Tablets are controlled by corporations

I admit I was wrong. In my previous post, I claimed that mobile devices would be free of corporate bureaucracy (and control). That's not true.

It's true in the sense that when the Acme corporation buys PCs it can control them with ActiveDirectory and group policies, and that similar infrastructure is not in place for tablets and smartphones. (I'm ignoring the third-party Mobile Device Management software.)

But it's false in the sense that corporations do control the mobile devices. The corporations are not Acme or whoever buys the devices. The controlling corporations are the owners of the walled gardens: Apple, Google, Amazon.com, and Microsoft. These corporations control the software available and the updates that occur automatically. (Yes, you can turn some updates off, but only while those corporations let you.)

The control that these companies exert is indisputable. Apple just recently placed a copy of a U2 album on every iPod and iPhone. Some time ago, Amazon.com deleted books from various Kindle e-readers. These companies are the "tribal chieftains", with immense power over the devices.

Android and iOS are popular in part because they are easy to use. That ease of use comes from the absence of administration tasks. The administration has not disappeared, it has moved from the "owner" of the device to the controlling company. Apple builds the updates for iOS and distributes those updates (along with updates to apps) to iPhones and iPads. Google does the same for Android devices. Microsoft does the same for "Metro" apps.

It may be this control that makes corporations reluctant to use tablets. They may know, deep down, that they are not in control of the devices. They may realize that at any moment the tribal chieftains may change the software, or worse, read or modify (or possibly delete) data on the devices. They may grant other individuals access to mobile devices.

All of this does not mean that corporations (the Acme variety, who are using the devices) should avoid mobile devices. It *does* mean that corporations should use them intelligently. They should not manage tablets and smartphones in the same way that they manage PCs, and they should not use tablets and smartphones in the same way as they use PCs. The model for mobile devices is very different from PCs.

Business can use tablets and smartphones, but differently than PCs. Data should be handled by specific apps, not generic applications like Microsoft Word and Excel. Mobile apps should authenticate users, retrieve a limited set of data from servers, present that data, manipulate that data, and then store the data on the server. Apps should not store data on the local device. (This is also good for the scenario of a lost device -- if it has no data, there can be no data "leakage" to unauthorized parties.)

Mobile devices are controlled by the tribal chieftains. Yet they can still be used by corporations -- and individuals.