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We are surrounded with a class of mobile devices that are eight years out of date, and predate the iPhone entirely. These relics are everywhere we go, affecting our daily lives in countless ways.
I’m talking, of course, about enterprise-class devices: the scanners that grocery clerks use to track inventory, the stylus tablets that couriers log their deliveries on, the handhelds that stockkeepers take into the warehouse, and the button-covered rectangle the agent uses to check in your rental car.
Todd Greco
Todd Greco is Interaction Design Director at Ziba Design, leading the creation of new software and physical interfaces. Follow him on Twitter @mrballistic.
On the consumer side, we’re in the middle of a mobile revolution; the computer in your pocket outguns what was on your desktop only a few years ago, and the software it runs is dramatically more intuitive. But the people who really need mobile computing power and a well-designed user experience are running around with devices that haven’t evolved in a decade.
Over the past couple of decades working with large corporations that use these devices, I’ve seen brilliant engineers spend countless hours trying to wring 60 seconds out of a worker’s day, in the hopes of driving up efficiency and saving money. Multiply that 60 seconds by 40,000 employees, and you have something that will make Wall Street smile. But their reliance on antiquated devices, with slow reaction times, software crashes and poor wireless performance, easily adds up to minutes or even hours lost each day. And this translates into increased costs for everyone who relies on their services–all of us, in other words–on the order of billions of dollars a year.
If we’re going to fix this, we need an answer for the enterprise. We need an enterprise operating system optimized for reliability, but also battery life. We need one that comes with a ton of documentation. We need one that treats encryption and privacy as first class citizens. Most importantly, though, we need one that limits its update cycle to every 24 months, and makes a pledge not to sunset APIs for at least four years.
Why don’t we have one yet?
Financially and technologically, enterprise electronics run at a very different pace than consumer ones. It’s all well and good for us West Coast technologists to look to the cloud and distributed computing as an answer for society’s ills, but the reality at these corporations is much harsher.
One group I work with has thousands of employees who rely on their better-designed consumer devices for functions like GPS directions and basic communications, because trying to cram them into their outdated handhelds (and they’ve certainly tried) is a fool’s errand. These handhelds come from a time when we hadn’t made a proper break between mobile and desktop computers, and they suffer from constant battery and connectivity issues that the consumer side ironed out long ago. Which leads us to the heart of the problem—the consumer side has worked hard to solve these problems, but the industrial market hasn’t received any of its benefits. As many of these devices approach the end of their lives, with nothing better on the horizon, what’s an enterprise CIO to do?
The obvious fix, currently being pushed in boardrooms around the world, is to simply equip employees with consumer devices. Delta just did this, with a rollout of 19,000 Nokia Lumina 820s last year to their flight attendants. It’s a sound strategy for customer service professionals in the controlled confines of a passenger plane, but workers in a warehouse or on a delivery route require ruggedized, no-fail devices—just putting a case on a smartphone isn’t the answer.
The first thing holding enterprise users back from simply adopting a consumer device is finance. Enterprises like to make large capital purchases on a long depreciation schedule that’s well established prior to purchase. Imagine buying 50,000 android phones in 2008 and binding yourself to those devices until 2015–that’s how enterprise thinks about computer hardware, which is quite different from the two year rolling solution in consumer electronics. The obvious answer is to think about these handhelds more like uniforms and allow them to be updated on a rolling schedule. Certainly, on the consumer side, we’ve all become used to rolling out software for a heterogeneous install base (just ask any Android developer about this), so it should be easy for enterprise too, right?
Probably not, and the reason why has everything to do with how enterprise develops software. The IT departments at large corporations are nothing like a scrappy app development studio. They’re large groups of developers tasked with creating mission-critical/never-fail applications. For them, the focus is always on launching software that never corrupts data, which they achieve by adhering to strict coding guidelines. Any engineer will tell you that working this way is effective, but it’s also methodical, and very, very slow. It may be possible to knock out the latest social messaging app in a weekend with two developers and a case of Red Bull, but an enterprise application is fast-tracked if it can wrap and deploy in under 18 months. Seeing that the consumer upgrade cycle is 12-24 months, it’s easy to see where the misalignment lies.
And this misalignment is just going to get more pronounced. The consumer market is seeing operating system upgrades happening on a yearly cycle now. Apple’s bottom line depends on a new iPhone and iPad every 10-12 months, and it’s an open secret throughout the consumer electronics world that device sales are heavily driven by new operating systems, exposing features that require updated hardware. This model is becoming standard, much like Detroit’s “planned obsolescence” strategy in the 1950s. Since users of industrial handhelds are also users of consumer electronics, it’s no surprise that they hold corporate devices in contempt. “Why is it that this obsolete device, that doesn’t even have GPS, costs two grand, while my phone, which outperforms it in every way, was free with a contract?” They deserve an answer.
Who Will Step Up and Build the Enterprise UI We Need?
Apple seems unwilling to allow non-Apple devices to run its operating system, which is a deal killer for any large-scale industrial program (putting a mass-scanner on an iPod Touch is possible, but not a great solution). The enterprise space is wary of unproven solutions, which limits the ability of a small, motivated startup to come in and save the day. So it becomes a race between Microsoft and Google.
Android is a fine place to look for a global strategy, since it can run on wildly different types of devices. This excites CIOs, who love the idea of putting a $90 phone in the hands of folks working in the Honduras office, that uses a subset of the U.S. build running on the $900 device. But Google’s biggest stumbling block may be, surprisingly, its corporate outreach. Google hasn’t done a very good job courting the enterprise market, and while we were all excited about the future with Motorola, that dream ended when the company sold the it off to Lenovo.
The one company that knows how to court enterprise, has a toolchain that corporate IT knows and uses daily, and now has the ability to build its own hardware…is Microsoft. If they’re honestly searching for a way back into mobile, I’d suggest thinking hard about Windows Mobile as an end-to-end experience, like they’re doing with Windows Phone 8. If Microsoft could create an enterprise-level mobile operating system (as with Windows Server), offer rugged hardware solutions (or at least partner with Intermec/Honeywell and Motorola, as they have in the past), and make a pledge that they will not only support it but merge in innovations from their consumer line, then enterprise would finally have an answer. Heretically, I look at Ubuntu as a way of organizing this. They release a Long Term Support (LTS) version of their operating system every two years, but release consumer builds twice a year.
In our rush to court consumers worldwide, we’ve lost track of designing and building excellent experiences for the people who need mobile devices for their very livelihood. Instead, they’re left with the equivalent of an 80s Motorola brick phone in modern day Palo Alto. The enterprise market is hungry for disruption, eager for better design, and growing daily. If one of the big three does the right thing, and attacks the way they have with consumer devices over the last 10 years, they’ll hit a captive and massive market. If they don’t, it’s not just the couriers and stock keepers of the world who are screwed–we all are.
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