The Phone Changed
Posting from Bermuda, where I am building EMC’s consulting book — and where the biggest technology story of the year is still a line outside Apple Stores in the States. The iPhone shipped last week. I have read everything. I have opinions.
It is not a phone. Phones are what it replaces. It is a computer with a real browser and an interface you run with your own fingers — no stylus, no manual, no training department. The smartphones we carry now look like fax machines next to it.
Every enterprise application I have ever designed assumed a desk, a chair, and a user who had been sent to training. This device assumes a person standing on a sidewalk with ten seconds. Business software is going to have to survive that assumption, and most of what I have built in my career would not.
The firms that get this will rebuild around the pocket. The firms that do not will spend ten years wondering where the customers went. I plan to be employed by the first kind and hired by the second.