Archive for June 9th, 2008

Monday, June 9th, 2008

WWDC’s Big News Not 3G, but Fortune 500

At San Francisco’s Moscone Center today, the release of a 3G iPhone took the spotlight in Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ annual address at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

But the biggest news to come from WWDC this year came about 11 minutes into Jobs’ talk, when he revealed that 35 percent of Fortune 500 companies have participated in Apple’s iPhone enterprise beta program.

These 175 companies should make RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, very nervous.

Version 2.0 of the iPhone’s software is to be released on July 11 and finally adds support for Microsoft Exchange, which powers the e-mail of corporate America like a bad crack habit. From Apple’s demonstrations, using the iPhone to access corporate e-mail seems intuitive and tightly integrated into the phone’s function set.

Add on top of that easy-to-use mobile internet access (at fast 3G speeds) and a fully-featured video iPod and the Blackberry seems like a Chevy Nova in Latin America… an outdated relic.

CTOs are practically-minded geeks by nature. It’s hard not to like the iPhone and Apple just broken the last major technical damn keeping the device from being fully integrated across major corporations.

Let the flood begin.

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