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Tech fix

I'm no expert, but I play one in the publishing world. And after months of listening to other experts on TV, on the web and in print discussing the iPhone (10 days and counting), I'm prompted to share my expertise.

In an article in today's Wall Street Journal, the discussion turns to whether the iPhone will work with corporate email systems, and touches on the security issues that readers of SC Magazine have encountered many times within its pages or on scmagazine.com, namely, how can a corporate network maintain its security when a plethora of outside devices — such as PDAs, cell phones, BlackBerrys, laptops and now iPhones — need to link up from the outside to send and retrieve data?

It's a shift for Apple, the article points out, to go after the business market. There's little doubt that the appeal of the iPhone has earned it a spot in the mainstream. After the success of the iPod (100 million and counting), a much broader market has opened up to Apple — consumers who have now experienced the "user-friendly" design and transparent engineering of the Apple product. Us Mac computer users have known this for a long time. Now that a broader market is impressed, satisfied and trusting of Apple, they're more available to a new item that promises consolidation and, let's face it, a wow factor, even at a price that is ridiculous compared to its competitors.

And that's where the corporate market comes in. A product that compresses an address book and true web access alongside a phone, camera and, let's not forget, an iPod, while making it intuitive and seamless to operate, well, this fulfills a need.

Will corporate users adopt the device, even with their IT staffs telling them no, we don't want a new system integrating with our network? The point is, I think, or as an expert, decree, that the IT folks are the ones who are going to have to adapt to find the way to keep up with the tide. It's a user's market, and hey, it keeps security folks necessary.

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