The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit

This article from business week was the catalyst for a brainwave. When I read this great piece, I was struck at how accurate my uptakes on the next 2 years were, when I made them to my manager sometime in September/October 2006. I made other comments at the time, which were not covered by the magazine cover story, but were just as close to how things turned out. The conversations I had at the time were in the light of where I saw the market going to.

After reading the article I sat down to write a quick email containing quick 15 predictions of the market in the next 3 to 5 years and forwarded it to some selected friends and colleagues.

I decided to copy them into this blog. Although my predictions were written in no specific order at first, I had to organize them into superficial and subjective categories for readability sake, and although I discovered afterwards that I had about 5 more points to jog down, I decided not to write them after all - at least in the short term - to stay as close as possible to the email content.

The iPhone

1. The iPhone 2.0 is coming out in June, perhaps with 3G straight away or maybe later this year, and within a few weeks/months, 'serious' business software will appear for it
2. We'll hear of large companies using the iPhone for business critical applications this year
3. RIM's blackberry will certainly struggle and have its shares down quite substantially over a period of time
4. Microsoft's Windows Mobile will also struggle in the higher end phones, as it won't offer anything comparable or better than the iPhone. They might keep it alive for a few years through their largest corporate accounts, but may pull out of it in the next 5 years
5. Sony/Erikson, Nokia, and others will rush to get Symbian phones and/or Linux/Android phones to match the iPhone capabilities but will have first generation problems (performance, bugs, etc.) and may end up concentrating on the already saturated low end by offering much higher specs phones for the same price to get people to switch. However within 2 years, they should have ironed the kinks of higher end phones and could offer an alternative to the iPhone. The rate of this change will depend, of course, on whether Apple decide to stick to their one operator per country policy, and not allow operators to subsidize the iPhone
   

Yep! I definitely believe that the iPhone 'second generation' will take the business world by storm - and I'm not even talking about the consumer market where end-users will crave for the games and cool software applications that are going to be made available - as the device will gain the respectability status it only had implicitly. The mixture of the iPhone controlled environment, classy graphics, corporate email management, storage size, and applications, will become too strong a pull for most businesses to resist. Here is a phone/PDA running an OS with free updates, which none of the competitors can properly offer.

next post will discuss the Server world...

What do you think?