Ars Technica is reporting that on March 6th Apple will hold a press conference where they will announce the “iPhone Software Roadmap”:
learn about the iPhone software roadmap, including the iPhone SDK and some exciting new enterprise features.
Wow, look at Apple sounding so enterprisy with words like “Roadmap”. So it’s pretty much set(as I said before) that this will be a developer announcement and not a consumer release(expect that at WWDC08).
If Apple is indeed focusing their SDK towards enterprise customers, this could eventually lead to Apple reentrance in the enterprise market, since the SDK will be Cocoa and Obj-C and those are the same skills required for Mac programming.
The iPhone could be the enterprise trojan horse as the iPod was the consumer. If this is their strategy, it’s fucking brilliant. Enterprise customers are dying to have a true mobile platform for their troops. Palm was once strong, and Blackberry application development has never taken off. There is a huge market for this and Apple wants to fill it.
NeXT (Mac OS X) was developed for the enterprise and used heavily in the early 90’s thanks to it’s rapid application development(still valid today with Cocoa, formal known as NeXTSTEP). Now more than ever is time for Mac in the enterprise. Some of the features in the video below aren’t really there anymore(like the easy connection to the database for accessing the directory). I’ve heard people familiar with the matter, saying that Steve Jobs doesn’t like the enterprise market. But the enterprise could prove a mayor growth strategy for Apple in the consumer market, since people like to use what they are familiar with. If people use Macs at work, they are more likely to buy a Mac at home.
Go Apple stock!