Gartner: Don&#39;t Use Google Desktop In Enterprise
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Research analysts warn about the danger of using first-generation local search tools from the likes of Google, Microsoft, and others.
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(InfoWorld) - The problem may not rival the movies Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror for sheer terror, but CIOs and datacenter managers are still well advised to deal decisively with so-called ghost servers. Like celluloid zombies, these forgotten pieces of equipment are dead when it comes to improving the bottom line, but they are very much alive when it comes to eating up IT budgets. The unproductive -- and usually undocumented -- servers take up valuable real estate, consume increasingly expensive electricity and, in some cases, absorb ongoing maintenance and lease payments. "You can find ghost servers in a lot of enterprises," says John Phelps, an analyst at Gartner. "And the larger and more diverse the company, the harder it can be to have a single group or technology platform that provides control over all corporate assets." Sun Microsystems, through case studies of two large corporate datacenter operations and anecdotal analysis of efforts with many customers, believes that 8 percent to 10 percent of all servers in large corporations have no identifiable function. In the two datacenter studies, 150 ghost servers were found in an installation of 1,800 servers, and 354 ghost servers were found in an installation of 3,500 servers. One of the companies studied was Sun itself. Sun used system performance tools to monitor CPU utilization and I/O and network traffic, collecting the data over the course of a month, and sorted out machines with zero utilization. Sun removed the questionable servers from operation for 90 days to determine any impact. At the end of the period, it found that 60 percent of the servers could be permanently decommissioned, says Mark Monroe, director of sustainable computing at Sun. The company now conducts quarterly reviews of utilization rates. "It's hard to get people to admit they have unused infrastructure," Monroe says. "It's expensive, wasteful, and having a CIO admit he's got millions of dollars of idle assets lying around could get a guy fired. I think we can remove some of the stigma by talking about the facts, and having people realize it's worse just to leave them lying around." Corporations need to admit "they are like everyone else" and try to reduce the number of idle machines to 3 percent or less, "which is three times better than the industry average," he says. The cost of running a server for three years exceeds its original acquisition cost, so keeping the ghost servers around has an easily measured effect in energy savings. Identifying and eliminating wasted resources are key components of green or "eco-computing," Monroe says. The good news: Advances in asset management and configuration software can help businesses find and shut down these useless machines. And more companies are being proactive when it comes to adopting policies in this area. A survey of more than 300 businesses in the U.S. and Europe conducted by Gartner in 2006 found that 74 percent of respondents said they have a formal software and hardware asset management program. More advanced autodiscovery capabilities and more efficient, effective and accurate search engines mean "there has recently been more focus on discovering the lost and unidentified equipment, especially in industries where security concerns are growing," says Richard Ptak, analyst at Ptak, Noel & Associates. "Every major company I've ever dealt with has had the problem to some level." When BlueCross BlueShield of Florida (BCBSF), which provides insurance services for nearly 9 million people, decided to build a new datacenter in 2005, the company also felt it was time to get a comprehensive look at its asset inventory, says Paul Stallings, senior manager for provisioning services. In addition to the new and existing datacenters, BCBSF also has about 10 smaller server rooms in various locations around the state. The server room equipment was being managed by different departments within the insurance provider, and each had a different way of tracking and documenting assets, Stallings says. Using Aperture Technologies' VISTA tool beginning in late 2005, BCBSF began documenting its IT resources under a single umbrella. "There were definitely undocumented assets," Stallings says. "When you have seven or eight teams managing the hardware, each using a different process, there was really no way to get a systemwide understanding of what we had in our various datacenters." By getting a complete view of its asset inventory, BCBSF has been able to create a formal decommissioning process. When a system needs to be retired, a workflow ticket is automatically generated. The IT department can then start to reclaim floor space, remove cabling and place old servers in pool of equipment that can be either redeployed or completely removed from the environment. As one of largest IT services providers in the world, Fujitsu Services operates seven Fujitsu-owned datacenters in the U.K. with more than 200,000 sq. ft. of floor space, and manages 11 customer-owned facilities. As a result of its outsourcing business, the company has acquired datacenter facilities and IT equipment from a variety of sources, and much of the equipment came with no asset or configuration management process in place, says Mark Scott, global datacenter delivery manager at Fujitsu Services. The company had previously used a configuration cataloging system that recorded only the location of equipment on the floor, but it did not provide any insight into specific use of the equipment. In attempt to get a comprehensive inventory and create an asset management strategy that would allow it to maximize existing datacenter space and continue to grow, Fujitsu Services began working with Aperture to deploy its VISTA datacenter resource management system in 2005, and the company began to see a variety of issues that were wasting resources. "We found we had IT equipment on the floor that people within the company had thought we had gotten rid of years ago," he says. "We looked deeper and found out we were also still paying lease and maintenance on the equipment. We even found that we were paying lease and maintenance on equipment that been removed from our datacenters." By extending the asset management systems across its entire U.K.-based datacenter operation, Fujitsu Services has reduced its operational costs and then passed the savings on to customers, Scott says. Since customers are generally charged for the floor space they use within the datacenters, the removal of unproductive equipment has allowed Fujitsu Services to reduce specific hosting charges for those customers. So, for example, if Fujitsu can reduce the footprint by 10 percent, Scott says that 10 percent savings can be passed along to the customer. The company is also developing the ability to invoice for the actual power required by individual customer installations, versus the current practice of invoicing for power based on the floor space used by the servers. "We also found lots of badly installed equipment," Scott says. The poor installation processes had led to what he characterized as vulnerabilities that meant his company had difficulties meeting customer uptime requirements. "The result was really that we had actually built vulnerabilities into the operation. It was a real wake-up call. We now have a complete vulnerability check and can control installations from the beginning to end." Alticor, the parent company for such businesses as Amway, Quixtar, and Access Business Group, handles IT demands for affiliates all over the world, says Randy Gast, supervisor of server technology at Alticor. The company uses a combination of management tools to keep track of its software and hardware assets, including BMC Software's Remedy service management and Hewlett-Packard's Systems Insight Manager. Using the software, Alticor early last year found that more than 200 servers, or about a third of its 650 x86 processor-based servers, were running at utilization rates of 10 percent or less, Gast says. Even scarier, these underused servers had accumulated without IT knowledge, over the previous three years as new equipment was bought to handle individual applications or affiliate requirements. Working with virtualization specialist VMware, Alticor has embarked on an effort to consolidate the unproductive system and increase overall utilization rates to between 60 percent and 70 percent, Gast says. To date, Alticor has consolidated 150 of the unproductive servers onto seven servers using virtualization software. Alticor has donated the majority of the servers it has taken out of operation during the consolidation effort to charitable organizations. Servers that were too old to be used by groups such as local schools and churches have been sold for scrap. "Using Remedy, we can track the lease agreements for our hardware, when they start and expire, and use it to have automatic triggers that let us know we need to consider replacing certain equipment," Gast says. That said, there is generally a great deal of inefficiency regarding how customers get rid of old gear. "A lot of businesses don't have a disposition strategy, primarily because it's easier to buy" new servers than dispose of the old ones, says Daniel Ransdell, general manager of IBM's Global Asset Recovery Solutions business unit. "Even if you've unplugged the equipment and stuck it in some closet or corner, the business is losing the opportunity to recoup value. Servers aren't like fine wine. They don't get better with age." Energy cost is the major issue that is changing attitudes inside corporations. In August, the Environmental Protection Agency published a report that documented datacenter power usage. According to the report, datacenters in the U.S. consumed about 60 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, or about 1.5 percent of total electricity consumption in the country. The EPA points out that datacenter energy use has doubled in the past five years, and is expected to double again in the next five years to an annual cost of about $7.4 billion. The EPA says existing technologies and strategies could reduce typical sever energy use by 25 percent, and even greater savings are possible using more advanced technologies. Rockwell Bonecutter, head of datacenter technology and operations at Accenture, believes that a large percentage of the ghost server problem was alleviated when most businesses engaged in extensive Y2k efforts within their infrastructure. In the intervening years, however, there has been a significant growth of systems that operate at 5 percent utilization or less, often because of poor communication and asset management within the company. "When it comes to servers that nobody knows about that are sitting for years and nobody has touched, there are probably examples in every IT environment, but it's obviously impossible to measure what you don't know exists," Bonecutter says. "What we have found is that it is not unusual to find that 40 percent of all servers on a floor could be consolidated and virtualized out of the environment." Consolidation through virtualization has also led to the new phenomena of virtual ghost servers. The ease and quickness with which virtual servers can be created can often leave servers cluttered with numerous poorly documented virtual machines created for short-term or abandoned projects. With tools allowing businesses to get a more holistic view of their assets and policies in place to guide a formal decommissioning process, businesses can now reduce the risk and associated costs of ghost servers, without the need to call on the aid of another great Hollywood institution, Ghostbusters. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate. Darrell Dunn is a freelance reporter in Fort Worth, Texas, with 20 years of experience covering business technology and enterprise IT. Contact him at darrelldunn@sbcglobal.net.
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A top Microsoft executive defended desktop application software, the source of the company&#39;s revenue for three decades, arguing on Tuesday that even services-based companies such as Google still need it.
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People who use public or workplace computers for e-mail, instant messaging and Web searching have a new security risk to worry about: Google&#39;s free new tool that indexes a PC&#39;s contents for quickly finding data.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft and IBM executives Wednesday admitted feeling heat from Google now that the Web search giant is trying to make inroads into the enterprise market with its hosted suite of communication and collaboration tools. Google Apps, a hosted service, is gaining traction primarily in universities but is a welcome addition to enterprise software because of its simplicity and ease of use, said Rob Curry, director of Microsoft's Office business platform group, during a panel discussion today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. "We actually see [Google] as a great competitor in this space," Curry said. "And they bring a good spirit in terms of simplicity, ease of use and things we're trying to leverage as we go forward in our development cycle." Google Apps was described as a "direct shot at Microsoft Office" by Forrester Analyst Erica Driver when Google released an enterprise version of the tool in February. For US$50 per user per year, customers get e-mail, instant messaging, a calendar tool, a Web page creator, support for e-mail on BlackBerry mobile devices and integration with Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Analysts say Google Apps offers less functionality than Office but is less expensive. IBM, which offers the Lotus Notes set of e-mail, calendaring and collaborative applications, and Lotus Sametime, an IM and Web conferencing tool, has partnered with Google but still sees the company as a potential competitor. Lotus Sametime allows IM customers to communicate with users of Google Talk. "We're a key partner of Google's," said Ken Bisconti, vice president of messaging and collaboration software for IBM, during the panel discussion. "We partner with them, and continue to partner with them, hopefully for the good of our customers. I also fully expect them to become a competitor to us in the business space." Google executives are busy trying to understand the requirements of enterprises, a learning process that will be crucial if the search company hopes to gain market traction for Google Apps outside of academia, Bisconti said. "Most of our customers tell us they're talking to the Google enterprise team," he said. "Google is doing a good job of collecting information to understand enterprise requirements. ... I don't see them as a near-term competitor but as a long-term potential substitution." No Google officials participated in the panel. The session, titled "Vendor Spotlight: Assessing IBM & Microsoft Platforms for Collaboration & Unified Communications," also gave the vendors a chance to discuss the broad trend in which employees expect the types of instant communication available to them in their personal lives. This is placing increased important on IM, Web conferencing, video and audio conferencing, and mobile communications. "The role of instant messaging has completely transformed and it has become a business expectation," said Akiba Saeedi, IBM's program director for unified communications and collaboration products. Years ago, people questioned whether e-mail would become a necessary business function. No one would question e-mail's importance today, and IM seems to be heading in a similar direction, Saeedi said. Bisconti cautioned against getting caught up in industry buzzwords such asÂ "enterprise 2.0," but said the desire for collaborative technology in general is real and has created a huge business opportunity for software vendors. "I have never seen so much senior-level interest in companies in improving the way they communicate, collaborate and improve the speed and agility of their business," he said.
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Google is releasing a new edition of its hosted applications suite that end-users can bring into the workplace without the involvement of their IT department.It means that IT managers who fret about employees using unauthorized software at work will have another tool to worry about, especially in industries where information management is heavily regulated, like health care and finance.The new release, called Google Apps Team Edition, is due to be available Thursday for free. It is aimed at employees who are interested in using Google Apps but whose employers haven&#39;t signed up for it, said Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager.Team Edition contains the core communication and collaboration services and applications from other editions, like the word processor, spreadsheet, Start page, Talk instant messaging, and calendar, but not Gmail, which requires IT participation to re-route the company&#39;s e-mail flow.So far, more than 500,000 mostly small organizations have signed up for Google Apps, but the other versions -- Standard, Education, Partner, and Premier -- require IT to implement the suite because its services are linked to an organization&#39;s Internet domain.That changes with the Team Edition, which will let employees set up Google Apps workgroups as long as they have valid e-mail addresses with their organizations&#39; domains, Sheth said.&quot;Google Apps has been, by definition, an IT project, and now we want to let people use it without IT involvement,&quot; Sheth said.Once signed up with Team Edition, people can see who else in their organization&#39;s Internet domain is also a user, and invite those who aren&#39;t, Sheth said.&quot;It provides a quick way for workgroups to start collaborating,&quot; he said.IT departments shouldn&#39;t get angry about Team Edition, according to Sheth, because, unlike other software that employees use without IT approval, it provides an upgrade path to IT-manageable versions.&quot;The IT department always has the option to sign up for the Standard Edition for free if they want to provide control over this,&quot; Sheth said. &quot;This is a solid, happy medium.&quot;Team Edition can also be upgraded to the other editions, like Education, which is free, and Premier, which costs $50 per user per year. Although Gmail isn&#39;t part of Team Edition, Google is exploring ways to make it a part, Sheth said.By its very nature as a Web-hosted software suite, an unmanaged Google Apps deployment can represent a concern for IT departments, since the applications and the data generated are stored outside organizations&#39; firewalls in Google data centers.However, Team Edition will be far from alone among the hosted software that employees use in their organizations without getting approval from the IT department, said Erica Driver, a Forrester Research analyst.The IT department reactions to Team Edition will depend on the organization&#39;s culture, which range from those in &quot;lockdown mode&quot; to those more tolerant and aware that Web 2.0 technologies are seeping in from the consumer world to the workplace, Driver said.Team Edition, with its bottom-up, end-user-driven focus, fits in with Google&#39;s traditional strategy of appealing to individuals, grown out of its consumer services, and will likely boost the adoption of Google Apps in companies, government agencies, educational institutions and other organizations that don&#39;t currently use the suite, said Matt Cain, a Gartner analyst.&quot;The Google model is to prime the well at the end-user level and assist IT somewhere along the way, but the demand generation for the suite will definitely be at the rank-and-file level, not at the IT level,&quot; Cain said.Google needs to make sure it strikes a balance between rallying end-users and giving IT managers a way to enter the picture and exert control, he said. &quot;Google will encourage end-user adoption but it can&#39;t disintermediate the IT staff, which will have to ultimately clean up any mess that&#39;s created,&quot; Cain said.
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The logic behind Google (GOOG ) Desktop Search is simple enough: Why shouldn&#39;t the best tool for finding things on the Web do equally well at helping people search their own computers?
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InfoWorld - A top Microsoft executive defended desktop application software, the source of the company's revenue for three decades, arguing on Tuesday that even services-based companies such as Google still need it.
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Google will do better, but don't look for the company to dominate the market anytime soon, says the company's top exec.
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InfoWorld - Google&#39;s claims that&#160;Microsoft&#39;s built-in Vista desktop indexing and search tool violates its antitrust agreement&#160;could be difficult to prove even if the software does slow down the performance of Google&#39;s competitive Google Desktop offering.
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Today's announcement from Facebook is the reason why Google announced OpenSocial last week. They must have gotten a leak from one of the companies that stood with Facebook, so they knew what was coming. They weren't scared of Facebook's technology, because they didn't respond with technology. They were scared because Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does. They are getting ready to offer some very premium web real estate that (pay attention now) Google can't compete with. And advertising is Google's bread and butter, advertising is to Google as operating systems are to Microsoft. They can't let somebody appear to be better than they are in advertising. Yet that's what Facebook is, better than Google in advertising. Here's what Facebook can do.  Let's say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends "Dave bought a Wii and he likes it." That's a lot more likely to result in a sale  than an intrusive ad like this one, that was displayed next to an email I sent to some friends about their New Networked Living Room. Google thinks I might want to buy Moroccan Lamps, or something called a Unique Shabby Chic (huh?) or Crate & Barrell bedroom furniture. Of course I tune that shit out, I don't even see it. It has zero impact.   Anyway, I was talking with Doc Searls a few minutes ago and he mentioned OpenSocial and I told him it was just a lot of noise meant to distract people from what Facebook was doing in advertising. He hadn't heard anything about it even though he was at a tech conference in Denver today and yesterday. I said there you go, Google's strategy worked. But to no effect, longterm, because Facebook has the momentum and Google, try as hard as they want to stop it, will not be able to, any more than Alta Vista or Infoseek were able to stop Google once they figured out that their lunch was eaten. Google will be around for a long time, I'm not saying they will go away, but Facebook will be around too. And Google will have a hard time catching up to them.  Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!  8/3/06: "Information is welcome, advertising is offensive."
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Gartner Inc. research director Rich Mogull says that customization of off-the-shelf software is the weakest link in application security. He spoke at the Gartner IT Security Summit in Sydney. Needless to say, some vendors in attendance were moved to respond.
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Google is firing back at enterprise search vendor Autonomy, saying the company recently distributed a white paper that contains &quot;significant inaccuracies&quot; about&#160;Google&#39;s Search Appliance.The white paper, according to Google, states that Search Appliance &quot;does not index all your critical content.&quot;&quot;On the contrary, the Google Search Appliance was designed to search all critical content in the enterprise, including file shares, intranets, databases, and real-time business data - all from one simple search box,&quot; wrote Nitin Mangtani, lead product manager, enterprise search, on an official blog. Mangtani added that Google has also supplied connectors to products like SharePoint and Documentum, and an open-source content connector framework.The white paper does not appear to be available on Autonomy&#39;s Web site, nor is it provided through Google&#39;s blog post. Autonomy could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday.Autonomy&#39;s document also claimed Search Appliance lacks enterprise-level security, according to Mangtani. It in fact supports a number of security access control systems and also allows security settings at the document level, he said. The latter &quot;ensures that end-users see only those documents in the results list to which they have access,&quot; according to Mangtani.In addition, the white paper noted that the search appliance&#39;s &quot;capabilities are still being honed,&quot; Mangtani wrote.&quot;This is certainly true: We are constantly working to improve the appliance, to make sure it offers ever increasing relevancy out of the box,&quot; he acknowledged.However, he added, &quot;The fact is that we employ thousands of engineers focused on search relevancy and quality. In the last three months alone, seven new Google Enterprise Labs experiments have been launched (by Google, not third parties as Autonomy claimed) to enhance the enterprise search experience.&quot;Meanwhile, a report released in December by the analyst firm CMS Watch also said the company&#39;s technology has certain shortcomings, among them a lack of &quot;advanced tuning controls found in most other enterprise search products.&quot;This is the second time Google&#39;s search team has responded to an Autonomy white paper, and overall the exchange is reflective of the tightening market for enterprise search.Microsoft&#39;s bid this month to buy Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), a key competitor of Autonomy, was seen by some observers as a validation of the market.Autonomy, based in England and San Francisco, is one of the larger independent players in enterprise search. Fourth-quarter revenue released this week stood at $115 million, up 57 percent over the same period in 2006, it said. Adjusted net profits in the fourth quarter were $28.5 million, up from $18.4 million in 2006.
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New PC indexing tools such as Google Desktop Search pose security risks to businesses that useÂ SSL remote access because the tools copy material accessed during SSL sessions and make it available to unauthorized people who later use the same PC.
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The changes are in response to a complaint by Google that a feature of the operating system is anticompetitive.
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(InfoWorld) - Gartner, IDC, and 451 Group research analysts, this week warned IT administrators to keep iPhones away from their businesses. "We're telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting [iPhone use in] the enterprise," Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said. "This is basically a cellular iPod with some other capabilities, and it's important that it be recognized as such." As if that will stop people from buying them anyway when they hit the market in the U.S. next week. The reality is that no matter how hard IT administrators try, the iPhone will be snapped up by their employees -- and not just the average Joes either. The device is a status symbol that will likely be snapped up by business leaders as the digital technorati. Try telling your CEO the iPhone doesn't play well with your IT systems. Dulaney and other researchers notwithstanding, this device can be good for the enterprise because of the business needs of smartphone users. It is an iPhone, after all, with an emphasis on phone. It offers e-mail -- currently the most popular means of business communications. There's an address/phone Book for quick access to contacts. It offers SMS, a quick way to contact other mobile phone users, and voicemail -- both useful to road warriors. There's a real Web browser -- by far the most underpowered and underappreciated part of a mobile phone. And it contains a slew of enterprise-worthy apps, including a calendar, access to maps, spreadsheets, and a document reader. All of these things are important -- and all can be done to a greater or lesser extent on most business-focused PDA phones. But in the business world, the mobile Web browser is the key to the future of business apps, and it is becoming a platform unto itself. One thing that Apple CEO Steve Jobs made abundantly clear at last week's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is that the iPhone would include a full browser. The Symbian and Linux platforms' best browser is Opera Mini -- which isn't that bad -- but it by no means constitutes a full browser. Windows Mobile's browser isn't bad either, but it also falls well short of Internet Explorer 7. Additionally, the iPhone browser has a lot of zooming and panning tricks that make it more usable on the relatively small screen. In that crucial area, advantage: iPhone. Why is the browser crucial? Because most new business applications are being built around it. AJAX and other browser technology innovations over the past few years have turned the browser into a veritable platform. Sure, a lot of legacy applications still require browserless, platform-specific client applications. But those days are numbered. It's not just the isolated applications that are moving to a browser. All of the stalwart office applications are also moving to the Web. With Google Office (which now works with Safari -- the iPhone browser), Soho Office, and even Web-centric versions of Microsoft Office applications, the browser is truly the new business platform. The iPhone is not without its business-use flaws. It doesn't natively sync up with Lotus Notes or Exchange - and Microsoft, at least, will most likely do everything in its power to try to keep it that way to protect its Windows Mobile business. It can, however, hook up to IMAP email, LDAP address books, and WebDav for calendaring; with a bit of tweaking, that will work well for Exchange-based companies. Microsoft SharePoint can also be browsed from the Web interface, but to what extent? Time -- and the work of apps developers -- will tell. A newly anointed relationship with Cisco on all things iPhone should also let the device into the VPN and might even let an iPhone play well with Cisco VoIP solutions. And of course, don't forget the arduous task of getting your conservative IT department to accept the idea of letting loose an Apple phone -- or even MacBook Pro -- into the office. Previews of the phone haven't yet touted an instant messaging client like Apple's iChat or AOL Instant Messenger. It is likely, however, that Apple will include something with instant-messaging functionality in the near future -- there are still four slots left in the iPhone's application window. It's also true that the first-generation iPhone isn't the raw specs winner by any stretch. That honor goes to the Symbian/Windows Mobile 6 Phones coming from Toshiba (the G900), Nokia (the N95), Samsung (the F700) and HTC (the Shift). AT&T's EDGE wireless network is slow by today's standards, and while Wifi connectivity will help, there are questions about why Apple has forsaken the HSDPA/UTMS component and when an update might occur. Given that battery life is a factor -- Apple this week released updated specs that go beyond what it touted in January -- EDGE makes sense because it's more energy efficient. Also, the 8GB max on storage is seems low. At a time when you can buy an 8GB SD card for less than $80, Apple likely looked to keep costs down with an eye on upping that storage when it's economically smart. Most users would likely be happy with a micro/mini/SD card slot now standard on most smartphones. There is, of course, the price. The iPhone's hefty $499 and $599 price tags, depending on which model you buy, is a definite disadvantage in business. With relatively comparable gear (from a corporate standpoint), such as the Motorola Q, which is almost free with a service plan, buying an iPhone requires serious justification. We're talking about spending the equivalent of a budget laptop. Of course, something that you spend half your day using should justify the premium that this delicious piece of hardware demands. And then there are at least two intangibles: Usability. Apple's legendary reputation for making painful tasks easy will totally transform the mobile phone industry. And remember, companies love productivity from their workers. Until now, the big players have been Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, and Linux. They all had successes. But it's the last 10 percent of usability that Apple always manages to squeeze out its products will be the differentiator. Apple did the same in the computer industry until Microsoft caught up. Apple has learned from this and patented every minute detail of the iPhone, making it harder for copycats to appear anytime soon. The few seconds here there that the iPhone saves users will quickly add up. It's the little things that make for big savings across an entire enterprise. Business bling, baby. Everyone knows that this is the phone to have. Just look at the buzz ahead of the June 29 launch. Apple has spent the last few years building up its brand across all channels and is reaping the rewards like no other company in the industry. As much as the enterprise IT guys will want to recite better specs for rival Windows Mobile devices, nobody wants to hear that. I can imagine any number of CEOs saying, "I don't care! Just make the iPhone work on our systems!" And if it works for the CEO, you can bet the sales folk will want in on the action, too. Think they'll want to show up to a meeting with an important client and whip out last year's "hot" phone? They might as well wear parachute pants as well.
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The PC market won't grow as fast in 2004 as originally predicted by Gartner Inc. analysts, as concerns about the overall health of the U.S. economy weigh on the market, the market research company said Monday.