Mobile devices have been a disruptive technology in the enterprise. It's a cliche, but it's absolutely true and extremely important. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's Apple that has been doing most of the disrupting.
Like most (maybe all) disruptive technologies, mobile devices gained their foothold without the cooperation of IT, and perhaps even against their policies. Obviously IT departments are on board now, but in the meantime, purchasing decisions have moved, in great part, out of their control.
That's why it's hard to gauge the significance of Microsoft's announcements yesterday of enterprise security and management improvements in Windows Phone 8.1. Looked at in isolation, they're very important and technologically impressive. The problem is that if end users don't want to buy Windows Phones it may not matter.
What exactly are the improvements? Microsoft spelled them out in a blog entry yesterday. There will be a session on the at BUILD later today and the video will be available (at this link) 24-48 hours later.
The major bullet points:
A white paper from MobileIron on Windows Phone 8.1 in the Enterprise actually goes into much more detail than what Microsoft has so far provided and includes interesting analysis. They expect significant interest from their enterprise customers in Windows Phone 8.1, particularly from those in regulated industries.
I spoke with Ojas Rege, MobileIron's VP of Strategy. He and the white paper point out important improvements not mentioned in the Microsoft blog. The management tools are better for all sorts of important characteristics: connections to corporate Wi-Fi networks; conventional system-wide VPNs; phone log support is improved so that help desks can get access to them to troubleshoot more effectively; there are even management policies to disable Internet Explorer, disable data access when the phone is roaming, and to disable Save As and/or sharing in Microsoft Office.
It took a long time, till the third generation of Windows Phone, for Microsoft to put meaningful security features in it. But, then again, the same was true of Apple and Google. It wasn't till the third or fourth generation of iOS and Android till they started dealing with security, and arguably Google still doesn't.
This was obviously intentional. As I've said before, Microsoft seems determined to ape Apple's phone strategy. They're even making the phones now that they bought Nokia. Their app security and store policies are very similar, but with 8.1 they may be leapfrogging Apple, at least with respect to the enterprise.
What they've accomplished with Windows Phone 8.1 is to make the product appealing to IT in many ways. The heavy subsidies for Windows Phone models, much heavier than iPhones and even top Android phones, might make other powers in the enterprise welcome Windows Phone for large deployments.
In that sense, the most important thing Microsoft has to do in order to make their enterprise features successful, is to make their phones desirable, or at least acceptable, to end users. They know this too; it's why all the wiz-bang consumer features were announced early on BUILD day 1 and the enterprise features were announced later, and to much less fanfare.