Apple warms up to the business market

[Nostromo]

Times are changing. While under Steve Jobs the consumer was paramount, Apple sees a great growth potential in the business market.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/businesses-too-have-eyes-for-ipads-and-iphones.html

This could also be great news for the professional creatives market, who have been all but abandoned by Steve Jobs in the past couple of years.

 

[Bernard SG]

Just another typical misleading headline.
The title should be "The Business market warms up to Apple".
It's not like Apple is ever going to bend over backwards to meet the peculiar needs of businesses. It's just that Tim Cook will be more courteous about it than the late Steve "Blunt" Jobs.

 

[Nostromo]

Sounds like you're studying journalism, and are in your first semester.

If you think it's business warming up to Apple and not the other way round, then you should spend some time on formulating an argument instead of working up a pose.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Sounds like you're studying journalism, and are in your first semester.

If you think it's business warming up to Apple and not the other way round, then you should spend some time on formulating an argument instead of working up a pose.

*shrug* Just saying, the title of the article is "Business, Too, Have Eyes for iPads and iPhones".

“Traditionally, you sit down with a vendor and they show you a five- and 10-year road map,” said Todd Schofield, global head of the enterprise mobility group for Standard Chartered Bank. “With Apple, they don’t do that. You don’t know what’s coming next week, never mind two years.”

....

And despite the rebuff by Mr. Jobs to the health care executive, Apple ended up adding a number of business-friendly features — like better support for Microsoft Exchange, a common e-mail system inside companies — to a later software update for the iPhone.

Sounds to me like Microsoft is still winning, and that's with no other competition. I'd like to see numbers in a year or two after Windows 8 and WP7 are out.

What it comes down to is that there have been articles like this for years, but nothing's ever come of it.

 

[miles01110]

Sounds like you're studying journalism, and are in your first semester.

In turn, it sounds like you're not in corporate IT management, and are just repeating something you read on the NYT website that happens to fit with your skewed perception of reality.

Apple is still as difficult to integrate into the enterprise as they were before. Steve Jobs alive or dead does not change anything. Apple's enterprise strategy is "Take it or leave it" which is why they're never going to make inroads until their paradigm shifts.

 

[Bernard SG]

Sounds to me like Microsoft is still winning, and that's with no other competition. I'd like to see numbers in a year or two after Windows 8 and WP7 are out.

WP7 has been out for a year now and we know the result...
I don't think Windows 8 will be a game-changer either. It's too little, too late for Microsoft to disrupt iOS momentum. To beat Apple at the new game they need to come up with a device twice as awesome as iPad and I don't see that happening with their OS-licensing business model (not even mentioning how far behind MSFT is lagging in terms of ecosystem).

Apple is still as difficult to integrate into the enterprise as they were before. Steve Jobs alive or dead does not change anything. Apple's enterprise strategy is "Take it or leave it" which is why they're never going to make inroads until their paradigm shifts.

I don't agree with that last part I underlined. Apple needs not to shift paradigms. What's actually happening is that business-computing paradigms are shifting slowly, but enough to allow Apple to make some inroads mostly with iPhone and iPad, but even with the Mac. It's the "Consumerization of IT"

 

[steve2112]

In turn, it sounds like you're not in corporate IT management, and are just repeating something you read on the NYT website that happens to fit with your skewed perception of reality.

Apple is still as difficult to integrate into the enterprise as they were before. Steve Jobs alive or dead does not change anything. Apple's enterprise strategy is "Take it or leave it" which is why they're never going to make inroads until their paradigm shifts.

Exactly. At my current job, we have about 3k users and several hundred Macs. We have some software running on XServes that help manage said Macs. It manages policies, updates, imaging, etc. It will even manage iOS devices. Then Apple goes and discontinues the XServe and the dedicated Server version of OSX. That isn't very enterprise friendly, but as you pointed out, it's Apple's way or the highway. Thankfully, our XServes are fairly new, but now we have to plan on how to continue running said software down the road. Apple's options are now run the Lion server app (an app? Really?) on a Mac Pro (assuming THEY don't get discontinued). Mac Pros are big and bulky and take up a bunch of space in a rack. And I have no idea what we will do if the Mac Pro does get dropped. I have never seen so many of them in one place before I got here, and those "trucks" see heavy usage. Our people are doing things that simply can't be done on an iMac or MBP.

Oddly, mobile devices are easiest to integrate into our existing infrastructure. There are several options to manage both Android and iOS mobile devices, and we are moving toward that and away from Blackberry.

 

[Nostromo]

WP7 has been out for a year now and we know the result...
I don't think Windows 8 will be a game-changer either. It's too little, too late for Microsoft to disrupt iOS momentum. To beat Apple at the new game they need to come up with a device twice as awesome as iPad and I don't see that happening with their OS-licensing business model (not even mentioning how far behind MSFT is lagging in terms of ecosystem).



I don't agree with that last part I underlined. Apple needs not to shift paradigms. What's actually happening is that business-computing paradigms are shifting slowly, but enough to allow Apple to make some inroads mostly with iPhone and iPad, but even with the Mac. It's the "Consumerization of IT"

The interesting part of the article is also that IT servicing people try to keep Macs out as they demand less servicing.

It also looks that it is now much more possible to indulge to preferences of office employees - and often theirs are on a Mac.

The article, of course, only hints on change, but, as you noted, Windows 7 wasn't that big game changer, and PCs are still much too service intensive.

Whenever you come in contact with people who work on computers professionally, they have a lot of respect for OS X.

Who knows what Tim Cook is going to do? Updating the professional line would be one possibility. I could even imagine a resurgence of a dedicated Server that fits in tight rack space.

Apple has the money and resources to do almost anything they want in their business field.

In turn, it sounds like you're not in corporate IT management, and are just repeating something you read on the NYT website that happens to fit with your skewed perception of reality.

This is a thread about a New York article, and I'm linking to it, and paraphrasing it (even if you like to call it "repeating". Well, you may be in corporate IT management, but this doesn't make "repeating", "paraphrasing", and "quoting" mean the same.

You think the New York Times' reporting is "skewed"? And this without a single argument? That's cute.

 

[miles01110]

You think the New York Times' reporting is "skewed"? And this without a single argument? That's cute.

No, I don't think the article is skewed- but the title is not accurate. Your posts in this thread so far suggest you haven't even read it yourself, otherwise you'd agree.

Apple will not make inroads in the enterprise without changing their philosophy. 30 years of history has pretty much proven this.

 

[ProwlingTiger]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Apple isn't warning to the business market; the business market is warming to Apple. The former suggests that Apple is doing something different with its strategy. Also, Apple has boasted about Fortune companies using its products for a while now; nothing new here.