Saturday, February 09, 2008
iPhone's business play
The biggest complaint about the iPhone since its sale has been that it is not business friendly compared to competing products such as the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile phones. Mainly "business friendly" means "integration with Microsoft Exchange" as that it the predominant enterprise email server. These business power users often cite push email as the killer app on their smartphones.My thinking is that Apple certainly realizes this and would be foolish not to go after the business users. That's why it has also allied itself with Yahoo, a notable Google competitor. There are a few iPhone widgets which use Yahoo's webservices instead of Google's, so there's no doubt there's a close relationship between Apple and Yahoo.
And iPhone does have push email. It's Yahoo Mail. But which company ever uses Yahoo Mail? That's true, but don't forget that Zimbra was recently purchased by Yahoo, and Zimbra's groupware suite offers a viable alternative to Exchange.
Could this help propel the iPhone into the enterprise space?
But as you know, last week Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo (just today Yahoo's board rejected the offer). Now that's a powerful play by the Redmond Giant, one that could transform the tech landscape. But that also threw a monkey wrench into relationship between Yahoo and its partners such as Apple. What will Apple do if Yahoo is gobbled up by its nemesis? The plan to bring the iPhone to business users may be stalled.
Labels: Google, iPhone, Microsoft, Yahoo
posted by Eugene at 4:12 PM
