Keynote
This year I followed the famous WWDC Keynote a little closer, partly to see how’s post-Steve Apple. Press coverage is all about oomph, iOS6, new Macbook Pro with Retina display and Facebook integration.
Instead, I. Am. Bloody. Disappointed.
Really, can’t be more useless. New features may be cool (although I personally don’t give a $%^$ about Siri button on my steering wheel or Facebook integration), yet there are MANY things we’re really missing. To be fair and not just talking, I’ve made a list of the outstanding ones:
- Bluetooth activate/deactivate shortcut: you know it takes 6 taps to get the bloody bluetooth on? I jailbreaked my iPhone only for that. Only for 1 bloody button! So what apple did? they moved bluetooth just up one level. Better than nothing, but was it really difficult to put it into notification screen?
- Mac Pro: Hellooo? Professionals need those powerful workstations that made Apple myth. The most loyal Apple customers are those who worked their a$$ on Mac Pros to deliver outstanding movies, games, you name it. Mac Pro haven’t been really upgraded at all: it’s still a three-year old hardware in a 10-year old tower design.
- iCloud: a little step further, but still clunky. There should be a clever way to interop between apps other than relying on specific 3rd party functions.
- Hardware acceleration: still reserved to Apple. Facetime sucks so much that they need to limit 3rd party apps. An example: RADVISION’s Scopia Mobile videoconference app has better performance than Facetime and it’s all software! No hw acceleration! There are great developers out there, but do you imagine how great could be applications with hw acceleration available?
- Photostream: why on Mac you need iPhoto or Aperture? Windows needs NOTHING of sort! to have a basic feature on my Mac I need to spend more money. That doesn’t make much sense, on user’s point of view. What if I’m a Lightroom user? Well, I’m using Dropbox.
- Final Cut Pro: no matter how much they claim the new Final Cut is awesome, the gap with Premiere or Media Composer is increasing lightspeed, especially after CS6 release. Maybe Apple decided that Videomakers are not of interest anymore.
- Web: we will need to upgrade the World Wide Web, because Retina displays will make everything look soooo ugly….
I just want to add a final comment. I am italian, I live between Paris and Milan, so a little more international, but do you really think Passbook is really useful? I imagine the average situation at the airport, queuing for boarding, each giving passport and ticket to the steward. At some point some geek hands over phone and passport and the girl look at him with “what” written on her face, then the queue stops because she can’t read the barcode…
Sorry for the italian text below, but this friend of mine (thanks Max!!) has really got the point…
BYOD from a user perspective
BYOD is the new word in the Enterprise business. Bring Your Own Device, meaning that your company allows you to use your laptop, phone, tablet as work tool. Advantages are obvious: you use a tool of your liking and the company saves a lot of money. In theory.
When you bring an uncontrolled item inside your organization, you pose a real threat, risk being higher because there is no control over your device and any possible malware you could carry in.
To tackle this BIG issue, a lot of experts proposed solutions, most commonly to enforce security through centralized policy, blocking unauthorized functions and software. I’d imagine that the user, so happy to bring his shiny new iPhone 4S at work, won’t be as much excited to see it locked down even when out of office.
Users have the nasty habit of being smarter that IT when it comes to use their favorite stuff, even if that’s not allowed (Murphy’s Law: Nothing is FoolProof).
Personally, I have the same attitude. I find difficult to stop using tools that make my life easier, my work more efficient. Dropbox, for example: it’s an amazing tool, but most companies have it on blacklist, as it’s an unsanctioned cloud storage outside IT boundaries. Nonetheless it’s a wonderful tool for it’s simplicity and easiness of use. Would you give it up for a clunky, slow and complicated windows sync? No, that’s for sure. Then you will try to find a way to use it anyway and according to Murphy’s you will succeed.
At work, many colleagues still use Windows Vista. Slow and buggy, they spend hours dealing with malfunctioning instead of work. I used my own Mac as much as I could, even if I had a fast laptop at my disposal. Why? because for what I do OSX is faster and more efficient. Now I switched back to Windows 7 because my Mac doesn’t have IE9, that is required for several tools I need. My goal is efficiency and I’m sorry if IT doesn’t like it, but I have my job to do.
Don’t get me wrong: I totally sympathize with IT people, I’ve been one of them for years. I understand it very well, especially from security perspective, but we all know it’s a lesson we should learn sooner or later: IT is at user’s service, not the opposite. As IT people, we’re frustrated by certain user behavior, but that’s part of the job.
I think the solution could be a compromise as tapping into consumer resources and using sandboxes, virtual environments, content control (watermarking, hashing, digital certificates) to facilitate users instead of fighting them.
If you want to read more about the so-called “Shadow IT”, try here.
Keilun Photography 