MacCentric Solutions is an Apple-certified Macintosh consultancy & systems integrator serving the San Francisco Bay Area.
The IT industry is in the midst of a rare grassroots sea change which is swelling up not from the impetus of the IT professionals who caretake it, but from the executive user base. Apple’s original 2007 iPhone software packed more eye candy for consumers than horsepower for professionals. However, unlike the trickle-down “halo effect” that had, over the course of years, only slowly converted iPod ownership into Macintosh sales (and did so primarily in the retail consumer market only), the iPhone’s halo was extant within days after its release: loathe to carry separate devices for business and personal use, and enamored both with the technical elegance and social cachet of Apple’s new phone, corporate executives began asking their IT departments how to integrate these slick new gadgets into the workplace. Beginning with questions as innocuous as, “Can I get my email on this thing?” these inquiries raised a host of concerns for CTOs and their staff, including the relative data security of iPhones, and whether IT departments were appropriately staffed, trained, and funded to support them.
At MacCentric Solutions, our own phone began ringing within weeks with calls from CTOs asking how to configure iPhone and over-the-air synchronization with user accounts on their Exchange servers. What is remarkable about the only possible answer – that it could not be done, since at the time iPhone software did not include the Active- Sync technology essential for this task, nor did the public know that it eventually would – is not that it led to tension between CTOs and their executive user base, who were clamoring for a solution that nobody could provide.
Rather, the salient point is that this disappointing conclusion did not dissuade executives from retaining and even increasing their iPhone dependence, often quickly adopting other Apple products with similar barriers to enterprise integration. Soon after the iPhone’s release, technology publications reported that, despite iPhone 1.0’s welldocumented lack of appropriate enterprise security features, many executives simply configured the devices on their own to check their work email, despite their IT staff’s refusal to support the devices and unqualified assertions that the iPhone posed a business security risk. Even unabashed Apple enthusiasts agreed with these warnings; nevertheless, the executives ignored them. Because the C-level was hooked on iPhone, everyone else was on the hook, too.
Indeed, despite that iPhone 1.0 proved difficult to fully integrate into the workplace, and with no prodding from us, in the months following its release a high ratio of MacCentric Solutions’ customers increased their investment in Macintosh and iPhone products while decreasing their investment in Windows and Exchange. Scads of both hard evidence and empirical observation, emerging even as this paper goes to press, can corroborate that this trend is widespread across the IT industry. This evidence includes:
For example, enthralled with their iPhones, and enticed by the customer service and retail pleasure of shopping at the Apple Store, we saw many executives replace their own Windows laptops with Apple’s MacBook Pro line. Two qualities of this decision were remarkable: first, they justified the expense of switching despite the fact that the Windows laptops were often not yet due to be end-of-lifed; and second, they switched to Mac in spite of the contrary recommendations of their own IT support staff – often without consulting their IT staff whatsoever. It goes without say that this is not a traditional way to make decisions which affect the workplace.
To these executives, something elusive justified the switch despite numerous hurdles, such as:
For many executives, switching to Mac on the crest of their iPhone halo thus brought a number of disadvantages with it. However, the marvel is that these disadvantages were not critical enough to dissuade these executives from making the switch.
While it could be argued that the execs in question, enthralled by Apple’s mythic marketing, simply made poor business decisions, we believe this radically over-simplifies their motivations. For starters, the sheer number of such Switchers across industries and regions belies a demographic intelligence that can’t be accounted for as merely something in the water; the effect of the iPhone halo has been an economic and cultural phenomenon. We believe that, rather than being duped by some diabolical sleight of hand during Steve Jobs’ keynote speeches, or the intoxicating background colors of iPod billboards, the actions of these renegade executive Switchers proved a critical point: the aesthetic pleasure of corporate executives’ computing experience (demonstrated here by the elegance of Apple’s industrial and OS design) is as vital to their sense of accomplishment and well-being as more traditional, quantifiable bottom lines. Those traditional analyses have historically justified investments in what is increasingly being perceived as distasteful technology – technology so concerned with being superutilitarian that it lacks elegance and intuition, thus losing a good portion of its purported utility. The iPhone halo effect realigns the relative weight of the values used to make technology purchasing decisions, giving credence to qualitative considerations that have not traditionally been considered valuable in enterprise IT.
We realize that calling Apple’s products elegant and non-Apple products (i.e. Microsoft’s) distasteful may sound like merely a rehashing of the now-tired debate that began in 1984. However, the fact that we have recently seen so many companies increase their investment in desktop and mobile technologies that often integrate less efficiently with existing infrastructure has been awesome testimony to the fact that this shift has been driven by the personal computing experiences of the user base, and not from CTOs’ formal technology planning processes. The user experience, represented by the nagging physical presence of iPhones on executive belt loops, has exerted enough pressure on CTOs to challenge traditional approaches to IT infrastructure planning, especially the default tendency to replace or augment aging infrastructure with more of the same (i.e. replacing Windows desktops merely with faster Windows desktops).
The following two examples demonstrate the kinds of technical hurdles that these executives have faced, and the workflow inefficiencies they have been willing to put up with, in order to have their iPhone halo effect, and eat it, too. These examples are each a melange of realworld experiences drawn from more than one of our clients. Although they do not represent singular case studies, they have been very real challenges for our clients who went through them.
Microsoft Exchange is far and away the industry’s dominant messaging and groupware platform, and will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future. Given its entrenched position in the server room, the question for CTOs is not so much whether to support an Exchange infrastructure, but rather, What’s the best desktop client application to work with Exchange?
On Windows, there’s not much argument that it’s Outlook. From our viewpoint, Microsoft’s mission with Outlook is to create such a powerful, versatile experience in both communication and collaboration – two mainstays of desktop productivity – that users are willing to stick with Windows as their desktop OS despite its other flaws, and CTOs are inclined to stick with Exchange as their groupware platform. In this way, Microsoft products continue to rule as both the desktop and server status quo. Even the most stalwart of Microsoft’s critics have difficulty devaluing the power of the Outlook-Exchange duo.
But what happens when executives basking in their iPhone halos follow their glow into the local Apple Store? There they discover that many of Windows’ flaws are obviated in Mac OS X, especially if their current point of comparison is Windows Vista. With users’ loyalties to Windows thus compromised, the only thing preventing them from plunking down plastic and marching a new MacBook Pro into the office on Monday is their deeply entrenched dependence on Outlook.
Suddenly the above question changes to, What’s the best desktop client application on the Mac to work with Exchange? All they need is an adequate answer to this question to cement their decision to switch to Mac, and to insist that their IT department supports this decision. The answer to this question exemplifies the kind of challenge that Switchers face on the desktop.
What they discover, if they even do the research (which, already swayed by their iPhone experiences and their initial Mac OS X experiences to blindly trust all Apple products, many do not), is that their options for attaining parity with Outlook on a Mac are each flawed.
In short, for Mac users in an Exchange world, there is currently no perfect answer. Each of these options entails some significant measure of either technical or workflow inefficiency. We’re certain that after facing these imperfect options, many executives have wisely decided that maintaining strong desktop productivity trumps their desire to switch. However, those executives are unsung in the wave of recent statistics that show the Mac’s business desktop share growing faster than any other PC brand, and one analyst declaring the Mac to be “recession proof” despite the current economic climate.
To be sure, some of our customers who switched without consulting us on the decision are dissatisfied. However, of those who have admitted this, very few have chosen to switch back to Windows. In some cases, this seems to be resignation that the Switch was a sunk cost, and reluctance to invest more in their desktop platform in order to switch back to Windows. While this may simply seem like good, frugal sense, we must consider another analysis of why disappointed Switchers don’t switch back: although these particular executives’ Mac Switch was not what they had hoped, they still lack confidence in the efficacy of other platform options. Although the Mac has not yet allowed them to be all that they can be, their decision to stay with it rather than invest in a reverse-Switch indicates ambivalence with all possible desktop platforms.
Thus, even in the case of an unsatisfactory Switch, the iPhone halo effect has achieved a broad minimum result: it has opened an opportunity for widespread questioning of the values of the desktop computing experience. If Windows or other, non- Apple platforms truly were the best business desktop platform, even those who mistakenly switched would drum up the capital to switch back. In the vast majority of our observed cases, however, this has not happened. Most of our clients who are disappointed Switchers, while grappling with the challenge of working with two technology platforms that don’t always work perfectly with each other, have retained their confidence that although cross-platform computing is still a nascent trend, their investment in switching will ultimately pay off. What may inspire that latter confidence is a certainty that their own experience of the iPhone halo effect is not isolated, and that other executives with the same experience will ultimately gather enough steam to become a demographic that shifts markets. Already, in the growing adoption of Apple products by corporate consumers, we’re seeing this trend pick up considerable steam.
Scrutinizing how executive Switchers demonstrate their new Apple brand loyalty vis-á-vis their daily computing experiences, as we’ve done above, shows how the iPhone halo effect affects SMB desktop computing. In our example, pressure is exerted on IT departments to support the user’s efforts to emulate Microsoft Outlook with the imperfect options available on Mac OS X. However, because this is a change on the desktop, it’s possible for IT departments to keep it contained to the individual executives that bring their Macs into the workplace without asking first. Those executives’ isolated experiences do not have to penetrate into the company’s larger IT policies, where they would have a wider, watershed effect on the rest of the company’s users.
However, the possibility for such penetration is not out the question. SMBs, by virtue of their smaller size, may have technology decisionmaking processes that are driven by one or two dominant executive personalities. When individual proclivities inform technology planning, those individuals’ preferences have an outsized effect on IT decisions – potentially as strong as a CTO’s. We have supported more than one SMB which made technology planning decisions without much knowledge of the current technology landscape or basic considerations of the planning process, and without relying on expert outside resources such as ourselves or our colleagues in the field. Indeed, in small enterprises, the corporate culture can be so personality-driven that often the executive whose tech preferences determine company policy is the CTO!
In such cases, something as personal as the iPhone halo effect can have fallout that penetrates into the server room. In these scenarios, dominant executives become so enamored of Apple technology, and simultaneously so jaded with the company’s platform status quo, that their belief in the need for platform change reaches across the organization: desktops and servers alike. “If Apple can make such a perfect phone,” goes the reasoning we’ve heard from clients, “and such a perfect desktop OS, then they must be able to do the same in the server room, too.”
Our characterization of this process may sound critical or even flippant. Indeed, we believe that good technology planning is not driven by individual preferences, but takes into account the totality of systems that make an organization tick, such as budgets, team workflows, and the sense of each user that the furtherance of his or her best professional (and personal) interests is the ultimate goal of the planning process. These are all parts of the corporate technology ecosystem.
In some companies, to be sure, criticism of this process (or of such a process’ absence) is warranted. Nevertheless, it is not our intention to criticize SMBs whose corporate culture leads to personality-dominated technology planning. In some companies the executive personalities who dominate the decision-making process are precisely consonant with what the organization needs. Most salient for the purposes of this paper is not the ethic of any company’s technology planning, but just the simple fact that in SMBs, this planning can be so driven by an interest in questioning the status quo that it can effect change of the server infrastructure as well as the desktops. In many of our SMB clients who have reached a level of planning this deep, a consensus seems to be growing that Exchange is not the only or best option for an SMB collaboration platform. Attention is turning to other such platforms; Kerio Mail- Server is the one that we have seen meet with the most success, and which seems to have the brightest future.
Kerio MailServer (KMS) is a messaging and groupware server which is a powerful replacement for most of the features of Microsoft Exchange which are of interest to SMBs. Of particular interest regarding the iPhone halo effect, amongst KMS’ benefits for organizations whose executives are adopting Apple technologies are:
Kerio MailServer is an unusual solution in the landscape, because unlike Exchange, not only does it have many features that appeal to the cross-platform organization, but its costs of deployment and maintenance are significantly lower. In this sense, KMS is a perfect example of a technology that appeals to both the traditional, bottom-line technology planning analysis and the new, grassroots culture in which IT departments must find ways to integrate executives’ cross-platform technology preferences into the organization. It also can satisfy SMBs whose technology planning is dominated more by personality and computing aesthetic than traditional planning analyses. It is a stable, fullfeatured, inexpensive solution that can run on, and support, platforms which are distinctly not part of the status quo.
CTOs who are considering implementing Kerio MailServer in order to provide a cross-platform messaging and collaboration solution that pleases iPhone users and challenges the IT status quo should be aware of the following caveats, which apply to ActiveSync connections between iPhone 2.0 and KMS. (Note: some of these limitations are those of iPhone 2.0, and some are those of KMS’ current ActiveSync implementation.)
As we hope this example makes evident, Kerio MailServer and iPhone 2.0 are extremely viable, if imperfect, solutions when attempting to diminish corporate reliance on Exchange. While the technical caveats listed here are mostly innocuous, cosmetic, or replete with workarounds, one user’s indifference to a feature’s absence is another user’s enthusiasm at the killer feature they’ve been waiting for. The following suggestions may help CTOs avoid implementing new technologies that end up alienating more of the user base than they befriend.
What’s a CTO to do when an executive insists on using their Mac with the company’s non- Apple infrastructure – or, more strikingly, pushes effectively for deep platform change at the server level? While the best course of action is highly subjective and situationdependent, there are some general actions the CTO can take to make the outcome more pleasant for all stakeholders:
The iPhone halo effect is taking IT by surprise, and will continue to do so for some time. Apple products have not been a factor in most IT formulae for over a decade, and their reentry into the enterprise through a back door is not making their renascence any easier. The opening of users’ awareness that they have options in their technology lives can lead to frustration and strife within the workplace as users recognize that their productivity differs depending on which technical tools they choose. With this realization, they are beginning to demand what seems to them logical: that they be given the choice to use the tools with which they feel most productive. That one user’s productivity tool will be another user’s time-waster is a challenge that CTOs should embrace, if for no other reason than that this dynamic will continue until the sea change passes. If the iPhone halo effect causes enough IT departments to invest in nontraditional technology, ultimately even the most disparate of platforms will grow more symbiotic, for the market trend toward cross-platform computing is picking up too much steam for solutions to be long in arriving. Rather than blindly embracing or rejecting their executives’ iPhone-generated enthusiasm for eclectic computing environments, CTOs should simply learn what is necessary to manage it and provide their staff with the resources to do so.