See why one CIO is migrating all Treos to iPhones
Posted by Jason Hiner @ 9:43 am
I’ve known Scott Lowe for almost a decade, long before he became a CIO. He is not the kind of IT leader who is susceptible to hype or following what the crowd is doing. So when he told me last week that the iPhone had not only won him over, but that his IT department was in the process of converting his entire organization from Treos to iPhones, I was pretty surprised.
If CIOs like Scott Lowe are doing this, then it’s a pretty good indicator that the iPhone is becoming a very viable and tempting option for a lot of companies out there. Keep in mind that Scott (right) works in the education sector and his organization is an SMB, but it’s still a good story about how the iPhone is starting to win over IT folks. And, fortunately, Scott has now written up the whole story and posted it on TechRepublic.
Here’s a quote from Scott’s article:
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“As contracts come up, we’re replacing Treos across the board with iPhones. Quite frankly, even if we were to stick with Treos, we’d have to replace those anyway since they’re not holding up well to the use and abuse at the hands of the people using them (no kidding, either… Treos have started dropping like flies around campus), so one way or the other, we’re buying a new device. Our direction now is to drop all remaining Treos as contracts come up; we’ll be an all iPhone organization within a year.”
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I found that Scott’s evaluation and experience with the iPhone was very similar to my own. We both considered the first generation iPhone to be little more than a concept car that looked really cool but had very little usefulness, especially in business (see my 2007 article “Sanity check: How much will the iPhone impact IT and business users?“).
Scott started to become interested in the second generation iPhone because of the strong Microsoft Exchange integration. I still wasn’t convinced yet, mostly because of AT&T and the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard (see my 2008 article “Sanity check: The five reasons I wouldn’t use an iPhone are down to one“).
By the time the third generation iPhone was released on June 19, Scott was already starting to move his entire organization toward iPhones, while I was finally won over by the combination of the iPhone’s Exchange groupware features and the breadth and quality of the third party applications (see my 2009 piece “Palm Pre vs. iPhone 3GS: The choice I made and why“).
from http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=20565
And now, the 3Gs is simply unbeatable.
There's still inconceivably stupid aspects to it like, why would you put all that effort into making the iPhone a music device and not include a per-band adjustable EQ? That's idiotic. What's with the crappy headphones? - They're almost insulting to include with the device. Why are users locked out of so many basic settings?
The list of annoyances is pretty long.
But in the end - unlike the Apple PC which cannot be objectively labeled better than any good PC, the iPhone owns its market.
I have had a WM phone (HTC Kaiser/AT&T Tilt) for two years and CAN’T WAIT until the is up at the end of the year so I can trade it in for an iPhone. Microsoft hasn’t accomplished anything more than incremental improvements to its OS in years, whereas the iPhone software increases functionality significantly with each iteration. Also, my Tilt has undergone at least two hard resets and daily soft resets because the OS gets buggy and sluggish over time. I never thought I would say that, either. I was solidly in the non-Apple camp until I got an iPod Touch and started using it. No resets. No constant tinkering to keep it operating within an acceptable range of performance. I just works, and works well. I will be saying goodbye to WM and hello to iPhone 3GS at the end of the year and will not shed a tear for doing so.