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The Mac In the Gray Flannel Suit

Posted by Soulskill on from the apple-of-my-eye-t dept.

oDDmON oUT points us to a BusinessWeek story about the increasing use of Apple products in the corporate sector. Many companies are finding that their employees are pushing for the transition more than Apple itself. Quoting: "While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference. After a series of failed offensives by the company in the 1980s and 1990s, Chief Executive Steve Jobs decided to focus squarely on consumers and education customers when he returned to Apple in 1997. As a result, the company doesn't have ranks of corporate salespeople or armies of repairmen waiting to respond every time a hard drive fails. He believes it's difficult for any company, including his, to be effective at satisfying both corporate buyers and consumers."

3 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Server is not quite there yet.. by kisielk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Now if only Apple would get their shit together when it comes to their server products. Anyone who has had to administer OS X 10.5 Leopard Server knows that the entire release was a complete gong show. From crashing AFP and directory services, to a half-implemented calendaring solution, a laughably broken server administration GUI (I mean, who would want to mark reverse zones as transferable _anyway_), and countless other problems... Microsoft , Red Hat, SuSE and Ubuntu are just walking all over them when it comes to the server offering.

    Sure the Apple stuff is integrated and works for the basic case. However, if you try to move past what is written in the sparse user manual, you not only lose support for your basic "AppleCare" but also have to spend time figuring out how Apple has mangled the pieces of the open source offerings that hold their stuff together.

    That all being said, I think with some work and polish the server side of things could really become a viable solution. It's just not quite there yet. This is coming from someone who administers these things for a living...

  2. Secrecy is going to kill them by goaliemn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    as touched on in the article, Apple is overly secretive on new upcoming things. This is not what companies want. I work in an IT department and I've seen what both IBM and sun have coming in the next few years. Its called a non-disclosure. This helps my bosses shape future purchasing requirements, because they know whats coming ahead of time, versus a big flashy presentation at a conference and it being available in afew days.

    Apple has to realize if they want to compete, they need to open up a bit to their larger buyers. Yes, the consumer market is great, but now that users are becoming apple savvy, you want them to have the opportunity to bring it to their workplace. Its a similar thing happening with Linux. My bosses were very anti Linux, but the latest batch of graduates have so much experience with it, its being rolled into our environment. You get people using it at home/school and they will want it at work.

  3. Macs are here. by BrianRagle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work at a MAJOR cable television network, based in Atlanta, with branch offices all over the country and about to be global. Our in-house Mac inventory has only been steadily increasing over the last few years and is expected to go even higher in the next budget. Whole departments are switching to MacBook Pros, en masse, and not just the "creatives". Even the engineering department is switching over to Mac, as most of their applications have OS X versions or they BootCamp/VMWare Windows if need be. Even Blackberries are being supplanted by iPhones, since the recent patch allowing Exchange integration and the next version of the device being fully Exchange compatible (according to our Apple vendor).

    From a support standpoint, the transition is a little rougher, as others here have noted, but the company is paying to have their support staff become Apple certified techs (myself included) in order to do the work in-house and keep our warranties intact.

    The server side is also increasing, for the specific purpose of running the data ingest software used to manage clips for our HD transition.

    Some of us have even messed around with the hacked OS X kernals floating around and I can report that it runs BEAUTIFULLY on a Dell GX520. If companies like Psystar are indeed a harbinger of things to come, I see Apple's market share in the corporate environment only continuing to rise.