Archive for the 'nerd central' Category

My meeting with Apple

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

I thought twice about writing this… but none of it was asked to be kept quiet, and I don’t think I’m saying anything that isn’t already known.

Today I got to meet with the guy who looks after iPhone sales to enterprises and governments in Australia for Apple. He’s a pretty tops guy. I definitely enjoyed his thoughts on getting iPhone fleets happening in businesses, and what the device can do for them as opposed to what it can do for consumers. It really is a very powerful device. We get to hear from Apple for a couple of hours in a presentation sometime in the next fortnight. They’re gonna share a lot about the iPhone in the enterprise world. I’m really looking forward to that, especially the security stuff.

I had a few giggles to myself during the 90 minutes or so, cos he’s definitely Apple’s whole marketing strategy personified – the secrecy, the knowledge that they’re better than everyone else, the exclusivity. He even talked about Apple’s strategy to have the iPhone becoming as much a “throw-around” word as iPod is – that is, even if you have some random MP3 player, people tend to refer to any MP3 player as an “iPod” … Apple want that same brand recognition with iPhone. Incredible.

And we asked them about participating in a data forum where we’d bring customers, and we like to have vendors assisting with setting up a stand and showcasing what they’ve got. He said they’d only be interested if there was no other mobile provider involved.

We talked about the hows and whens of getting iPhones into the hands of us tech sales people to use, and Apple wanted a commitment that we’d use it as our primary phone (work-wise) for at least a month before deciding whether or not to keep it. I liked that. They weren’t just giving them to us for us to use as demos and to sit in a drawer for weeks on end. And they follow up over the next weeks and months with weekly updates of app recommendations for us.

Can’t wait to get my hands on my new iPhone. Using it for work will be quite a different experience, I think.

It made for a fun Friday. Apple are a good bunch of people.

On the topic, I made my blog iPhone friendly tonight – you can check it out on your iPhone or iPod Touch and it looks nothing like what it does in a normal browser… but at least it loads very quickly and simply.

And I added a tweetmeme link down the bottom. Useful? Probably not. But cool nonetheless.