Jon’s Friday Night Ramblings - Citrix, Mobile Devices and White Headphones...
Jon Wallace
I am the creator of insidetheregistry.com but that's as far as it goes - the site is strictly independent and vendor agnostic and anyone is invited to contribute and post views...
I was awarded the Microsoft MVP (Windows Desktop Experience) in 2009 and have presented at various trade shows including Citrix Synergy and VMWorld. I am a frequent contributor to www.dabcc.com.
In my spare time I develop this little baby (the website), and spend time with my lovely wife Vicki and daughter Mia.
Originally for Warrington in the United Kingdom I now live in Coral Springs in Florida (near Fort Lauderdale) and although gone through Katrina and Wilma have never looked back.
As a side-note I do have a background as a professional performing magician, am a member of the Magic Circle (London) and the Magic Castle (Los Angeles). I find IT very similar, smoke and mirrors.
I hope you enjoy what I've got to say and if not, let me know.
Posted Friday, July 09, 2010 by Jon Wallace | 1 Comments | 692 views
Tags:
Outside The Registry |
All Articles
When Apple launched the iPod it was largely seen as a music revolution with a slick new device, excellent online access to music and most of all one of the most brilliant marketing gimmicks ever. The iPod was not a new invention in the music scene and in fact prior to its launch there were many MP3 players available on the market but Apple seemed to do something better than everyone else, sell the device virally.
After the launch of the iPod you could walk into any mall, college or other public venue and instantly see who owned an iPod and it is this, which was probably one of the greatest marketing decisions of modern time. The reason this was possible is simple – white headphones!
Almost every iPod user kept and used the stock headphones that came with the device and with their white cable and white buds they were very easy to spot. More to the fact, it was very easy to see just how many people owned the iPod and regardless of quality or features, there is one thing that is always certain, more people draw more people and as such the product grew virally.
Apple didn’t invent the mobile music device, and they didn’t pioneer the MP3 player – what they did however was put the “cool” into these devices. Apple made access to music more beautiful, more appealing and more desirable than ever before and for that reason, they were able to take an existing technical element and turn it into a phenomenon.
We’re in a similar situation right now with mobile devices however this time; there are more players in the game as they have learnt from the iPod revolution. There are an array of units with different capabilities, all with their slick tweaks and application sets, and all have a different view of what the customer desires from a mobile device.
Now while access to cloud services such as Facebook, Flicker and others is very important, in the business world what will make or break these mobile devices is access to corporate information. What I think many are missing however is that much of this data is not yet stored in the cloud and not even “cloudable” right now and so all of these devices will need to work with legacy systems in order to provide the required access to the user.
The problem is however that mobile devices (granted except for things like Blackberry) are fundamentally designed for mass-market (or the every day consumer) with business coming second. Because of this, most of the creators effort goes into making the device sexy to attract the 75% of the population who don’t necessarily need access to business data and as such it is left to 3rd parties to provide this.
This is where I think Citrix (can) play a massive part in this and right now they appear to be the only organization looking at providing mass access to corporate resources from mobile devices. They are putting the “business” into the cool devices and thus enabling their use. I also think this potentially opens Citrix up to a larger group of acquisition potentials as Citrix could most certainly be the business equivilent of the white headphones of mobile devices.
Its no secret and I’ve been very open with my negativity regarding the iPad. I feel that personally the device is useless once you get beyond the few wiz-bang applications and doesn’t actually provide me any benefit beyond looking cool. I had a Twitter exchange with @joeshonk (who I respect dearly) however in the back and fourth I was still unconvinced as to why he so adamantly defended the device.
That said however, Citrix change this for me. With a simple application, Citrix opens the device to an entire new world, access to my corporate resources, access to my personal resources and most of all, gives me a device which is functional as a business entity. When I use my iPad, I think I’m safe in saying that 90% of the time, its simply being used as a thin-client with the Citrix receiver being the application in use.
So what if Apple purchased Citrix? Citrix could be the white headphones of the mobile device. When the relevant CIO’s or CFO’s are considering devices, simply having the Citrix technology logo on the spec could mean that the device instantly wins over all others. More so, once other people saw the corporate desktop accessed from a certain device it wouldn’t take long for that to spread virally through the business world as the CIO device of choice thus Citrix becomes the “business” element of the cool devices.
Anyway, that’s my lot for tonight. I appreciate this is a lot of rambling and such but hey – I’m sat in LAX airport waiting for my red-eye flight back to Ft. Lauderdale and wanted to put some thoughts down.
I’m interested in other people’s views here too…
Comments
Guest
on Tuesday, August 03, 2010 says
Visit http://www.filereflex.com includes support for BlackBerry, allowing you to gain remote access to your BlackBerry users on their devices. In addition to BlackBerry, FileReflex also enables remote control for Windows, Linux and Mac computers, plus Windows Mobile devices.