The State of IT
The direction of computing is only going in one way—to the cloud
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In the past decade, mobile computing has gone from a niche market for well-heeled enterprises with large field organisations to the fastest growing, and often most popular, way for employees of organisations of all sizes to do business computing. The near-universal adoption of mobile devices by consumers—who are also employees—has forced one of the most major shifts that corporate IT has ever seen.
In many cases, expensive company-owned laptop rollouts have been replaced by leveraging phones and tablets that are owned by employees. Business applications are quickly being rewritten, and new ones are being invented that leverage the power and ubiquitous nature of mobile devices.
Mobile computing is no longer just another way to access the corporate network: it is quickly becoming not only a new computing platform, but the dominant computing platform for many enterprises. Along the way, corporate culture has had to change to accommodate the always-present nature of the modern smartphone, and security practices have been completely rethought to deal with the challenge of alien, uncontrolled devices being brought inside the corporate firewall.
The enterprise mobile device that started it all: the Blackberry 850.
The enterprise mobile device that started it all: the Blackberry 850.
OldComputers
Before the BlackBerry, though, there were a few other less-successful attempts, such as the GridPad...
Wikipedia
... and the Apple Newton.
Before real mobile computers, calculators like the HP-12C ruled the roost.
Mobile computing used to mean modems, laptops, and Blackberries
There was a time when companies could pretend that mobile was some sort of fad, or that it didn't apply to them. Perhaps they were in "high-touch" businesses, and phone calls were the only accepted way to contact customers. Or maybe they thought they had well-defined markets and stable competitors, so 24-hour access to key employees was not an issue. For many companies mobile computing used to mean that all the MBAs carried HP-12C calculators, and engineers had their own version. Early attempts at true mobile computers like the GRiDPad, Eo, and Apple Newton were hampered by inadequate processor power and very little in the way of connectivity.
However, once e-mail reached critical mass in the late 1990s, the market opportunity drove a relatively-unknown Canadian company, RIM, to put together a connectivity solution for mobile professionals that leveraged IBM's extensive ARDIS radio network. Billed as an "interactive pager" the Blackberry 850 (released in 1999) featured e-mail, calendar, and contact management—all synchronised with your corporate server, using enterprise-grade security. For the small annoyance of a monthly fee, employees could be corporate citizens anytime and anywhere.
Enlarge / The original Compaq iPaq H3150.As the CTO for a high-tech company at the time, I was one of the first users of the Blackberry 850; it’s not hyperbolic to say it’s still one of the most life-changing gadgets I’ve ever used. Suddenly I could stay in touch literally anywhere in the country—even on trains or riding in a car. No more needing to find a phone line to plug in my laptop, or call the office to see if there were messages. Given the limitations of the small form factor, the thumb keyboard and high-contrast monochrome screen worked remarkably well. It was all powered by an easy-to-replace AA battery, too.
The rest of the industry struggled to adapt their existing PDAs—like the popular but expensive Compaq iPaq, and the innovative PalmPilot—to the new need for constant connectivity. Palm and Compaq both introduced bulky communications add-ons for their devices, and many Windows CE units like the Dell Axim supported adding a wireless card. But none caught on the way the Blackberry and its successors did. As a result, the mobile computing market remained fairly calm until the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
The smartphone changed everything
Ironically, given the changes it brought about, the original iPhone wasn't a very good phone, and it certainly wasn't targeted at corporations. It was designed to—and did—make waves among consumers, but many thought it wouldn't matter to businesses. Microsoft, the titan of business software, dismissed it as irrelevant, continuing its push to put Windows on tiny devices with little pens for their menus, and often featuring Blackberry-like keyboards.
In reality, business use of mobile devices has taken off faster than any other computing market in history. HP's Mobility Business GM Pierre Mirlesse, in an interview with Ars, estimated that "there are 1.3 billion workers already mobilised using some form of laptop, tablet or phone."
Enlarge / Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007. The device itself wasn't very good, but the long-term repercussions were momentous.
What most of the industry and its pundits had underestimated was the impact that consumers have as employees. They wanted the same easy-to-use iPhone interface that they were using for their personal messaging and mail for when they were conducting business. Mirlesse explained that some of this is generational. Younger workers expect to be able to do work from their mobile devices. As this reality dawned on other major industry players, they began to respond with their own new or revamped mobile computing initiatives.
Enlarge / The original "Sooner" Android hardware prototype device, which very closely resembled a Blackberry. This device never made it to market: the first real Android device was a slider smartphone called the HTC Dream.Google was the first off the mark—perhaps aided by CEO Eric Schmidt's position on the Apple board while plans for the iPhone were made. Already a cloud-based services titan, it sensed that mobile would be the future, and that if it lost control of the end-user to Apple it could be boxed out of its lifeblood services revenue. Earlier, Google had purchased Android (the company), but didn't announce Android (the OS) as a product until November 2007—ten months after the iPhone was unveiled. Android-based handsets started to become available in 2008.
Early versions of Android had plenty of teething pains, but Google's development resources and Android's free price point have contributed to it becoming the highest-volume—but not the most-profitable—mobile OS worldwide.
Microsoft tried various approaches to respond to the iPhone, famously beginning with Steve Ballmer making fun of the fact that the iPhone didn't have a keyboard. Once it became clear that the lack of a keyboard wasn't a deterrent to widespread adoption by business users, Microsoft belatedly began working on a touch-based version of Windows for phones as part of its erstwhile "Windows Everywhere" strategy.
Unfortunately, even though it was Microsoft's third or fourth attempt at a mobile version of Windows, Windows Phone didn't offer enough compelling features to attract either a critical mass of app developers or users; they were growing more committed to iOS and Android by the day, and thus harder to budge. It took some serious panic, and the firing of Windows leader Stephen Sinofsky, before Microsoft started to pivot to a "devices and services company"—a motto that new CEO Satya Nadella has since tweaked to be "cloud-first, mobile-first."
Further ReadingMicrosoft has a new mission statement, and it’s basically the same as its old oneSatya Nadella says that the company has "tough choices" ahead of it.Windows PC OEMs are still hoping they can make the Windows Everywhere strategy work, however. Mirlesse, for example, sees Windows 10 as providing the unified experience of device and application management that corporations need for mobile rollouts. “I don’t think Android or iOS is going away, but I think there’s a clear thrust for Windows 10 because it does provide that integration capability and the extra security layer,” he added.
While the economic impact of universal mobile access has been massive, we shouldn't ignore the social and cultural implications. Raman Khanna, former Stanford University CIO turned corporate venture investor, told Ars that the biggest changes he’s seen brought on by mobile computing revolve around corporate culture. “Employees at many companies—and their bosses—are now expected to be available at any time and any place. Texts get returned evenings, weekends, and even on vacation.”
On one hand, that can help employees take time away from work to be at family events. At the same time, it means that you might be painstakingly tapping away responses to business messages, rather than actually being at the event. The industry isn’t quite sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, though some companies are clearly against it: back in 2012, in an attempt to retain a modicum of work-life balance, Volkswagen decided to stop forwarding e-mails to employee Blackberry devices outside of office hours.
BYOD: Cutting costs at the cost of new headaches
By implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, large enterprises can save millions of pounds. Instead of providing and supporting expensive mobile devices to all their employees, they could merely subsidise their mobile data plans. There’s also the massive convenience factor of employees only having to lug around their own devices, rather than multiple laptops and phones.
The trade-off, of course, is that the IT department has to deal with the corporate network, and all of the corporate data therein, being accessed and stored on personal devices, raising many new security concerns.
Many enterprises have dealt with this issue by requiring employee devices to adhere to certain security policies. For example, devices may need to be encrypted, and rooting is often forbidden. Typically some type of Mobile Device Management (MDM) software is also required, such as Samsung's Knox or HP’s Touchpoint Manager, for example. This in turn is creating a backlash from some employees, who are upset that their company now has the capability to remotely wipe their personal smartphone or laptop if it suspects a security breach.
Recently, enterprise hardware vendors have also seen many companies move to a variant of BYOD: Choose Your Own Device (CYOD). “Enterprises became concerned about the security implications of the wide variety of devices coming into their networks as BYOD proliferated,” Lenovo North America’s COO, Emilio Ghilardi, explained to Ars. “[In response], they have increasingly adopted policies giving users a menu of supported devices from which to choose—aka choose your own device. This gives IT a chance to choose products that both appeal to employees as consumers, and have needed corporate-friendly management features built in.”
EnlargeGhilardi sees this growth in CYOD changing the way computers and mobile devices are designed for sale to corporations: “It is no longer true that new features and designs need to start with consumer products," Ghilardi said. "Increasingly we [Lenovo] are producing devices for sale to corporate IT that are both stylish and enterprise-ready. That helps serve both the needs of corporate employees as users, and the company’s need to manage and secure its devices and network.”
With CYOD, sometimes the devices are subsidised and need to be returned when the employee leaves the company, while in other cases the employee owns the device outright.
An intriguing footnote to the CYOD/BYOD trend has been Apple’s totally unexpected success in this arena. Despite the notoriously enterprise-unfriendly Steve Jobs, the sheer number of iOS devices sold has, quite inadvertently, given Apple a foot in the door at many corporations. Coupled with a transition of leadership to Tim Cook the result has been the growth of Apple's enterprise business from nearly nothing to $25 billion (£16.2 billion) per year in revenue. Apple is doubling down on that strategy with a major new partnership with IBM, even reaching out to Big Blue to bring its Watson AI platform to iOS with a developer toolkit.
It's too early to tell how effective this partnership will be, but there is no doubt it represents a very large threat to Microsoft's enterprise market share, and will make it more difficult for Google to keep making inroads with its Google Apps product line and its Google Apps for Work initiative.
Mobile security: Getting past passwords
I spoke to several enterprise IT executives for this article, and one thing they all agreed on is that passwords have to go. Best-case, passwords are poor protection for users at a fixed location with a keyboard. For mobile users, passwords are a complete horror show, and have proven time and time again that they’re susceptible to being stolen in a variety of ways.
Further ReadingThis 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 eachGirl makes Diceware passwords, rolled with real dice, written by hand, sent by mail.Policies requiring hard-to-remember passwords, frequent changes to passwords, and continual password re-entry due to session timeouts make things even worse for users with limited benefits to security. Two-factor authentication is a step in the right direction, but it presents the scary possibility of being entirely locked out of your computing environment if your phone is dead or stolen.
Both CIOs and venture capitalists see a lot of promise in a variety of more customised approaches to security. Khanna explained to Ars that the fingerprint readers already available on some phones, and now tablets, are only the first of many biometric approaches to security. Another example is Intel's 3D-capable RealSense camera that lets you use your face as a biometric login via Microsoft's Windows Hello initiative.
There are some other innovative techniques in use as well: by sensing your phone's location, for example, credit card companies can decide that a transaction is probably legitimate if both your card and your phone are in the same place. Going forward, one startup is demonstrating that it can tell by your specific finger motions whether it was you or someone else that typed your password or PIN into your phone—essentially gait analysis, but for your fingers.
Overhauling enterprise applications
Most existing line-of-business applications pre-date the widespread use of mobile devices; they were designed for terminals or PCs. As a result, there is a huge need to rapidly make them accessible to business users over their preferred device—which is increasingly a smartphone or tablet. Desktop virtualisation solutions, like XenDesktop from Citrix, are an obvious short-term solution, but aren't ideal because mobile devices have smaller screens and are touch-based, instead of having a keyboard and mouse.
Instead, companies are turning to everyone from creative agencies to traditional IT vendors to build native mobile apps to replace much, if not all, of the functionality found in the current desktop versions. Some business application startups report only being asked to demo the mobile version of their applications, with potential investors not even bothering to investigate whether they have a solution for the desktop.
Starting in 1998, the Sony VAIO 707 was one of the first "thin and light" laptops to integrate a CD-ROM drive. It was the beginning of a trend that would result in today's hybrid devices.
Starting in 1998, the Sony VAIO 707 was one of the first "thin and light" laptops to integrate a CD-ROM drive. It was the beginning of a trend that would result in today's hybrid devices.
The Samsung X10, released in 2003, was one of the first laptops to feature the Intel Centrino platform, which paired the Pentium M CPU with a Wi-Fi module. Centrino was superb.
Released in 2007, the dinky little white Asus Eee PC was the first netbook. The first model ran Linux; future models ran Windows.
The Asus X21, released in October 2011, was one of the first Ultrabooks. It was priced at $1,000, and had an SSD instead of a normal spinning-platter hard drive.
Peter Bright
The Surface 3, with a detachable keyboard, is one of a new breed of hybrid laptops. The Asus Transformer is another similar example.
The Spectre x360 is another hybrid laptop, but this time it uses a 360-degree hinge to turn from a clamshell laptop into a tablet.
Andrew Cunningham
And now, of course, even Apple has entered the hybrid market with the iPad Pro.
Mobile is changing the future of computing platforms
The most visible influence of mobile computing on the design of more traditional computers is the rise of the hybrid device. Early efforts by Asus (the Transformer) never really caught on because the Android platform at the time didn't have the requisite ecosystem support. Even Microsoft's first hybrid—the original Surface—was frequently scorned and not a big seller.
Now, though, hybrids are one of the fastest growing segments of the computer industry, with Microsoft's Surface 3 product line selling well and the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 recently hitting the market. Most major PC makers have introduced their own hybrid devices by this point—HP has the Spectre x360, Lenovo has the Yoga 900, and even Apple has entered the fray with the iPad Pro.
Further ReadingAnalysis: Nadella threatens to consign Microsoft to a future of desktop obscurityBallmer's vision is undone, with nothing coherent to replace it.While most of the hybrid devices look fairly similar and have remarkably consistent specs, under the covers Apple and Microsoft have taken dramatically different approaches. Apple is pushing the concept of “mobile first” to the limit by basing its hybrid strategy entirely on iOS, instead of OS X. With an increasing number of employees relying on iPads instead of laptops, this is a way for Apple to capitalise on that momentum. In contrast, Microsoft is attempting to extend its legacy installed base by basing its device strategy at every level on Windows 10. That gives Windows hybrid users an immediate bridge back to existing applications, but has slowed down the availability for new "universal" applications written to run well on all Windows 10 devices.
Microsoft does have a second prong to its attack on mobile: making its applications and services accessible on all mobile devices, and betting that it can replace client-side platform revenue with subscriptions and cloud services. It has put a lot of work into creating touch-friendly versions of Office and other apps for Android and iOS, as well as for Windows Phone. This is clearly a very necessary move for Microsoft, but has the disadvantage of spreading its development resources —and those of its partners—fairly thin. Likely as a consequence of that, the actual desktop applications that make up Office 2016 evolved very little from their Office 2013 counterparts, as all the effort went into building the alternate client versions and retooling for its cloud-first/mobile-first strategy.
Mobile computing goes way beyond its desktop ancestor
Perhaps the ultimate expression of how far mobile computing has come is the mad rush to go beyond simple productivity applications, and incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into our smartphones. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are beginning to deliver on the elusive vision of voice-recognising digital assistants—twenty years after startups Wildfire and General Magic pioneered the idea using standard phone lines. In the meantime, IBM has gone even further, by starting a dedicated Mobile Innovation Lab, and providing mobile access to its Watson cognitive engine—a development with vast implications for enterprises.
Enlarge / Our editor, Sebastian Anthony, standing inside Watson. This is the same Watson that famously beat Ken Jennings in the Jeopardy gameshow.Sebastian AnthonyNot only does Watson show the potential for delivering on many of the until-now science fiction aspects of AI, but instead of being confined to scientists in a data centre, its power will be available to employees and even customers, anytime, and anywhere—currently through applications that use the Watson SDK for mobile devices.
The combination of the nearly infinite computing power available in server farms like those run by Google and Amazon, or the cognitive horsepower available on a Watson system, with the ubiquity of access to the cloud, has made every mobile device potentially as powerful as an entire network of computers.
Smartphones are now also multi-sensor platforms, with cameras, microphones, accelerometers, and GPS chips built in. Mobile applications that harness this synergy are just starting to emerge. For example, Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) is working with HP to become a “true digital hospital,” where mobile devices in the hands of doctors and nurses, backed by the cloud and big data analysis, will play a central role in improving patient safety and care. At hospitals in the US, IBM is doing something very similar with Watson.
On the consumer side of things, the imminent popularisation of wearable tech may result in some innovative personal mHealth (“quantified self”) applications popping up over the next few years, too.
Further ReadingHow the hybrid cloud and open-source tech are changing ITAfter a rocky start, it's clear that computing is going in just one way: towards the cloud.Unsurprisingly, all of these changes are going to result in some upheaval for IT types. “Going from today’s workplace to tomorrow’s is going to be a journey,” Mirlesse told us. “We have to integrate the cloud, mobility, social innovation, and drive mobility interaction in context-aware engagement—where are you geographically, position in the company, employee or client, and so on.”
Apps: The battleground of the future
Not only are mobile devices revolutionising the way that employees work, and how companies interact with their employees, they are increasingly the preferred way for corporations to interact with their customers. This trend, which got rolling with the simple Web interfaces for customer self-service, is now snowballing with every company and its creative agency working to create a world-class online presence and experience for its customers.
Longer term, with companies investing massively in mobile-first application development, already crowded app stores will become even harder to navigate and the once-simple iPhone page of app icons will have turned into pages of folders and icons. As a wise and prescient band stated in 1974, if you thought that mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, and Windows were already extraordinarily popular, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
As a result, over the next few years the battle for mobile device real estate and app installation will be rejoined. Khanna sees apps becoming a major battleground in the future, explaining that the “apps people choose to install on their phone will help determine who wins and who loses in the battle for customer mindshare.”
Ultimately, turning every customer into a user of a company's apps will make IT and the role of CIO more important—and more challenging—than ever.
David Cardinal has worked in Silicon Valley for 35 years, including a decade at Sun Microsystems, where he started off as a programmer and was later Eric Schmidt's chief of staff. David was then CEO of FirstFloor Software and CTO of Calico Commerce before the dot-com bubble burst and he changed career paths. Nowadays, David is a freelance tech writer, a software and digital imaging consultant, and a professional photographer. You can find him on Twitter at @davidcardinal, or his photos at cardinalphoto.com.
This post originated on Ars Technica UK