Is Apple really conquering the workplace ?

How Apple could lose corporate users

The following scene happened in January 2015, in a cosy corporate meeting room.

“I hate my iPhone!”

“ So do I ! I’m never sure my e-mails are really sent, and typing is really not good. Why did they have to give us those *expletive*ing machines?”

I looked around in the meeting room, and noticed a familiar sight. In front of each person lay, neatly set on the table, an iPhone piled upon another, bigger iPhone. The smaller of the two was in the company standard issue plastic case; the bigger one had a fancier shell.

I wondered: if they really hate their (professional) iPhones, why in the world would they want to inflict it upon themselves as a personal smartphone?
Or more to the point: what is this gap between personal and corporate use, that Apple is still unable to bridge ?

Disclaimer: the following conclusions are drawn from a small sample of observations, i.e. a dozen or so colleagues and friends working at various European companies, as well as my own experience. However the feedback is consistent enough, so that I allowed myself to extrapolate a bit the data.

This is about real money

The corporate market for mobile devices is worth billions of dollars, and Apple’s leadership has big plans there.

Some changes in corporate purchasing have already opened the door. In some companies, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies allow employees’ personal choices to determine the professional device they use ; in others, senior management themselves push towards the products they know and like, based on personal use.

Which means that

• Preferences of consumers or employees have more weight in corporate purchasing decisions;
• A bad user experience in the professional context could lead to user backlash and market share loss. In that context, corporate IT could argue against splashing on iPhones, compared to cheaper devices running Android or Windows Phone.

Here, the huge iOS app store doesn’t play a decisive role in user adoption. When a device is imposed on corporate employees, they start using it half-heartedly for its basic functionality. They stay a long time in first-party apps, and only start looking at those fancy to-do list applications and minimalist productivity tools once they are convinced that the device “works” for them. And if they own a smartphone for their personal use, they may stick to it and never use the pro one for anything beyond email.

But other factors are key in the iPhone user experience:

A professional smartphone is (still) an e-mail machine

The first reason why employees are given smartphones is to be able to respond their e-mail when out of the office.
In the professional context, it has to work flawlessly. Any lost stuff can create a real, serious problem.
This is why we don’t tolerate the same level of flaws and glitches in a pro Device. Instead of, say, 99% reliability for a personal machine, we accept nothing below 99,99%, and even then, will complain loudly about the 0,01% of problems.

I also suspect, without data to back it up, that the enterprise set-up of e-mail is also a culprit: it is a more complicated thing than just linking your IMAP account, especially due to the constraints of information security.

If Apple wants to take hold in the enterprise market with the same qualities that propelled the iPhone at the top of customer satisfaction charts, they need to improve significantly the reliability of their standard mail app, which is the one people use most.

I accept the notion that e-mail is a concept of the past, and that dedicated apps could, in the long run, replace many of its uses. Innovators and start-ups may be pioneering new tools and uses; however, the hard reality of most corporations today is that notifications, requests, work, information and documents are still circulated by way of e-mail.

We expect a lot from our professional calendar app

Here MS Outlook is the reference for most users, and this software, for all its limitations, is very capable. Of course the comparison of a mobile app with a desktop app is unfair, but the existence of a calendar app on the smartphone means that people can, and will, compare.
In particular, I have heard — and felt — frustration about the limited options to answer to an invitation, check availability, and selectively update meetings. This functionality gap is blaring.

Typing on glass still sucks

Where Blackberry was renowned for the quality of physical keyboards, Apple and their Android followers have bet the house on the fact that typing is so 2000. Now we can do everything with a few taps and voice commands !

It may be true for private uses, but wherever intensive e-mailing remains the norm, the experience suffers. Not to mention those old iPhones without TouchID, which you have to manually unlock by typing, several times a day, the same long-but-secure password… Even a seasoned glass typist will make mistakes, and the frustration quickly adds up.

A better predictive typing would go a long way. The existing software does usually a decent job, but there are a lot of online collections of its most funny errors that show how much room for improvement remains.

Time to regroup?

Apple has made a lot of progress towards mass adoption of their products in the enterprise, but numbers don’t tell the whole story. Their position does not look as strong as in the consumer market, the fit with use cases remains inconsistent; if they were able to run satisfaction surveys focusing on the professional use of their mobile devices, I suspect the results would be disappointing.

A large part of the problem is about making existing functionalities work more reliably. This topic resonates with the recent “high functional ground” online discussion : concern is rising among developers and specialists about the deteriorating fit and finish of Apple software.

A gap in software quality would open a window of opportunity for competitors to seize, and nowhere is it as obvious as in the corporate context.

Over the past years, the development of smartphones was spurred to a large extent by a features race between iOS and Android. As the market matures and differentiation by features becomes harder, stabilizing and consolidating the product might actually be the right choice to keep growing.