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.'"
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."
Totally. If you have only a couple folks and want something that is easily usable and interoperable, OS X is great.
Get beyond that, though, and it's not that you *can't* do it, but Apple isn't particularly interested in addressing the need with a wide array of enterprise solutions.
Which is fine, OS X integrates fairly well into an Active Directory setup with a little tinkering. It'll be a lot nicer again once Microsoft re-releases Outlook for OS X in the next version of Office.
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.
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.
If you ignore the products that they market to businesses, then it probably does look like they don't market to businesses.
Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft would beg to disagree.
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.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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."
Actually the only thing I see is people complaining that "They're not in business so why should we have them". I can cite multi-floor buildings stuffed with lawyers that run exclusively on os x systems. The same for 5,000+ strong schools. The remote management tools (ARD, DeployStudio, SSH) are more than powerful enough for what the staff want and need and can be used to lock down a machine if necessary. Policy dictates that the whole "your machine must be locked down tighter than a cows arse at fly time" is no longer necessary, so it isn't put in like that - even in the law firms.
There are some things that are not enterprise ready - I would like to see a more robust printing system and their group policy replacement (Managed Preferences) could be fleshed out a bit more - but the idea that the tools are very limited is indicative of either a lack of training, or the Apple Tech you have needs to be re-trained severely.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
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.
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.
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?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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.
I used to - and one of the biggest. We switched to PCs and nothing has worked quite right since, and really no serious attempt has been made to fix it for 12 years. Document control, in particular, has completely broken down. We still have a few Macs around (OS8.6 and OS X) to try to correct document corruption problems caused by PCs. Even on PC to another can't correctly read, render, or print a document correctly. Create it in Office 2000, move it to another Office 2000 machine, characters are screwed up. It's even worse with 2000/2003/2007 and NT/XP/Vista (for those poor saps who got stuck with it). Put them on the Mac, using Office 98/2001/VX/2004, and frequently, no problem, and/or you can fix it and have it work with any of the PC versions. But reports created on 2003 two days ago, into Windows-based document control, and try to extract them today, completely hosed.
For critical items, we print it out (however we can get a correct version, PC or Mac) then scen them in as TIFF files. This was suggested by the senior Microsoft tech working the Platinum trouble ticket as the most reliable way!
Brett
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.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
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.
and Apple uses open directory instead, which is a much more open system. But it too can become something of a tangle. But having worked with both, Apple's use of OD is a good deal more sane than Windows AD.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
$33/seat is not an unreasonable price for system management. If you've spent enough to have 500 Macs, $16K for system-wide admin is peanuts. If your company is in dire enough straits that they can't afford that, you might want to start looking for a more stable outfit to work for.
That is all.
Yes, they have a services hosted on Mac OS X Server called NetBoot, NetInstall and NetRestore that do system imaging functions. You can read some marketing speak about it here and here. I've been using it since OS 10.4, it's easy to set up and works pretty well.
grep -iw skynet
Are you kidding? With VL, our cost for a seat of Windows 7 Enterprise is less than $25. Don't get me wrong; I am not a Mac hater. In fact I have one on my desk right now (all the admins in my company do). But buying some 3rd party app to do something as basic as remotely administer a workstation is just crazy. Kind of like buying a smartphone where the concept of 'copy/paste' is a new feature... (I kid...)
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Apple Remote Desktop (http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/) is $499 for unlimited clients.
But if your company doesn't have $500, you can use any VNC client, as the macs support it natively (In the sharing settings is where you set up VNC access).
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
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
The enterprise license is what an organization would buy to deploy an application to their workers.
We sell to organizations - not our workers. The enterprise license doesn't let you do that.
What we *wanted* to do was give our customer organizations our source code so that *they* could use the enterprise license and so that we could avoid the App Store.
Our lawyers, and Apple's lawyers, had agreed on this model, as well as various people at Apple. Then, someone high-up at Apple came down and said that route wasn't possible anymore and against their terms. Because their terms are so damn broad, we didn't have any recourse and certainly didn't want to get into a spat with Apple.
But thanks for your suggestion!!! I hope you feel smug now for calling us cheap, asshole.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
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.
I just don't get... eh, ugh... never mind. This post wasn't worth the research I put into it.
Does it really work with exchange calendaring? Can you see free/busy time when creating appointments for your team, can you proxy into other e-mail boxes and send on their behalf, can you manage mail-enabled public folders, can you view all shared calendars, can you book resources and not just users? If the answer to any of these is no, you need outlook...and that just scratches the surface of what an Exchange admin like myself knows are enterprise requirements.
Because it ONLY supports certain versions of exchange and if you are not running the EXACT versions that Apple tells you are compatible you are pretty much screwed.
You'd also sink your business.
/. really needs to get over the myth that you could have a Mac and not need to support it, it's the same as any other machine.
Contrary to popular opinion Mac's suffer problems. I've had to support Mac's in mixed enviroments and I spent more time per machine just getting things to work on a Mac. The whole "just works" fallacy only works when you dont do anything with it.
Further more, 99% of business software runs on Windows, I may not like it but I have to deal with it.
Finally, Mac's do not perform well in any Domain, I've tried Windows AD and Linux domains and Mac's seem to reject the whole idea of centralised services.
Mac's are not ready for business, they are not designed to work in business. Given the fact that if I buy 10 of anything from Dell, Lenovo et al. I instantly get 10% off the top and Apple does not do volume deals you have to be certifiably mad to buy Apple.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
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?
The incredible thing is that is true. I brought my Mac to work, then specified my company e-mail address and password and it simply asked me to specify my account name, since this was not the same as my e-mail address prefix. In doing so it discovered the mail server (internal and external), the calendar server and the contact directory. With this configuration in place I can even read my work e-mail from home, which is something I can't fathom how to do with the Outlook 2007. BTW for anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch, this approach works there too.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.