Go read John Gruber’s blog post on the bizarre Wall Street Journal article today letting the world know that the iPhone won’t connect to proprietary mail services. I would assume that anybody who’s seriously considering buying an iPhone already knows that.
June 20, 2007 at 1:23 am
Or, more to the point, they don’t care. Anyone who works with technology at the business end knows that before the little buggers even ship, there will be HOWTOs and tips on how to make them work on any environment. IT departments say “no” when they should ask “how?”
June 20, 2007 at 8:07 am
My thought about this is Hooray for Apple for encouraging the use of standard protocols (e.g. IMAP, CalDAV) and Hooray for John Gruber and the WSJ for helping to get the word out about the need for standards. Our role as users is to just say no to proprietary systems!
June 20, 2007 at 11:18 am
Reminds me of trying to convince and IT guy to let my design staff run WinXP on top of Parallels on their Intel Macs. He argued that they could not support it because the users could shut down Parallels a any time thus breaking their randomly-scheduled WinXP security updates. I replied, “How is that any different from someone shutting their WinXP box off at the end of the day” — thus breaking their randomly-scheduled security updates. Silence.
June 21, 2007 at 12:21 am
Certainly corporate IT departments have a difficult job to do with generally mediocre staff, and that leads to some very obtuse policies about this sort of thing.
Since Gruber doesn’t have comments, I wanted to throw in my own user perspective about his mention of CalDAV and IMAP. I theoretically prefer open standards, but I’ve yet to run into a good, fast client implementation of either IMAP or WebDAV (please tell me where they are if you know). Of all the Internet protocols out there, these two stand out in my mind as the poorest possible examples of the potential for open standards. Am I wrong?