John Gruber, the iPhone's biggest fanboy, springboards off a WSJ article to launch another attack on corporate IT departments.

The Problem With Duke's iPhone Problem:

Ben Worthen of The Wall Street Journal:

And this is why information-technology departments always worry about employees’ bringing new technologies like the iPhone into the workplace. The conventional wisdom in IT shops is that anything that’s not standard-issue will cause unanticipated problems when it’s introduced into an existing network. The new technology may be perfectly innocent; but the network still goes down, and the IT guys have to fix it.

Translation: A lot of IT infrastructure is fragile rickety crap, and the people responsible for it aren’t smart enough to fix it so they make rules and place blame based on little more than superstition.

No, that isn't the translation. (Gruber is quick with invectives, but I've decided to chop mine out.) I've addressed this before in response to Gruber's last ill-informed rant on the topic, and nothing has changed now.

IT departments have limited resources. Limited resources result in limited staff to devote to tracking down new problems caused by new devices. Often, that staff is also tasked with new projects or tracking down even larger problems. IT departments conserve their scarce resources by standardizing. Because of this standardization, interaction with untested items may have unintended consequences, and it's not surprising that's where the finger would be pointed first.

Was it irresponsible in the case of the Duke yokel to come right out and say that there was no way it was the Cisco gear? Of course. Does that mean it couldn't possibly have been the iPhone at fault? Of course not. Is it possible for users to introduce untested hardware or software and cause networking or systems problems? Absolutely.

Those problems often aren't caused by rickety infrastructure or stupid employees, but rather by unplanned or unpredictable interactions with software or hardware that would normally have been caught in a testing process.

In fact, excluding the Duke public statements, it's not the least bit clear to me that he's given the matter any logical consideration. Duke bought equipment from a reputable vendor. Due to a previously unknown bug in that reputable vendor's software, large portions of the wireless network went down. Was it Duke IT's fault that they fell prey to a bug in the software driving a reputable vendor's product?

Given his wildly superior attitude on this topic, I'd congratulate Gruber on having apparently chosen software and hardware that is completely flawless, or at the very least is entirely self-healing. However, because he uses Macs and OS X, as do I, I know first-hand that he hasn't discovered those products.