Why Apple Doesn't Market Squarely To Businesses 510
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.'"
Of course not (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple needs to downsize Enterprise (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Re:No Enterprise Offerings (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [faronics.com]
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:No Enterprise Offerings (Score:3, Interesting)
There's nothing comparable to Exchange server that I know of.
Well Apple does have mail, calendaring, and address books built into their server software. It's comparable to Exchange but not as well fleshed out. They don't have as great control of delegation, for example, no ActiveSync support, and frankly the webmail isn't too hot (it's just Squirrel Mail).
The webmail thing is pretty frustrating to my mind. MobileMe has decent web applications for mail, calendaring, and address books, and meanwhile the included webmail in their server software stinks.
Re:Maybe Businesses Don't Want Macs (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never heard of anyone who works at a company that uses Macs.
I work in a large research institution, and nearly every scientist or programmer I've met here uses a Mac on their desktop (though the HPC resources are mostly Linux/UNIX variants). One thing that would be great is if Apple would customize their computers for their corporate and government clients, since all of our Macs have to be modified to remove cameras, WiFi, etc.
Re:I'd like to see Apple make a move, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Maybe Businesses Don't Want Macs (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because you've never heard of it, hardly means it doesn't happen.
Companies in creative industries (e.g. like R/GA) are typically a mix of Macs and PCs, but you probably knew that. But in 30+ years of supporting computers, I've seen plenty of mixed organizations. Usually they'll have 90% PCs with a handful of Macs for either (a) the creative types in the design department, or (b) the people who demanded one because it was "better" in some way. Heck, nearly 20 years ago I came across a lab full of heavily-used Mac IIci's and IIfx's at an IBM research facility, and that was in the old Motorola 680x0 heyday (e.g. before the IBM-Motorola PowerPC developments).
And your estimation of cost is not quite correct. Training and migration, yes. But overall total ownership cost is generally less over a Mac's lifetime than with a Windows computer, even if the original purchase price was significantly more. I have seen this over and over. A university I previously worked at had roughly 600 PCs and employed one full-time computer technician for every 50 PCs... and for their ~100 Macs, they employed one half-time Mac guy. Same level of support.
Re:Macs are great for small business though (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Apple doesn't care too much about the enterprise. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Maybe Businesses Don't Want Macs (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Maybe Businesses Don't Want Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
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:No Enterprise Offerings (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Of course not (Score:5, Interesting)
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:I'd like to see Apple make a move, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pre-iPod there were ubiquitous CD players made by everybody and a handful of random companies making MP3 players that only slashbots were buying (e.g. Creative Nomad). The MP3 player market may have been crowded for its size, but it barely existed.
The iPod entered the very small, but crowded market for MP3 player, and while it did take sales from its competitors it mostly did what the Nintendo Wii did for console gaming: it opened up a huge new segment of the market. And then they got the CD player business because they were in the perfect position to ride the paradigm shift from discrete media (CDs) to digital mass storage.
The iPod never really competed with CD players, because they were essentially obsolete when it was introduced. Saying they were "competitors" is like saying that buggy whips were competitors for steering wheels.
I also don't buy that a market is crowded just because there are "competitors" in it. If a market is much smaller than its potential (e.g digital music sales pre-iTunes), then how can you call it crowded?
Re:Macs are great for small business though (Score:2, Interesting)
My company used to be a mostly Mac enterprise. There were a couple of guys who were dedicated Mac support - they spent most of their time evaluating stuff and coordinating roll-outs of hardware and software. Occasionally, they would get involved with really challenging problems.
Most of the Mac administration was performed by Mac power users. People who had real jobs, but volunteered a little extra time to service the needs of their peers. This was all we needed. The average time to resolve an issue was measured in minutes.
We had a dedicated IT staff that supported unix workstations, some uvaxes, some mainframes, and the handfull of scattered PCs that we had for custom stuff not supported on Mac.
Then, almost overnight, everything changed. We switched from being predominantly Mac to being predominantly Wintel. The reason stated was cost, though a later analysis revealed that because we only bought highend PCs, the cost of the hardware was not a significant factor, the cost of the software was higher, productivity dropped off, and the cost of the IT infrastructure to support the PCs was significantly higher. There were other cost factors, as well.
In my opinion, this last aspect is key. The IT people put themselves in control of the hardware/software platform choices and they chose a platform that would require them to hire more people to support and give them even more power...
The reason Apple will never dominate in the enterprise is simple. Apple doesn't cater to the empire builders...
Re:I'd like to see Apple make a move, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pre-iPod there were ubiquitous CD players made by everybody and a handful of random companies making MP3 players that only slashbots were buying (e.g. Creative Nomad). The MP3 player market may have been crowded for its size, but it barely existed.
More significantly, Apple released the iPod around the time that technological developments made it worthwhile. Had they done it three years earlier, it wouldn't have been the iPod as we know it.
Yes, there were MP3 players circa 1997, long before the iPod came out. But the first models had circa 32MB of memory (with support for expensive memory cards of similar capacity if you were lucky). That was enough for one hour's worth of low bitrate music uploaded via a hideously slow serial cable or whatever. (USB 1 was around then, but hadn't gathered much support).
So you had an expensive device that could hold a similar amount to a Walkman cassette player in one go and was more difficult and/or expensive to load with new music. And with such limitations, you probably had to decide what you wanted to listen to beforehand, nullifying any benefit of random access.
In other words, outside of the tech-fetishist geek market (which wasn't as big then anyway), the first MP3 players offered little benefit over much cheaper devices for your average user.
It's not just that the early devices were quantitatively different in terms of capacity, it's that such limitations made them qualitatively different in the way you'd have had to use them; i.e. more like a very inconvenient cassette Walkman than a modern iPod- regardless of the underlying technology.
It was only when the underlying tech increased in capacity (and decreased in price) far enough that it would have been possible to create a device with the benefits we associate with modern MP3 players, i.e. hold lots of music, random access, listen to what we want, take our music collection with us, became possible.
And (not) oddly, it was around that time that Apple released the iPod. I'm not crediting Apple with inventing the modern MP3 player- as distinct from those limited early tech toys- someone else would have done something like it- but they *did* do it quite nicely, and they did do it at the right time.
I suspect it's possible that Apple realised this, and had had iPod prototypes around for a while, but waited for the tech to reach acceptable levels. Who knows?
Re:Macs are great for small business though (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:I'd like to see Apple make a move, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The design mentality of Apple (well, Steve Jobs at any rate) seems to be that of "lets figure out how to build this interface as simple as possible while retaining the bare minimum functionality. It's not about removing "knobs and buttons," as they were never there to begin with.
The reason Apple won't deliberately get into business or government technology is simply because they aren't equipped for it. 99% of their marketing experience is geared towards direct-to-consumer sales. They don't even want to deal with third-party retail if they can avoid it. (The only Apple products you ever see at Walmart are iPods and their accessories. Everything else is sold through their stores and store website.)
It would be like asking General Motors to start manufacturing 747s. There's no doubt they couldn't do it if pressed, but they aren't set up for it, have no experience with it, and it would carry a ton of risks. To sell a computer to a consumer, all you have to do is convince them that its worth spending their money on and that's it. To sell a solution to a business, you have to network, cut deals, offer bribes and kickbacks, hire an actual support team, and then you'd still have to fend off additional lawsuits here and there because businesses are a lot more sue-happy than consumers.
Consumers are a lot easier to handle and Steve likes things to be easy (for him). It's not at all difficult to imagine that he wouldn't want to bother with businesses. Apple is making a killing with their current strategies, why jump into uncharted waters? Losing their focus is nearly killed Apple in the 90's. They won't repeat the mistake again.
Re:Macs are great for small business though (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Maybe Businesses Don't Want Macs (Score:1, Interesting)
" Create it in Office 2000, move it to another Office 2000 machine, characters are screwed up. It's even worse with 2000/2003/2007"
Wow, you have weird problems in your company. Where I work we have several hundred PCs, and users exchange documents all day long, it is a huge part of what they do. Different versions of office also. I can honestly say that no one experiences these weird corruption problems you speak of. Sounds like you have something else going on, what makes you so sure it is the PCs and not something else? This is not a common problem at all....
Re:No Enterprise Offerings (Score:3, Interesting)
"Perform over a dozen commands securely on remote Mac OS X systems, such as locking screens, sleep, wake, restart, and shutdown."
Wow! Over a dozen? You mean I can restart AND shutdown?? Amazing!
"Configure Task Server* to perform package installation...*Task Server requires additional Unlimited Managed Systems license."
Brilliant.
"Apple Remote Desktop 3 is licensed per administrator..."
So if your company grows and an hire a second admin you get to buy that license again?
Listen, if you're a Flash developer or a graphics girl, then Macs are the way to go. Even as a home computer they are far superior in many ways. But when one needs to, say, restart a service or rename 500 workstations, you just can't beat taking 3 minutes to write a two-line batch file and getting it done with OTB functionality.
Re:Of course not (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps I'm not explaining this correctly. I don't really want to implicate my company by being too specific, but I'll try this again.
We sell software to businesses. I'm sure you're familiar with the site-license type of model. That's what we do. We have many, many customer organizations. In short, we send them CDs and they install and maintain the infrastructure like any other enterprise solution (with our help, of course).
The only legitimate way to get an iPhone application to our customer organizations so that they can distribute the application to their employees would be to give them the source code such that they could compile and distribute the binaries using their Apple enterprise developer license. The enterprise license does not allow you to distribute the provisioning profile/binaries to non-employees. There's no way around this.
Well, that solution fell through, as I stated in my previous post. Apple decided they didn't want us sending our source code to all of our customers. Probably due to them realizing what a clusterfuck that would be. I'm kind of glad, but I'm still kind of annoyed that they changed their mind.
And yes, while I'm aware of organizations that are, in fact, breaking the Apple enterprise license, we cannot afford to do so.
On top of the licensing mess that third party vendors have to deal with, I should have mentioned that there's no good way to deploy, configure, and maintain iPhone/touch applications in the enterprise, which is perhaps even more annoying.
So Apple's been good and bad to us, but the main point is that they aren't enterprise friendly.
Anyway, I'd love to be more specific than that, but as it is I've probably said too much. If you're interested, feel free to contact me privately somehow or other.
Re:Macs are great for small business though (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't claim that it was more difficult, I claimed that the IT infrastructure cost was higher. To some degree, I'm sure that was a "manufactured" problem. Our IT department built in constraints to try and protect the computers and networks from malware. These constraints then created hardware and software conflicts. They controlled and regulated what could be installed. Their paranoia - not mine. They managed the wireless connectivity in some peculiar and secretive manner - to this day I can't connect to an external wireless network unless it's unsecured. Backups - on their schedule. Security updates - on their schedule. Software updates - only after they have completed their evaluation and approved. I want to connect up a new piece of hardware. If it's plug and play I'm good to go, but god forbid it doesn't just work, I have to wait weeks for them to get around to looking at my non standard, non approved gadget that won't play nice with some security stuff they have running in the background.
Things are better now, but I'm still not in control of my own destiny.
Just because I'm a crazy conspiracy theorist doesn't mean they're not out to oppress me... [apologies to Joseph Heller]
Re:Macs are great for small business though (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Macs are great for small business though (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice use of sarcasm... but you're missing the points.
First, the ad hoc managed Mac solution was working fine. In fact, most people thought it was working better. However, even if the goal WAS more structured management of computing resources, this could have been achieved at lower cost and higher security if they would have stuck with the Macs.
BTW, I've been somewhat disingenuous. They didn't completely drop support for Macs in the company. Most of the senior managers and a few privileged elite in the company still prefer their Macs and they are equally well (if not better) maintained and as secure as the PCs. It's just that PCs outnumber Macs by about 300 to 1.
Second, the change-over was never about better managed solutions, it was about a team of around 20 people worldwide evolving into a team of nearly 200 over the period of about a year... At the time, IT was experiencing more growth than any other team in the company.
This might have been OK if the users' level of productivity increased or if there was a general perception of better service or if the computers seemed to be more reliable, but none of that held true...
You're right, it's not apples to apples, it's apples to eggplants!
Businesses won't pay the Mac be-cool prices. (Score:1, Interesting)