Slashdot Mirror
Why Apple Doesn't Market Squarely To Businesses
snydeq writes "Despite feature enhancements that suggest otherwise, Apple remains lukewarm to any Mac and iPhone success in business environments. 'Apple has intentionally created a glass ceiling it has no intention of shattering. My conversations with Apple employees over the past decade have always been off the record when it comes to the topic of Macs in the enterprise. The company has had no intention of signaling any active plans to serve the enterprise,' InfoWorld's Galen Gruman writes. 'In a sense, Apple views enterprise sales as "collateral success" — a nice-to-have byproduct of its real focus: individuals, developers, and very small businesses ... likely because to do otherwise would greatly increase the complexity Apple would have to deal with.'"
Seriously, if you have a couple of people in an office and no full time admin Macs save you a small fortune.
So, fit for business? Yes.
Ready for the enterprise?
Dennis Onstenk
Apple's not very big on jumping into crowded markets. I'd love to see them take a good shot at unseating Windows in the server business, but they look at how much it would cost to try to push their way in, versus what they can make if they put the same resources into something like the iPad. So far, Apple's growing like crazy without doing much about the business market.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Gotta have a stomach to run such an outfit.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
. . . because you can't bullshit bullshitters.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Businesses certainly run Macs but they really don't have any great centralized administration tools. Apple Remote Desktop and Open Directory aren't nearly as powerful out of the box as Active Directory and its accompanying tools. There's nothing comparable to Exchange server that I know of. MacOS is to business desktop computing in much the same way linux is...you can use it, but you need to develop the tools for administering it (or use some open source tools, etc).
Apple wants to lock down your software and hardware every which way.
Businesses can't operate in such an environment.
Hell, the only major software released for OS X has either been (poorly) written by Apple, or has been writen by a company that Apple bought specifically so they wouldn't be able to release a Windows version of the software.
Apple is for people who don't mind having a turtle-neck ghestapo control their computer. Businesses need hardware and software that gets stuff don.
Of course not, that would mean they would have to be more active about following industry standards like PXE boot and remote management. The enterprise tools that are available for apple are very limited compared to what they can do with Windows (Altiris etc). If apple wants to get into the enterprise market and out of their present niches they need to start working with enterprise management companies on enterprise management.
I've never heard of anyone who works at a company that uses Macs. The company I work at uses PCs exclusively, and probably saves quite a bit of money by doing so. My work PC has never crashed, has never had a virus, runs relatively fast, and was probably quite cheap. I do have to have an IT person mess with computer every now and then, and thats usually because a poorly written application fails and needs to be reinstalled. For most businesses switching to Macs would require new IT people, retraining of employees, and finding applications that function in OS X. The computers would also likely cost considerably more than PCs.
Sent from my iPhone 5
Businesses demand a lot of esoteric features and are concerned with getting the cheapest hardware possible. They have no desire or tolerance for "cool" Completely not the market Apple is going for.
Apple has traditionally had two target markets. Those markets are education and "creative professionals". Creative professionals aren't going to turn out enterprise applications, but they can sure come up with some spiffy product literature. The education culture is focused on learning, not application development. In the past decade Apple has expanded their focus to include the consumer market.
Apple is so far behind the curve in the business market that they'd run themselves out of money trying to play catchup. They can't compete in the desktop space. I've heard that their X-Serve boxes are nice, but even in the SMB market they'd get clobbered by HP and Dell. They don't have anything close to what IBM and Oracle/Sun are putting out for enterprise customers. Beyond that, there aren't enough developers targeting the platform to develop the accounting packages, ERP systems, groupware servers, etc. that businesses run on.
What does it offer that any other *nix would not? GUI (On server side it do not make that much sense). Linux license cost is free and there are lots of resources (people mainly) are available and the same cannot be said Apple OS.
Quite a lot of laptops are making inroads into the business environment which used to be just Windows Shop. But if you still see, they are runnig Windows OS on it for majority of the cases. I think Apple would face the same compitition like MS from Linux and other Open source OS.
people who value apple's simplicity + power and have the $$ to indulge are extremely likely to be thought leaders in their organizations...instant word-of-mouth
Doing B2B sales is completely different (longer attention spans, bigger deals, but much more demand for customization/configuration).
Needless to say, Apple's image and culture is focused completely away from B2B type sales. Furthermore, they are focusing on what they're successful at. I wish other companies would take Apple's lead, and do something *really* well and only venture into other markets when they have aligned their brand with that market audience.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I don't mean downsize in the sense of "fire".
What I mean is, that right now if you want to do enterprise iPhone development, you have to have an employee base of 500 people. Seems fair enough at first...
But the trouble is, although you can have a normal developer account and distribute applications via AdHoc to your employees - where the limit is 100 separate devices.
Now you probably are not going to need one device per employee. You can kind of work around that with multiple accounts, but that's a pain - it would thus be way better if they made the step clear, by supporting 500 devices on any developer account OR dropping down Enterprise requirements to 100 employees.
To me what separates "small business" from Enterprise is a clear delineation of worlds... a small business does not mind having data exist all over the place, whereas an "Enterprise" studiously guards data and wants to keep as much of it in-hous as possible (and then send it all to India as an afterthought).
That's why the enterprise iPhone program is useful, because it keeps your business apps off the store. Basically anything Apple can do to support self-isolation helps the enterprise, and they've actually been much better about this in recent years (along with adopting ActiveSync all over and adding in good VPN support, which again goes back to that "separate world" thing).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you ignore the products that they market to businesses, then it probably does look like they don't market to businesses.
Apple sells fashionable gadgets and a small number of Unix based computer systems. Entering the "enterprise" market would increase the quantity and variety of software and hardware they would have to support. Add in a dozen server form factor systems that have to cater to a wide variety of potential business needs and say goodbye to your reputation of being a company that sells products that "just work". That reputation is only just barely deserved as it is, and they only sell a handful of unique products.
If Apple marketed to corporate america, they'd have to make docking stations... not the crappy third party ones that by pulling a handle, they plug in all your cables.
They would have to provide and support their products longer then a consumer product cycle. Things like releasing a $3000 workstation then 3 years later releasing an OS update that doesn't support it don't fly well in enterprise environments.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Won't someone puhlEEZE think of the businesses! They're so deprived! They see their employees walking around with fancy iphones and they want one too! Not fair!
Apple does have at least some enterprise business, or they wouldn't bother continuing to sell and support products like the XServe.
Doesn't market squarely to business, then why the hell do they sell Xserves with dual quad core xeons, 24GB ram, 3TB w/on board RAID, FC cards, XSAN (!) software, even reselling Promise vTrak raid storage, and Tandberg 80-tape storage libraries on the Apple store website. A SAN deployment among XServes and Mac Pros is not exactly a 'very small business' kind of situation. They took some big steps but it feels like Apple is dropping the ball on the business side beyond individual sales.
I went from the Windows world of all 'enterprisey' all the time to the Apple world of 'yeah it SHOULD work in your enterprisey solution unless you want reliable Active Directory/Open Directory integration without jumping through many hoops and crossing your fingers'
And don't get me started on the RAGE that occurred when I realized this spanking new MacBook Pro uses the magsafe connector and its patented with no third party options and NO DOCKING STATION. I'm used to having options, now I'm stuck with a very linear choice.
I'm just having one of those weeks. Apple needs to get it together and go full speed ahead on business oriented software systems, I'm running headlong into this in a business that is decidedly Mac but wants to expand greatly (and stay Mac). The OS X Server tools feel unpolished and/or unresponsive at times, and the command line support and documentation is wholly inadequate.
I guess I'm just turning into an old bastard IT Admin. Damn kids better stay off my lawn.
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
AFAIK, Microsoft makes the bulk of its money by selling to the big corporations. By entering the enterprise market, Apple would attack Microsoft biggest and safest money source. If they do that, Microsoft will stop selling MSOffice for Mac and will prevent Macs from interacting with the AD. This way, Apple will lose more trying to enter the enterprise market than ignoring it altogether.
Laudele lor desigur m-ar mahni peste masura.
What a load of bunk. If they thought they could be competitive they would be in there grabbing the cash with both hands. The fact is that they have done it internal reviews and concluded they would get slaughtered in that market. "We chose not to" just sounds better.
To properly cater and market to faceless corporations, you have to become one. There are no shortcuts, it takes a machine to relate to a machine. Case in point, Microsoft started losing its juice when it got serious about enterprise. Those MS guys used to laugh at the "old" IBM; they howled derisively when the IBMers tried to become cooler by switching from blue suits to sport jackets. Now Microsoft have become them and the enterprise customers love 'em -- they're on the same wavelength. They made lots of money but lost their soul.
Just off the top of my head:
1) Price.
2) Legacy (OS/applications).
The first one is pretty obvious.
The second, I need to define better. Apple generally limits new hardware to the version of the OS that was in production when the machine was built. So I can't work out all of the kinks in 10.4.11 relevant to my environment and load up all new systems with an image of that same OS. The most recent PowerMacs I've bought won't run 10.4. I had 10.4 locked tight and all of our software runs great on it. 10.5 gives me font cache problems similar to the ones I'd already ironed out of our 10.4 systems long ago. To me, that's not an upgrade. I don't want bleeding-edge in production. I want stable and reliable.
OTOH, every PC I've bought since Vista came out has been able to run XP just fine. In fact, I just got some new systems last week pre-loaded with XP. (Win7 license with XP downgrade.) This means the environment my company's been grooming and tweaking for years can be applied to brand new installations and I don't have to deal with, "I've never seen THAT before."
And getting back to the cost, I can get a decent C2D windows machine with 4 gigs and a 20" flat panel, keyboard, and mouse for about $500. A mini with 4 gigs, no monitor, and no mouse starts at $700. Apple wants another $50 each for a mouse and keyboard. Each. Don't even ask what they want for monitors.
Those are the two main reasons Apple won't be making it beyond the Creative departments in my company. And I'm actually a bit annoyed that we're still purchasing Macs for those departments since they're running Adobe suites that are available on the PC. If one of my hats wasn't "the only mac tech in the company", I'd consider making strong arguments against the continued waste of money. :)
Apple builds OSs that largely get out of your way so you can get work done.
Enterprises like OSs that can be locked down until you can't get any work done.
Polar opposites in agendas really.
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
Here's the dirty little secret we all know:
Schools (and easy piracy) train people to use Windows and Windows-based software. If you're at home, who cares if you have to spend a few hours to learn the OS, or a new email system, or a paint program.
Go into a business office, and an employee costs $100/hr or more to train. With, say, 12 desktop apps the typical employee might use - half of which have no direct port - and maybe a dozen hours to get "fully productive" on the custom apps, you've got a $7000 price you have to add to every mac you put on a desk. (that's why corps also are loathe to upgrade within windows)
Of course, that's not the whole of it - there's the app side, too...
What about the custom s/w written for PC that the in-house foo group uses. Tack on another 5 (if you're lucky) to 7 figures to rewrite that app. How about apps that have no direct analog in the Mac world? You're fucked if you have to interact natively with businesses that use AutoCAD or Pro/Engineer. What? There are translators? Sure - but how much productivity will be lost (and now we're into higher paid workers - maybe $80-$150/hr in opportunity cost) if the translation isn't perfect - and it never is.
When you're at home, it may never matter - the embedded apps are "good enough". When you're in business, there's more in play.
I know some of you will cry that management is easier, so it's cheaper. Really? Is it actually cheaper to hire a competent Apple admin (do they even exist in significant quantity?). If you're a small to medium business, you've only got an IT staff of 1 anyway, so 1 Win admin isn't going to cost you more than 1 apple admin. Sure, you might outsource it, but if you have more than a dozen employees do you really want your whole office dependent on an outside firm with hundreds of other (larger) clients? You're still paying a retainer every month, and you know you'll take it up the ass (at $125-$200/hr) if anything does go wrong (and it will).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I work in the ITS of my university and whenever the faculty and staff using macs consider or even hear about management apps like puppit or how if they have a PC they MUST install (novell) zen they cringe. They HATE the idea of the IT department invading their computer because their PC(Linux, Mac or Windows ) still feels personal. Even the sub-departments of our IT infrastructure HATE it when our the central sysadmins push updates to computers without telling the departmental support teams.
Because
timothy wouldn't pay the ransom?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
http://infoworld.com/print/112907
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
There's not much markup to be had before you've outpriced yourself with Apple itself, at least in New Zealand anyway (I've worked for one of NZ's larger IT providers in the past) and a lot of IT companies also prefer to get cheap labour - which generally means people that only know Windows. MCSA / MCSE is more likely to land you a job than a degree, I know this from personal experience.
It's actually quite a shame considering the over all experience of using a Mac running OS X is relatively easy and maintenance free bar the occasional update that becomes available every now and then.
- Microsoft Office (poorly written but not written by Apple)
- Adobe Creative Suite (poorly written but not written by Apple)
- Maya (not written by Apple)
- Mathmatica (not written by Apple)
- Parallels Desktop Mac (not written by Apple)
- VMware Fusion (not written by Apple)
- TurboTax (not written by Apple)
- QuickBooks (not written by Apple)
- MoneyWorks (not written by Apple)
- All of the Omni apps (not written by Apple)
- All of the Stone Design app (not written by Apple)
- Apache (shipped with Mac OS X but not written by Apple)
- Firefaox (not written by Apple)
- Camino (not written by Apple)
- Skype (not written by Apple)
- Delicious Library (not written by Apple)
Just off the top of my head - Oh yah! and the AppStore.
Apple was a dying company for quite a while, and had to buy back Jobs and NEXT to breathe life back into it. I'm inclined to believe that Apple's innovation is tied directly to one man more so than any other business. This relationship would not exude confidence if I was an IT Director or CIO.
I maintained an OS X Server box for 4 years. Very nice hardware, but the OS had a lot of issues (10.3 and 10.4) and support from Apple was non-existent. We struggled with a race condition in Apple's directory services architecture (the glue between the system and LDAP) for years. Apple really wouldn't do anything about it until some guy on a forum managed to come up with step-by-step instructions on how to trigger the condition. finally Apple acknowledged the problem and, to my amazement, said, "we've fixed it in our new OS, please upgrade." We're talking a full OS upgrade from 10.3 to 10.4. I tried to explain to them that OS's are upgraded in an enterprise normally with the hardware cycle and that we cannot take a production server down for a full system upgrade. Even MS understands that.
Additionally, the lifespan of Apple's server OS was tied exactly to their consumer OS. So instead of 5-6 years that we expect from RH and MS, apple supports their server OSs for about 2 years only. Even within major versions, updating was a real pain. Each and every OS update required a reboot. It was just silly. Of course the bug brought our system down every month or so, so I guess that worked out.
Another time a disk died in our XServe RAID. So we called to get a warranty replacement. The guy on the phone said, "are you sure it has died? Put it back in the array and see what happens." Dumbfounded, I told him this was a production array with mission-critical data on it and that I simply could not trust any disk that had been kicked out of the RAID. The risk was too great for data loss. Had to go through a local rep to lean on apple to just replace the disk.
After I finally figured out how to make my OpenLDAP server on Linux look and act like Apple's OpenDirectory (making Mac client access seamless with no custom ldap mappings required), I ditched the OS X server and will never go back.
The bulk of enterprise space wants cheap whitebox farms of GateDellPaq machines interchangeable and uninspiring of possessiveness enough that the IT guy can drop by your desk and switch out your box four times a year and you won't care.
Apple, meanwhile, has a farm full of insanely loyal customers willing to pay premium prices to avoid precisely the GateDellPaq style of non-shiny nuts-and-boltism.
To get the part of enterprise space that they can't get with their current business offerings, they'd have to do things that would alienate a tremendously loyal, premium-paying customer base. And for what, exactly? To enter the tremendously crowded, cutthroat space of GateDellPaq where everyone competes on price and has to ensure compatibility with a massive ecosystem of devices and ISVs?
Why exactly would they do this?
Why does every other Slashdot poster seem to imagine that the goal of Linux, or Apple, or OLPC, must be to dominate the world and arrive in every home and business everywhere with all competition eliminated? I suspect many businesses would be more than happy to be in Apple's shoes right now, and I also suspect that their investors aren't too upset with them for not going out there trying to get every MBA farm on the block buying an Apple line of cheap-and-dirty-ware.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Always with the docking stations crap. When are you people going to learn to use that new fangled Google thing to find your bloody docking stations. Must I always do it for you?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You can get a clean version of the article at http://infoworld.com/print/112907 and avoid having to flip through a half-dozen web pages.
To properly cater and market to faceless corporations, you have to become one.
And Apple are NOT a 'faceless corporation'!!!
Apple have a face and it is the face of GOD!!!
Yeah, right.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Those with unusually long memories will remember that, in the '80s, the Macintosh (and while it lasted, the Lisa) were Apple's Serious Business Computers. The Apple II was the home/education line.
The Mac had networking built-in from the beginning. (Not very useful for home users, essential for offices.) It had a black-and-white screen. (Not very useful for games or creative work.) Advertising almost exclusively focused on how a Mac could make businesses more efficient by reducing training and support costs. Watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MaDXt30xSo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dqLT0UBPx0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwcuSOfjR6w
Print ads, too:
http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads10/Macad1.jpg and http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads10/Macad2.jpg
For about fifteen years, Apple desperately wanted to be taken seriously by business users, who dismissed Macs as incompatible and expensive (with good reason.) Apple lost loads of money during this period. Meanwhile, Apple's sales were coming entirely from home users, artists, and education sales.
One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned was shit-can that approach and release the cute, cuddly, home-student oriented iMac. And whaddya know, the company suddenly started making money.
Microsoft might even agree with your assessment, and may still labor under the delusion that Microsoft Office is their very own Sword of Damocles. However, I suspect that the sword may not be hanging by a thread above the seat in which Steve Jobs is sitting. Perhaps they haven't looked up, lately.
I've already said too much.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Because their service level agreements are just not good enough.
I standard "business" laptop from Dell comes with next business day on-site service, wherever you are in the world (well, within reason.)
i don't care how attractive Apple's laptops are, unless they can give me that sort of coverage for USD$1500, I'm not interested. I continually hear horror stories from my friends with Apple laptops about what they need to go through for it to get fixed.
When you travel, and travel a lot, you discover that stuff does have a finite lifetime - especially hard drives. There's only so many bumps from being wheeled around or bouncing through air pockets that they will take.
Steve Jobs has done a pretty good job of giving Apple his face and his persona. I don't have any kind of Apple hardware, but have to marvel that they still has a passionate culture after all these years. Contrast that with your typical enterprise customer, say some typical insurance company.
If the X Serve isn't aimed at Enterprise users, I don't know what is. I use both X Serves and Dell Linux servers, and rate them about equal overall.
they like to make you pay over a $1000 more for a desktop pc then one you can get with the same cpu power + X2 ram and better video card and the imacs are not a good fit as Businesses like to reuse the displays.
Also the hard to get to HDD's in the Imacs and some what with the mini are a trun off for data security. You do not want to ship out a system with data on it for warranty work. Also the build in web cam is a BIG no for some Business in the imac as well.
The mini will be a good system if they dropped the price to $500 with a good sized HDD and 2-4gb of ram as make easier to open.
Justin Long doesn't work in the enterprise! He's too hip to work for the man.
Case in point, Microsoft started losing its juice when it got serious about enterprise
Microsoft has always been serious about the enterprise market.
In July of 76 Microsoft was selling its microcomputer BASIC to corporate clients like General Electric.
In April of 79: Microsoft 8080 BASIC was the first microprocessor product to win the ICP Million Dollar Award, "traditionally dominated by software for mainframe computers."
The single most important decision Microsoft ever made was to negotiate a non-exclusive license for MS-DOS. That would permanently alter the landscape. Apple is the lone survivor of the era when hardware and software was tightly bundled.
In 1983 Microsoft Multiplan spreadsheet the company's first application product, was ported across many platforms. "While Lotus 1-2-3 surpassed Multiplan in domestic markets, Multiplan was the winner in almost every other country in which it appeared."
In September of 83 Microsoft introduced Word for MS-DOs 1.0. Microsoft Timeline
No, it's the face of Steve. He's heard of this God fellow, and he plans to have a long talk with him someday about the way he's been running things, but he hasn't hired him as Apple's public face.
Once multitouch interfaces begin to replace the archaic desktop metaphor, Apple will be in a much better position to move into the enterprise market since they will be the major company pushing the technology.
The product they sell is so good, businesses are adapting to Apple - using open standards rather than developing for IE, .NET, etc, making things work cross-platform, etc. Apple just needs to keep doing what they do well already and "the enterprise" will catch up. It's already happening.
Apple invests a lot of time and money in removing control elements to what an individual needs to make the device a fluid part of their lifestyle.
You're really deep inside that Reality Distortion Field. I think The Onion analysed the situation best with its prescient Macbook Wheel promo:
Apple Introduces Revolutionary Laptop WIth No Keyboard
Simplicity is good, yes, but so are buttons and control surfaces for complex multi-modal devices that can change state instantly and enable the user to proceed simultaneously along very different goal paths with divergent inputs. The pathetically modifier-overloaded Macintosh primary mouse button is a classic example of how Too Much Simplicity can become a very bad thing.
Everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler - Albert Einstein
Da Blog
Microsoft would drop MS Office for Mac OS.
Probably the best reason you should be cheering Oracle buying Sun: Larry Ellison is all too likely to ramp up work on Open Office just because he wants to horse fuck Microsoft.
What is with the need for a docking station? Seriously, I don't get it. And I have both a ThinkPad (now mostly retired) and an MBP and I've never felt the need to plug either into a docking station.
I shlep the MBP to work, and I plug in one USB cable which connects to a keyboard (the mouse connects to the keyboard's hub), the Ethernet cable and the power supply. When it's time to go home, I unplug. At home, I do the same thing (I have two power supplies).
I used to do the same thing with the ThinkPad, 'cept I shlepped the power supply because I only had one.
I really don't get the docking station thing.
Smart phones before the iPhone sucked, big time.
The original Iphone sucked in many ways. All a matter of opinion.
The introduction of the iPhone has driven a great expansion of the smart phone market.
Nonsense. Firstly "smartphone" is ill-defined - the difference between "smart" and "feature" is just one for marketing convenience to distinguish the current high end from low end (can you give me a definition of smartphone that includes the original Iphone, but not many feature phones?) Since Apple even now only have a few per cent market share, and this was far lower with the original Iphone, it's clear that they can't have greatly expanded it.
Nokia are the company that should be praised for bringing phones (from the high end to the low) to the masses.
They've got almost everything except security down. Add a few more ways to lock down the systems, and add real WOL (that wakes from off state, not just sleep), and they're good to go.
Well, name some numbers as to what is "very small." I've been at businesses with 30-something employees where we had some pretty powerful hardware. If you're an enterprise software ISV startup, you may very reasonably want this caliber of hardware, though you'd almost certainly do better to go with a Linux solution. A small video production and CGI shop, on the other hand, sounds like a very good candidate for this level of Apple-branded hardware.
Are you adequate?
Really, whats up with that?
The biggest feature of my work laptop is that I have docking stations at home and work for it. Exactly how hard is it to do? Is Apple afraid of a connector blemishing their cases?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
There is no such thing as an enterprise-level fart app. There, I've said it, there's no unsaying it. You were thinking it, mouthing the words, hov
Businesses demand a lot of esoteric features
What? Look at the enterprise-marketed laptop lines for a great example of what corporations want. They're not "esoteric" by any stretch.
Way to prove you don't work in IT, much less corporate level. We care about things like price, TCO, parts availability, interchangeability of accessories (within reason), and management.
Meanwhile, consumers want just about everything under the sun.
and are concerned with getting the cheapest hardware possible.
Purchase price is not the ultimate concern, no- ballpark is important, yes. Again, way to prove you don't work in IT. I've never had a boss that said "well, this $3000 server is $300 cheaper than the other one, so we're going to get that, even though it doesn't have IPMI and we have no in-house experience with this brand, and their support contract is 8hr, not 4hr."
They have no desire or tolerance for "cool" Completely not the market Apple is going for.
It's not a matter of "cool". It's a matter that Apple likes consumers because they're easily pushed around and they CONSUME. And if you think companies don't want "Cool", you haven't seen a CEO of a million dollar company get handed his new Blackberry (hell hath no fury if it works more poorly than the old one, however.)
Corporations say, "Hey. Why did you just change the display port AGAIN? Now half of our 2000 member sales force have a different display port from the other half." Or, "why are all of our iMacs developing vertical lines? Our CEO's secretary has gone through two machines in a month and he's raising hell because they can't work. Don't you people have any quality control? Send us some goddamn WORKING computers or we buy Dell from now on. That's straight from the CEO's mouth."
Corporations have legal departments, so that when machines die, lawyers say "give us our money back or we seek damages." Consumers just bitch and moan on online forums- and purchase decisions are more rational in corporations (heh, I can't believe I just said that, but I mean they're not *emotional*.)
Corporations say "Oh, Macbook Pros are $2k? Well, we're buying 100 of them this month, and we've given you $500k in business this quarter. So, how about $1700?". Consumers just hand over their CC.
Corporations say, "If a laptop breaks, we want someone to come in and fix it. And if you won't, we want to be able to train our own IT staff in how to fix them and be able to order parts." Apple a)won't let you order parts unless you're a reseller, b)won't do on-site service of anything except Mac Pros and Xserves. Ever spent your day standing in line at the Genius Bar with a laptop belonging to a CEO of a $50M company because that was the best support option, and then arguing with some pimply-faced "Genius" who is used to talking to grandmas about why their gumdrop iMac is dead?
In big Apple-using companies I've worked at, we kept every single machine that died and cannibalized them for parts for the other ones, because we couldn't get the goddamn parts from Apple, couldn't get service manuals, couldn't train CSRs.
Meanwhile, HP, Dell, IBM, Sun will all happily take our precious dollars and promise that if anything breaks in my shiny server or desktop, I'll have a replacement part sitting on my desk in FOUR HOURS. They'll let almost anyone order parts, and happily train people in how to repair their products. And if a laptop breaks, they'll come out and service it on the spot if you bought that support plan, so our CEO doesn't have to be without his laptop while it gets shipped to fucking TEXAS, the only place you can get a Macbook Pro repaired if it's anything remotely complicated (the Apple Store can do drive replacements, that's about it.)
I had to replace two failed drives on an HP server once (one system drive, one data array drive.) I said "I have red lights, they were kicked out of the array by the controller." We had a 4 hour support contr
Please help metamoderate.
Well, Apple could kill iTunes for windows. Oh wait, that would trash their music sales and crack the iPhone ecosystem. Yes, you are probably right.
Or, Apple has looked around at the hardware guys in the business space and realized the margins are shit in that little race to the bottom.
Plus, there's a long term play that says software costs will go to near zero and hardware and support is where all the money will be, and margins are shit in hardware, and support is a cartel of sysadmins...
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
I was told four years ago when I bought my first Mac that Apple wanted more professional customers. Since then I have noticed a definite move away from supporting professionals. I questioned an Apple tech last year about this. They claimed they still wanted professional customers. I cited numerous things they have done to drive away pros in recent years. They didn't have an answer they simply chanted the "we want your business" line. They want professional dollars but professionals expect support and Apple just wants to support people that can't figure out their iPod. Sad because pro business kept them afloat in the old days. Take away the pro business and Apple would have died 15 years ago and may never have gotten off the ground in the first place given how expensive the old Apples were. They turned their backs on the business and pro users. I'm normally pro Apple for hardware and OSs but there is no denying they don't want to be bothered with pros these days.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
I have been making statements and observations similar to this article and time after time, I get modded -1 troll after about two or three hours... of course initially modded +5 insightful prior to that.
I think it has been plainly obvious that Apple doesn't care to be a business powerhouse at any level. I think perhaps it is a responsibility (read: liability) they don't want to manage. I tend to think of Jobs as the computer world's George Lucas. Everyone loves what he can do, but every time we see something with serious potential, he throws some sort of Jar-Jar monkey wrench into the works that prevents the newest iProduct from being accepted by the largest consumer of PCs... business.
"Despite feature enhancements that suggest otherwise, I remain lukewarm to any success in scoring with lingerie models. 'I have intentionally created a glass ceiling that I have no intention of shattering. Conversations with myself over the past decade have always been off the record when it comes to the topic of sex and beautiful women. I have no intention of signaling any active plans to serve incredibly hot girls,'. 'In a sense, I view sex with beautiful women as "collateral success" — a nice-to-have byproduct of its real focus: sex and speading my seed, because to do otherwise would greatly increase the complexity I would have to deal with.'"
My employer has one of those "Enterprise class" IT departments. I use the phrase in quotes, because if Captain Kirk had this type of IT support on the Enterprise, Star Trek TNG would be entirely in Klingon. My wife and kids have better, more reliable networks and PC applications -- running from my HOME. At work, we suffer along with an Exchange server that takes a day off every so often. File servers are a hit-or-miss proposition. We have measurable packet loss on our own LAN! Websense blocks us from legitimate business sites. Meanwhile, the computers are locked down in such a way that half the time the automatic updates to corporate-supplied software die for lack of privileges -- but spyware plays right through.
When corporate IT simplifies its approach and cuts the MS-inspired complexity, they will discover the appeal of Macs. But not until. If Apple were to try and make the Mac as "administrator-friendly" as a PC, it would be no better than a PC. It is not easy to justify premium pricing if your product suffers from the same disease as lowball competitors.
It would be the clash of the titans. Apple would NEVER allow control over their ecosystem (user experience) and IT Admins would never relinquish control of the ecosystem.
It will be nice to watch!
The mini is already a pretty decent system -- and you can't possibly convince me that the mini is $1k more than a comparable PC. (And if you CAN find a PC for $1k less than that, lemme know -- I want about thirty thousand of them.)
I dunno, I build my own machines from parts sometimes, but if I just wanted another desktop, I'd get a mini. Even if I was gonna run Windows on it; I'd still rather just get a mini, since it's small, cheap, quiet, and no-effort.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I would love to replace my POS HP cheap as dirt laptop with my sweet MB Pro. I would even furnish the computer myself, so they would save the $1000 on the laptop. And in fact there is a few brave souls using Macs, some of them even dual booting when required (see below). I am seriously considering joining them when my lease is next up. I have seen the next generation laptops that are coming in to the corporation and the machine is not faster and has an annoying refresh entire screen every 30 seconds.
This company is standardized on XP and explorer 6 with Lotus Notes. We are in a "tight controlled" network. You get software patches 3x week and you have to accept. We have virus software that prevents us from using our science instruments any more without an IT intervention. The computer takes 8 minutes to boot up and 5 minutes to shut down. All internal "paperwork" requires IE6, not even Firefox allowed. Telcons require you "see" the screen of others, requiring IE6... you get the picture. We are considering Win7 (never got to Vista, in fact we removed the preloaded Vista and put on XP) but will still need a year to work on the bugs.
If the lack of IE6 was not enough there are some specialized software that is not on the Mac. This is where dual booting would work, but I would have to become the dual boot expert, don't expect any help. Lotus updates Notes on the Mac so slowly that there would be periods of goofiness during the lag time. Also, they like the straight jacket they can put on our computers, I wonder if the Mac and even be constrained in a similar manner?
In their minds this is the cheapest solution, maybe so as they would screw up a Mac installation as they have screwed up the XP computers . It would require switching completely to Mac to regain the comfort level. But that seems unlikely. But then h-e-l-l is close to freezing over outside.
I use a two-button mouse on my Mac, so I don't have that problem. But I do like not having to explain two buttons to my 92-year-old grandmother on her iMac.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you're the type that likes the 200+ button remote control that can change any setting on any AV device in your house. I happen to really like the iPhone's simplicity and the way they kept all the UI inside the screen, leaving only volume, mute, on/off, and home buttons.
E pluribus unum
I agree with most of your post, and it would be nice if it were more obvious how to open the Mac Mini.
On the other hand, the Mac Mini isn't hard to open...if you know how. It takes me about fifteen seconds, which is pretty competitive with almost any other computer I've ever opened; the G4 towers were easier to open since you just had to lift a latch and the entire motherboard swung down. With the Mac Mini you do need two tools, but if you have them it's very, very easy.
I think you're right. I just wish Apple could somehow break into the games market for their machines and compete with M/S there. That's a personal non-corporate market and I'd ditch my Windows PC if I could play games (All of the games I decide I like) on another O/S. Apple will get me a few games, WINE will get me more but I'd still be left short. There's nothing else that I need a wintel for at home that any other competitor can't do.
Ahh... I can see it now. Imagine if you will when your average, everyday "clueless" user wants to eject a disc from their iMac drive, or better yet simply wishes to turn the damn thing on!
Omission of such fundamental hardware features for clashing with the cool, minimalist design aesthetic alone would preclude Apple's hardware from penetrating the business market where flexibility, inexpensive, and pragmatism dominate.
Let alone Apple's choice of exotic, non-upgrade friendly hardware and flaky support of products outside of the latest release cycle.
This has been the differentiating factor of Macs vs PCs for pretty much ever.
Why is this news now?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's not like Apple couldn't build business computers. For example I have an old G3 somewhere around which is just very easy to maintain.
However the refusal of Apple to accept the business market causes them to not be taken seriously in terms of quality. When I buy a consumer product, I know it won't work. I know that it will have GPU fans, cables held by cable straps and capacitors rated for 1000 hour use. I have seen it many times with consumer computers.
Now Apple also had it's "consumer moments". Just think of the many "logic board failures" it had in the past. (my iBook G3 had 3 of them in 3 years!) It would be great if Apple had a product line geared towards businesses where you could be sure, the quality would be alright.
And please, Apple, stop manufacturing in China. China is great for simple things, but they really don't care very much about quality.We once made them do a couple of coaxial cables and none of them worked.
It's all about strategies. For many years (before it started with its entertainment division), MS essentially followed the opposite strategy. It made windos so obiquituous in business that people were expected to know it if they wanted a job, so lots of people bought a computer for home, which of course (thanks to OEM deals) came with windos. Closed ecosystem.
Apple approaches the same thing from the opposite direction, it assumes that even corporations are made up out of humans and that it is humans who make the decisions. So people who enjoy Macs at home bring them into the company - I've seen that happen on many occasions.
btw: You can get enterprise support for Mac hardware and software. Just not from Apple directly, but many of their partners will be happy to fill that niche.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Apple does not want to market to businesses because businesses will demand sensible prices. Businesses won't pay the Mac be-cool prices. Once Apple products are sold for sensible prices, everyone will want those prices.
If you don't get that the Mac with OS X saves you time and money and increases productivity compared to a PC with Windows by now then that's your problem. You can help the ignorant but not the stupid, not the completely disfunctional. There are thousands of examples like Genentech where Mac minis replaced Dell towers and millions of dollars were saved and productivity soared. The message has been sent. Many simply are not listening.
I'm working in the I-T group for a huge multinational that is 98% Windows, and me and my co-workers all have Macs at home, and so do most users. But the guy making the buying decisions only knows Microsoft. He does not even know anything about the Web. He's a middle manager guy, not a technologist. Nobody is home. There is no decision-making about I-T except when do we roll out the next Microsoft patch? They still run IE6. They spend months deciding what icons will appear on a user's desktop when they get it. They have no idea what their users do or how to help them be productive. The big issue now is how to convince users they want Windows 7 enough for them to learn it. They're not rolling out better tools, they're propagandizing the next Microsoft thing. You can't help people like that.
... is grounds for immediate termination (and i'm not just talking empolyment).
"._" files anyone?
Enterprises love roadmaps. They need to plan their IT budgets and deployments and know what's coming down the pike in 12/18/24/36 months. Apple's business model has them keeping products as secret as possible until the day they're announced and go on sale and refusing to comment on future products.
Two completely different worlds. I don't see Apple ever getting into the enterprise.
Enterprise is also a crowded, mature field with companies who have been doing this for a long time. For Apple to compete, they'd have to build all of the infrastructure that Dell does - fleet sales, leasing arrangements, tiered support contracts with on-call and on-site support, and all of that. And they'd have to build up their server backend to support all of the enterprise features that Windows and Unix already do, like linking with SAP and Domino and interoperating with AD Group Policy Objects and all that crap. That's going to cost a fortune, and is completely outside of Apple's strengths (selling nicely-designed things to end users and consumers at a premium). Finally, Apple is a high-margin company, and enterprise is about delivering the lowest bids. Dell can afford to do this because their whole company is organized around volume and efficiency and squeezing nickels out of the supply chain at every opportunity. Apple can't play that.
Rather than spend the money to go toe-to-toe with Dell for individual percentage points of a market that's mature and completely outside their core competence. It makes perfect sense that they'd do the bare minimum to function in that market, and spend their capital on markets that are younger and growing and not as crowded and more suited for Apple's core capabilities - like the nascent media player market, or the online digital media market, or the non-enterprise smartphone market, or the tablet reader/browser market. Apple getting into enterprise sales makes about as much sense as Apple building its own search engine.
Apple courting IT people is a losing battle for a couple of reasons. First, a large number of IT people drink daily at the Kool-Aid fountains of Microsoft so to them, anything else is an "also ran". Second, the IT support requirements of Windows environments are far more than that of Apple environments but the heads of IT departments don't care about saving money as much as they do about increasing their headcount. Running a larger department gives the department head more clout in the company. This has been my experience working for a Fortune 500 company.
a-holes who do not live in the real world
I find this question to be extremely easy to answer. Whats worse is I only support 10 of them and come across things on a daily basis that I would never have to even think twice about answering if the same task can be accomplished in windows. The answer is they simply aren't ready for business so they don't market toward business.
Here's just one shining example: Accounting on Xerox copiers isn't correctly supported.
Why does every other Slashdot poster seem to imagine that the goal of Linux, or Apple, or OLPC, must be to dominate the world and arrive in every home and business everywhere with all competition eliminated?
Bravo chap! Great point, their current business model (select users, select products) makes a few people a shitload of money ... why potentially screw that up with enterprise support?
Had a meeting the other day for a threat risk assessment for an app we are trying to build. I ask the guy "Your a consultant. Are you aware of the corporate security protocols? They are currently causing us some problems." He wanted to know why I knew he was a consultant. I said "Your using a Macbook."
No one in a corporate setting would be using a Macbook. Also when setting up to the projector he made a big deal about it having HDMI ports, to which my response was, "You know it is the exact same thing as DVI except with sound right?"
Funny enough there was no sound in the presentation.
Anyway he did a good job, I am just being smarmy.
Apple is counting on user and group demand to get into business.
For example, they have good traction in some media content departments. Most professional media organizations standardize on a set of tools, and stick with them for decades. If you go to video production houses, you'll generally find they're "Sony shops" or "Panny shops".. they don't mix and match camcorder gear. Same applies to video editing suites and at least OS platforms if not necessarily (on the PC side) PC vendors.
In short, Apple keeps their adherents, and they have virtually no chance of selling Macs to a PC/Vegas, PC/Newtek, or PC/Grass Valley shop, and not a very good chance of selling to PC/Avid or PC/Adobe shop. Similar things in audio work.
Outside of content creation, it's even more difficult. There's lots of talk of corporate email and maybe even desktop apps, and if that's all you're doing throughout your organization, maybe Apple stands a chance. If you're doing software development, sure, you might be able to run on the Mac... at least as a Linux replacement. But once you get to non-FOSS development, you probably can't get that special compiler for a NXP ARM or TI DSP on Mac. Windows may the only target.
Going on to hardware development, it gets even more severe... there are no good hardware tools for MacOS, and for any reasonable hardware development environment, you don't just need one, you need dozens of tools. This is the same reason peopl use Windows and MacOS for media content creation over Linux.. it's not just one tool, it's potentially dozens (I do hardware development, software development, video and music... the PC is the only possible answer).
Now, get back to larger companies.. you have to hire a sysadmin. He may not need to do much in the engineering group, but his department is going to manage computers in marketing, sales, finance, office support, documentation, etc... definitely all the non-tech departments. Unless you can do each and every one of those things on the Mac, the PC wins by default.
And then there's the smart business decision. If I'm building a new company, I need gear. I'd like to establish a relationship with a hardware vendor for any medium sized company or larger. If I pick Apple, I have no recourse... I take what they give me, and that's that. It's an expensive platform shift to move to another platform. If I buy a PC, regardless of the software platform. I can change hardware suppliers any time I like. Which gives me much more leverage with them. So Apple would never be the right answer, from this aspect of the business perspective.
-Dave Haynie
Apple never did business/enterprise correctly, or well.
But they used to be a powerhouse in education. And they're not just losing that market, they're intentionally walking away.
The future trend is one computer per student. They've been doing that at my kids' high school recently. This was completely enabled by the rise of Netbook PCs. Every kid in school borrows a Netbook for the year.... that's possible with $300 Netbooks, impossible based on the lower Apple iBook prices. In fact, Apple's prices are all over crazy... the average price paid for a laptop, excluding netbooks, was about $550, 4Q09. Where is Apple's $500 laptop, much less their $300 laptop. Without they, they're walking away from one of their traditional markets.
My guess is that Apple just doesn't care.. they like the high margins on the Apple laptops.. they're getting twice as much money per computer as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Sony, Toshiba, etc. That's got to feel good, but also, I think Apple doesn't quite believe that the Mac is their future.
-Dave Haynie
You're not wrong, but you're not right, either. You vote for one approach. I vote for another. There is lots of room in the world for experimentation.
Your mouse button hatred is a complex phenomenon. Apple first went for a consistent design that called for standardized menus to accomplish anything. One button was all you needed for a long time. If you found yourself doing a repetitive motion, you opened the menu and found the Command-key combination. Right-clicks slowly began to intrude from the Windows world, and eventually this was dropped in favor of the Apple mouse designs that are, in fact, two-button or three-button mice. They were demanded by the Windows refugees, because they're used to that, and for no other reason. The newer mice are great, in my experience, except for the tiny nipple roller ball, which get clogged too frequently. I'm now using a Magic mouse, which has a mulitouch-type roller pad, and yes, both left and right click. I really love it. And of course, it's never mentioned by mouse haters that you can use any USB mouse that's on the market, most of which you don't need a special driver for. My Microsoft Mouse works fine, too.
Meanwhile, the right-click-slide-drag world of Windows has one big defect. When you're a bit lost about how to do something, on the Mac you can look through the menus to find out most things. When you're giving your developers free rein to put essential commands on a right click, you make them invisible. I'll cite as an example my long attempt to alphabetize the bookmarks in IE. I searched the menus, nothing. I looked at the menu dialog, and I could find no little button there. Add, subtract bookmarks, clean up the listing, that's it. I actually read somewhere that you right click in the open menu to do that. Weird. How would I have guessed that?
No interface is perfect, but the one-button mouse was a noble effort done for a reason, to keep the interface clear for everyone.
You are forgetting to add the cost of yearly virus checking software subscription. And if you have had the same windows box without a single re-build I might not think you are telling the truth. You probably do one of those about once every 18 months.
I will add to that, that you never know what product line Apple will drop next. And if you need to plan your enterprise infrastructure for more than 5 years, you are screwed with Apple. Microsoft at least lies when it comes to new functionality, but Apple just stays quiet.
Corporations say, "If a laptop breaks, we want someone to come in and fix it. And if you won't, we want to be able to train our own IT staff in how to fix them and be able to order parts." Apple a)won't let you order parts unless you're a reseller, b)won't do on-site service of anything except Mac Pros and Xserves. Ever spent your day standing in line at the Genius Bar with a laptop belonging to a CEO of a $50M company because that was the best support option, and then arguing with some pimply-faced "Genius" who is used to talking to grandmas about why their gumdrop iMac is dead?
In big Apple-using companies I've worked at, we kept every single machine that died and cannibalized them for parts for the other ones, because we couldn't get the goddamn parts from Apple, couldn't get service manuals, couldn't train CSRs.
Meanwhile, HP, Dell, IBM, Sun will all happily take our precious dollars and promise that if anything breaks in my shiny server or desktop, I'll have a replacement part sitting on my desk in FOUR HOURS. They'll let almost anyone order parts, and happily train people in how to repair their products. And if a laptop breaks, they'll come out and service it on the spot if you bought that support plan, so our CEO doesn't have to be without his laptop while it gets shipped to fucking TEXAS, the only place you can get a Macbook Pro repaired if it's anything remotely complicated (the Apple Store can do drive replacements, that's about it.)
This is the real issue. Support. We have a relatively large number of users (including the CEO) that like Mac's, mainly MacBooks (we have around a 100 Mac users). We can't get decent support from Apple. Period. At least not in the Netherlands, maybe somewhere else. The difference with Lenovo, Dell or HP is staggering. I also use a Nac myself, but I shudder at the idea it might break and I might be without it for days or weeks.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor