Painless Tech Transition

I just noticed my trusty Palm Tunsten E gathering dust on my desk. For years, it was my trusty and trusted PDA, worthy companion to my various non-smart phones.

I have been trying to tidy up my workspace and overcome my tendency to hang on to technology long past its expiration date--which reminds me, anyone need serial cables or an i-Opener?

The fact of the matter is that I haven't used my Palm in ages. Our consultancy made an utterly painless transition off of the Palm OS platform and on the iOS platform. In other words, we swapped out our various Palms and swapping in iPhones and even an iPod Touch.

I am struck by how well that tech transition went, especially given that so many of our clients experience tech transition as slow, expensive and painful. So why did ours go so well?

I argue that our transition was painless because it was also patient and precise. We made the list of what we needed, what we had in the Palm + phone era and therefore what we expected to have in the iPhone era. Then we waited until we could get everything that we used to have. Simply put, we wanted to stop carrying three devices and starting carrying one.

(Some of us had PDA + phone + pager; others had PDA + phone + MP3 player. Either way, it was two devices too many.)

Our requirements were not very exotic:

• ability to make and receive phone calls
• ability to send and receive text messages
• support for time-and-materials billing
• contact support
• ability to send and receive emails
• ability to make and share notes
• access to a shared calendar as well as a personal calendar

We wanted to cut-over without leaping into the void, so we didn't wait until our Palms died, although they were clearly wearing out. We started by having one of us get an iPod Touch and use it for a while. It took over a year before all the pieces we wanted were there and validated.

Once the iPod Touch user was up and running, moving to the iPhone was a no-brainer: the cost was significant, but well within reason. Our transition was painless in part because we had had a high degree of uniformity to start with. Her experience is moving from the Palm to the iPhone paved the way.

Originally, I had wanted to make sure that we had at least one Android user, one Blackberry user and one iPhone user. But the lengthy discovery process (largely me striking up conversations with fellow business travelers on trains and air planes) indicated that supporting multiple platforms internally is more resource intensive than I expected or could tolerate. To my surprise, the consensus was that the iPhone ecosystem was more mature and more business-oriented.

While the recent Windows phones are well-reviewed, at the time the Windows phones were so bad that I did long consider them.

I gather that Android is catching up and might be a more of contender now but I don't really know much about it.

What I do know is that the iOS platform has met and exceeded our expectations. The range of applications available is stunning and many of them are actually useful, instead of being merely impressive or amusing. I am shocked that I use the web browsing, mapping, on-line banking, built-in camera, music player and e-book reader as much as I do. I am not much of a gamer, but I even play games on it occasionally, which beats staring into space when I am too tired to read or work.

So a large part of the painless transition is the superior technology to which we transitioned, although I am constantly reminded of a warning given to me by an Android-oriented colleague: the iPhone is a lifestyle choice and one is likely happier if one embraces that. Although I am a Linux guy, I run a VirtualBox virtual machine with Windows in it mostly to support iTunes and to interface with my phone. So far, this has been a small price to pay.

But more than the quality of the target technology, I attribute our success to the lack of artificial deadlines and to existence of clear, precise definitions of success. The only drawback I see so far is the assumption by many of our clients that we got iPhone so we could be part of techno-cool kid herd. That way lies madness. Instead, shoot for making transitions that land you in a place at least as good as where you started. You would be surprised by how many people settle for less.