As my company is now getting interest in how our projects display on the Apple mobile devices, I’m becoming more aware of the technical limitations.  And now that we know the Apple iPad will be using the same OS, the concernwe have is the lack of multitasking.  From what we’ve seen, only certain (read: Apple-developed) applications and services are allowed to run in the background.

From a user experience perspective, I can understand why the choice would seem make sense – isolate applications to running only in the foreground, and you reduce the risks of poor performance, memory conflicts and good ‘ol crash.

But seeing that Windows Mobile and Google Android do allow multitasking, is Apple being lazy in not addressing the potential issues head-on, or brilliant in assuming that users won’t really care?

This is a continuation of the article Deploying software is easy, but realizing value can be hard.  Why technology adoption matters.

In this article, I’m going to focus on the 3nd and largest segment.  The Enterprise.  When you think about the technologies your company is using right now, the ones that ‘help keep the lights on’ financially, what are the top 5?  You should know this, because everything else is supplemental, and your budget should reflect that.  In fact, the battle that rages on the desktop right now between Microsoft, Google, Cisco,  and a few others is predicated on each company’s belief that their technology addresses the productivity and ROI needs better than their competitors.  In fact, it’s not uncommon for organizations to use products from several of these companies, cherry-picking the optimal basket of solutions to meet their needs.  But I go back to my original question: when you begin to evaluate each investment and solution, which are the ones that are absolutely needed and which are kept around for political, IT stagnation, cost/complexity to migrate or other reasons?

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On CNBC today, McGraw-Hill’s CEO Terry McGraw confirmed that Apple will be announcing a “tablet-style” device tomorrow.  Of less importance is the confirmation of the device to me than the fact that a company with such a presence in the textbook publishing industry is very likely close to Apple and the expected device.  As M-H looks to expand into more online books, it’s likely that their periodicals will be there soon as well, and undoubtedly taking advantage of the Apple iStore for sales & distribution.

The pressure this puts on Microsoft and it’s business partners is incredible, as the device is expected to use the 4.0 version of the iPhone OS and thus have access to not only the existing portfolio of applications but also the growing interest in HTML5 (which Google is already taking advantage of with their Google Voice application).

Having been a “Field Champ” within the Microsoft sales team during the time of Windows XP Table PC Edition, I applaud the validation that Apple will bring to the segment.  The expected adoption never took place over the past 7 years, mainly because of the premium charged by the PC manufacturers (dumb idea) and the fact that there wasn’t a consumer entry to be found – the “Mira” project was supposed to solve this, but died an early death before even getting a chance in the market.

Today’s NY Times has an article in the Bits section that attempts to define the services available from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo across a wide swatch of important

technologies.  It’s a curious matrix, and points out the risk of ambiguity charts like this present, limiting their effectiveness.  Let’s look at several of the categories and try to make sense of what (if anything) this chart actually is telling us.

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