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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.'"
John, are you seriously saying that the personal music player market wasn't already a crowded market when Apple released the iPod?
Are you seriously saying that the cell phone market wasn't already a crowded market when Apple released the iPhone?
Are you seriously saying that the web browser market wasn't already a crowded market when Apple released Safari?
Or are we only considering the "hipster-targeting" markets, which Apple basically created?
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.
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.
E pluribus unum
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.