners? Custom OS images? Gone. A fully controlled, curated environment. Even if a user installs something, it will not break the system or steal your data. If an iPad gets stolen/lost, remote wipe and buy a new one. Log in, restore, done. Apple suddenly allows for bring your own hardware - the wet dream of enterprise IT.
3., Completely homogenic hardware, globally. This is the most important point. Wherever you buy an iPad, from Brazil to Korea, it is exactly the same. Same hardware, same OS. With notebooks? Lenovo, HP, Dell. And they change their models all the time, warranting a new driver here, a different OS image there.
4., The death of Blackberry is on the wall, making the iPhone the natural successor - for the above points.
Now, what about the MacBooks and iMacs? Looking at my company, once the iPad is in, those follow. If the majority of users is on iOS, there are no benefits of being on Windows. Most admins like Unix-style anyhow, and OSX is a great UI for that.
Managers are the ones left, and here the MacBook Air is gaining traction. It is sleek, light, and works. Plus, IT can standardize on it. Also, as people create slide decks, Keynote is seriously cool shit. Those presentations work seamlessly on iPad, whereas PPT breaks. Strong incentive there to switch.
The last big footholds of MS in the Office are Excel and Outlook. But both are available on OSX, and some argue in better shape than their Windows brethren. The biggest gap of Apple is Excel on the iPad. Whoever releases a fully compatible iOS Excel version/clone will accelerate the demise of MS in enterprise desktops.
Servers are completely different discussion, the MS Exchange/Sharepoint/Dynamics/SQL Server behemoth is here to stay. This battleground will shift due to SaaS.
> 4., The death of Blackberry is on the wall, making the iPhone the natural successor - for the above points.
I can't speak for the pharmaceutical industry in America, but from what I've noticed in the financial industry in the UK a lot of people are ditching their Blackberry's and are moving to either Android or, surprisingly, WP7. One of the large financial services companies I've worked with is switching all of its employees to WP7 this year, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is where Microsoft find their area.
WP7 is probably a good choice if you're a big Microsoft dev shop and are actively developing custom tools. I've been told that development for WP7 is pretty easy for existing .Net programmers.
All of this is great news for the industry -- a robust market is a good thing.
5., Apple convinced people to pay enough to get good equipment.
An IT department implementing anything PC based is constantly fighting against the $300 acer netbooks on the shelves of the local best buy. Management will cut corners on a PC.
We can wax poetic about the democratization of corporate IT processes, or specific technologies, but IMO those are all herrings, or minor causes at best.
At the end of the day, Apple introduced an incredibly prestigious product at the very highest end of the market. It had cachet and desirability, and when your SVP buys that drool-worthy envy-of-the-office phone, he damn well wants to use it with his email, and damned what IT thinks of it.
I suspect Android's success in the enterprise space hinges on a similar product - if someone can come up with the "oh my god I must have it" phone in Android-land, the enterprise support will follow.