Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Mobile devices may always be independent from corporate bureaucracy

The mobile revolution is different from the PC revolution.

The PC revolution saw the IBM PC adopted as the standard for personal computing. It was adopted by businesses and consumers, but most spending was from businesses.

The mobile revolution, in contrast, is driven by consumers. Individuals are buying smart phones and tablets. Businesses may be purchasing some mobile devices, but the bulk of the spending is on the consumer side.

Why is this distinction important?

To answer that, let's look at PCs and their history. Personal computers in corporations are anything but personal. They are purchased by the corporation and controlled by the corporation. The people using PCs rarely have administrator privileges for those PCs. Instead, the ability to install software and make significant changes is governed by the local copy of Windows and configurations in a central ActiveDirectory server.

The infrastructure of ActiveDirectory and Windows group policies was not built overnight, and was not part of the original PC. The first PCs ran PC-DOS and had no administrative controls at all -- any user could do anything, see anything, and change anything. Microsoft worked on PC-DOS for IBM, then MS-DOS for non-IBM computers, then Windows, and finally server software and ActiveDirectory. It took about twenty years to create, from the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981 to the introduction of ActiveDirectory in 1999.

That work was done by Microsoft because corporations wanted it. They wanted mechanisms to control the PCs and the access to data on PCs and servers. (And even with all of that interest, it took two decades to "enterprise-ify" PCs and make them part of the bureaucracy.)

Corporations were interested in PCs from the introduction of the IBM PC. (Some corporations were interested in earlier microcomputers, but they were a minority.) Corporations were interested in PCs because PCs ran Lotus 1-2-3, the popular spreadsheet at the time.

Now let's look at mobile devices. Corporations have a mild interest in mobile devices. It is only a fraction of the interest in PCs. There is no killer app for tablets, no must-have app for smart phones. (At least, not for corporations.) It is quite possible that phones and tablets are too personal for corporations.

It is telling that the Microsoft Surface tablet, with its ready-to-use connections to ActiveDirectory, has seen little interest. For consumers, the Surface (and other Windows tablets) are more expensive and not as useful as the iPad and Android tablets. But even corporations have little interest in the Microsoft offerings.

Without corporate interest (and corporate spending), neither Apple nor Google have incentive to make their tablets "safe for the enterprise" -- that is, controlled through a central administration point. (Yes, there are "mobile device management" packages, but they have little interest.)

Apple and Google will invest their efforts in other areas, such as better hardware and improved reliability of apps in their stores (and maybe higher profits).

Corporations will use tablets for small, isolated projects, if at all. I suspect most corporations view their proven and familiar desktops and laptops as sufficient, with little benefit from tablets.

But all is not lost for tablets and smart phones. Some folks will use them for critical business purposes. These folks will not be the large corporations with established IT infrastructure. They will be the start-ups, the small companies who will build completely new apps to solve completely new business problems.

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