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Can Apple Penetrate the Corporation?
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Feb 27, 2007 06:32 PM
from the awareness-gap dept.
from the awareness-gap dept.
coondoggie sends us a NetworkWorld story on the prospects for Apple gaining market share in the corporation. A number of factors are helping to catch the eye of those responsible for upgrading desktops and servers, the article claims: "Apple's shift to the Intel architecture; the inclusion of infrastructure and interoperability hooks, such as directory services, in the Mac OS X Server; dual-boot capabilities; clustering and storage technology; third-party virtualization software; and comparison shopping, which is being fostered by migration costs and hardware overhauls associated with Microsoft's Vista." On this last point, one network admin is quoted: "The changes in Vista are significant enough that we think we can absorb the change going to Macs just as easily as going to Vista."
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why not? (Score:5, Funny)
Why not? They're already penetrating consumers.
Re:why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Informative)
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What? (Score:5, Insightful)
See, in the real world there's no such thing as perfect, it literally can't exist. There is only ever good enough and no two people stand at exactly the same point on the good enough continuum.
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Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
As a matter of fact there are fewer and fewer client side apps in an average corporation. Most IT departments do not have the competence and resources to support internal development. I no longer even get pissed off when I hear an IT boss wannabie speaking the "We are not software developers" mantra. In fact in many places, not using software "as shipped and specified by the vendor" has become a firing offence.
Most internal applications have long moved to various forms of portals/intranet servers which makes the end-client platform considerably less relevant. In fact moving from IE6 to IE7 and further to vista access controls have caused (and will cause) the same level of pain as moving to a different OS + browser.
As far as corporate readiness goes, Apple has everything it needs from a technological viewpoint to be ready. However, it is not currently showing the will and desire to go after that market. It does not have a corporation oriented sales channel. It does not have corporation oriented support channel either. Its entire model is geared towards end-users (alone or within an educational establishment).
Actually the situation is not entirely dissimilar from the early PC days.
In those days enterprises where terminal shops with terminals connected to a mainframe or minivax or a unix system. Few places were running Unix using early vintage X terminals. The PC went for the small business and personal market first and from there it displaces the terminals in the larger businesses.
Nowdays the situation is about the same. Microsoft has been paying too much attention to large business customers and ignoring the place it started - SMBs, small ISVs and personal use. At the same time most internal company applications are now server based and very few things run on the clients. This is roughly the position of mainframes of old and we very well know how they have been displaced by a product which was initially adopted by SMBs and for personal use.
So, Apple if they want to, can try to repeat the Microsoft of early days. Currently, they are not showing that they are willing to do so.
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Re:Are you sure? (Score:5, Informative)
Office
Smart Cards
Certificates
Distributed policy management
Corporate distribution of packaged software
Granted, most of this is newish since it was only added in 10.4 (04/2005) but it's all there.
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Re:You should keep looking... (Score:5, Informative)
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I'd like to see (Score:5, Insightful)
If nothing else I'd love to see a larger market-share for Apple just to cut down on the number of spam-generating zombies out there.
Re:I'd like to see (Score:5, Informative)
Yes they do. Ask any Apple sales rep about it.
-jcr
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If you're going to get like that... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'd like to see (Score:5, Informative)
This is not accruate. I am an Apple Authorized Business Agent, and Apple Enterprise sales group absolutely can and does offer corporate dicounts. Check your facts. Call Apple, ask for entrprise sales, and talk turkey. Evidently, you'll be surprised.
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Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that if the IT department (Ok, the undergrad who has to act like an IT department) is leaving IE as the default browser on those machines, you're getting pretty much what you deserve. Get them to put Firefox on there and the general level of noise and hijacking will settle down quite a bit.
Or you can go Mac and it'll settle down to zero and stay there. :)
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Re:I'd like to see (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure it's even a love of Microsoft and IBM so much as a love of control and hostility to change, especially change not implemented by them.
I've seen a government office's IT department refuse to send a standard USB mouse to a team that needed one for a Mac they had purchased because "we don't know how to support a Mac." Even after the head of the team had calmly explained to them that all they need to know in this particular case is how to tell a USB connector from a PS/2 connector. I don't see anything there but the IT department trying to play power games - something that I see hints of every single time I go out to visit a client site.
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Yes and Maybe No (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes and Maybe No (Score:5, Interesting)
The big cost is all the custom software that was written with an MS-Only IDE, to MS-Only API's and specs. That is the real killer.
I am a senior programmer with more than a decade of experience. During that time about 90% of my work has been MS-only stuff.
I have written C code for Win32
I have written C code for Solaris
I have written C code for Linux
I have written C++ code for Win32
I have written C++ code for Solaris
I have written C++ code for Linux
I have written Java code for Win32/Solaris/Linux
I have written VB code for Win32
I have written C# code for Win32
The funny thing, all the code I have written for non-MS OS'es has been pretty portable. The MS software, well, that has been MS-Only. MS designed their whole software "ecosystem" to lock you in.
So the real cost of switching from MS is not in training, but in re-writing custom apps. Notice I didn't say _porting_. Most MS-Only apps don't port very well. MS made it this way for a reason, to lock-in customers. The more MS software your company uses, the more locked-in you are.
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Our Business (Score:5, Insightful)
However, corporations and businesses in general are prone to using a lot of custom-designed software built by Windows-only outfits. Until that changes, Apple will have a hard time penetrating the corporation.
Nope - Companies/Groups Have Innate Cultures (Score:4, Insightful)
For Open Source it is an inability to make hard and reasonable choice in UI design.
For Apple, it is a complete lack of understanding of the corporate computing mindset. Also game development, but that's a whole other subject.
It's already happening (Score:5, Interesting)
Especially at small companies. The company I work at was 100% Windows just 2 years ago. Now we are 90% Mac (only holdouts being our servers, and the dev machines that work on the servers). The impetus was security -- get everyone using Macs since they're safer for browsing/email -- but in the end, people just liked them better, and they require less maintenance. I know, because I'm the guy maintaining them.
A friend today (new Mac convert) was groaning about getting help from his office IT guy for his MacBook, on a printing issue, because that IT worker was openly hostile to Macs. Only months ago, that IT worker was laughing when he heard my friend was considering a Mac, don't get it, it's not compatible with our stuff, you won't be able to do what you need to on there, etc. I just received an email, literally 10 minutes ago -- this same IT guy heard about his printing issue today and WANTS to help. Why? Because more of his other customers are moving to Macs, and now that he's had to use them, he actually PREFERS THEM! He's thinking about getting one for himself!
The vista people are looking at is increasingly filled with Macs... the Wow starts now for sure, but perhaps it wasn't what Microsoft was expecting... as in Wow, there are a lot of Macs in this office.
Most corporate users don't need a whole computer (Score:5, Insightful)
I love it when Apple moves into a new space. But until you can do something like a Citrix session to a Mac OS server, I don't think their stuff has any role as a standard workstation in large businesses.
They need to break into some new markets ... (Score:5, Funny)
Sure! I'm game. (Score:5, Interesting)
The Mac Pro is grossly overpowered for what we need, which makes it much too expensive for us to consider. The Mac Mini's laptop-class hard drive is probably too unreliable (and not user-serviceable enough) for our 5-year desktop replacement cycle. And while the iMac is about right in many ways, I already have LCDs throughout so buying an all-in-one makes no sense for us.
What I'd need to buy Macs for the office is a headless machine that delivers a single Core 2 Duo, a gig of RAM, integrated graphics, and a basic desktop-class SATA drive in a user-serviceable chassis for around $1100.
But Apple does not seem to be interested in the low-end desktop market, so it's back to Dell for me.
Biggest Challenge for Apple in Corporate Market Is (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple will have to ditch the culture of secrecy (they can keep it for the consumer stuff) over their roadmaps. Corporate buyers need long lead times and intro and dicontinuance notices. And corporate IT wants plenty of notice on technology directions from all their key vendors (partially so they can warn off the ones that are about to make a mistake) so Apple's attitude about this would HAVE to change.
Re:Ew. (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Jobs spent a lot of time and money trying to get the fortune 500 to use NeXT computers, and I think he just doesn't care much about that market anymore. The Xserve and Xserve RAID are fine machines, and far less work to set up and operate than any other system I can name, but Apple's just not staffed to offer the kind of enterprise-level support that HP, and Sun are. I plan to use a lot of Xserves in my current venture, but I do so knowing that I'm going to have to provide the on-site rapid response service to our customers myself.
-jcr
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Re:Ew. (Score:5, Informative)
You have some points but Xserves still aren't as capable as modern solutions from Sun, HP, and hell, even Dell. Think SAN management, it's not impossible but its quite a bit more difficult on the Mac side of the fence. Maybe in a few more years they'll gear it up but monitoring and management have always been the weak side for Apple as they generally prefer to give the power to the user. This is great for home users but very bad for corporate users.
The support you mention is probably the biggest stumbling block for Apple at the current time however.
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Re:This topic perenially arises (Score:5, Informative)
Apple does have an Enterprise sales division and they are quite different from the consumer division, you get dedicated Apple representatives for your account. Onsite service contracts are available for server systems. Apple has always had self-servicing programs for enterprises, although the investment in spares can be a bit high.
Another factor is your allegations that uncertainty over future products hampers enterprise planning. The switch to Intel changed this picture considerably. Apple's future products track rather closely to Intel's.
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