Breakage Rates Are Almost Entirely Unimportant In Decision

A customer once showed me a broken WOW Gold computer with the screen smashed into a million little pieces. The chassis, still mostly intact was acutely concave, the tire marks clearly visible across the middle. "It fell off the bonnet and was run over... apparently." I didn't believe it and neither did he.

Everyone who's worked in mobile hardware has seen a device with a screwdriver-hole in the screen, sometimes with the screwdriver still in it! It's always said that the screen is the least rugged component, even with the very-impressive but cringe-inducingly-named gorilla glass, so it's perhaps not surprising that if a tradie wants to attack a device, that's the bit they attack.

I struggle though to think of similar incidents of willful damage to non-rugged smartphone-style devices. I'm sure it happens and I've certainly wanted to throttle my phone from time to time but the incidence, in my experience, is very much less common.

A friend of mine, let's call him David, runs a field service operation in a highly competitive industry dominated by a small number of large companies but with a thousand small businesses in competition. Margins are tight and success depends on cost control and product innovation, the product being as much the field service as the physical equipment itself.

Faced with a business that ran entirely on paper and an IT team that was traditionally pro-Windows, earlier this year David introduced a forms-based field mobility solution running on iPads.

Traditional opinion in field mobility would tell you he was mad and that the likely outcome would be failure.

David says "I started thinking 'Why not employ what people are willing to use?'. It seemed logical that if you Buy Runescape Money and it becomes more than just a device that's looked at as 'Work'.. then you have the opportunity to by-pass the traditional change management challenges."