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.'"

Comments

Re:No Enterprise Offerings

[aristotle-dude]

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).

Problem: Adminstrating a lot of macs.

Solution: Products like Deep Freeze.

http://www.faronics.com/html/DFMac.asp

Combine that with restricting macs to network logins with home directories stored on the server and you have one central point for configuration management and backup of user data.

Oh, wait. You wanted "enterprise" solutions that require your constant attention so you can justify your existence. Sorry about that.

Re:I'd like to see Apple make a move, but...

[samkass]

Yes, apple has geeks working in company, but would it have enough geeks to put every knob and button on their applications to make them enterprise-ready?

This statement is interesting because it gets to the crux of the matter in terms of design philosophy. Microsoft designers probably get paid a lot of money to add the right knobs and buttons. Apple designers probably get paid a lot of money to remove the right knobs and buttons. It's like the old quote, "I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make
it shorter." (Blaise Pascal, Provincial Letters XVI). 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. That's not necessarily what most business needs, having to contend with all sorts of contractual, systemic, and other specifics that require tweaks not deemed essential by the Apple designer.

Re:Macs are great for small business though

[Tibor the Hun]

Pardon the uninitiated, but with 10.6 supporting Exchange Mail and Calendar with setup time of about 2 seconds (to enter your email and password), why does one need Outlook?

Apple has no clue how to do enterprise

[caseih]

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.

Re:Maybe Businesses Don't Want Macs

[Anonymous Psychopath]

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.

Ever heard of Cisco? We are free to run a Mac that the company will pay for, as long as IT doesn't have to support it. We have an internal user community that provides its own support in lieu of IT. There are thousands of Mac users here. I switched about four months ago thinking that the worst-case scenario is that I could still run Windows on the hardware if switching to a new OS didn't work out. So far, I'm still running OSX, but am also still running Outlook under virtualization; enterprise messaging on the Mac is currently not very good.

Obviously this type of solution is not for everyone, but it works for us.

Re:Of course not

[Xtravar]

There are some things that are not enterprise ready

Let me tell you right now: the iPhone/iPod Touch platform is one of those things not enterprise ready. This seems as good of a post to rant off of as any.

I work at a company that wants to sell iPhone software to enterprise customers. We've talked to Apple a hundred times and they reneged on every single one of their promises to help so far. They have no interest in the enterprise or enterprise applications.

Hello, App Store.

Now, our competitors can see our (awesome) product and we have weirdos downloading it who can't use it. Not to mention, we can't put out quick fixes (which is kind of important for my business) because of the Apple Gatekeepers.

Oh yeah, and we can only have one client version and must retain server compatibility (and/or customer-specific lock-out logic) for older clients.

Re:Macs are great for small business though

[kainewynd2]

This is totally true. I am actually one of those folks who takes OS X Server the "extra mile" so that it can scale into medium/large businesses. It's not even that taking OS X Server to those levels is hard, but there are so few of us out there with the skill set to accomplish this that the overall belief is that OS X Server just can't do it.

Case in point, I just rebuilt an entire Open Directory backend for a school that had grown from 200 nodes with a cheap SOHO network to upwards of 900 nodes and a Cisco backend. Until the moment I finished, the current admin was adamant that OS X Server and Open Directory in general just couldn't handle the load they were putting on it (essentially one-two hundred authentication transactions at peak times).

That's ridiculous and since the rebuild and migration, OD has been rock solid... and they have Kerberos again (someone removed it entirely at some point in history). As with anything like this, proper setup, configuration and tweaking will allow most technologies to scale as necessary. Hell, I didn't even have to tweak the OpenLDAP config to optimize this install...

There just aren't a lot of people who "know how to do it" on this platform and so a stigma is attached... and amplified when Apple refuses to actually push forward on the Enterprise end of things.