Comments on: “Beautiful Infrastructure” with Apple?

By: cote

cote — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:07:05 +0000

To clear it up: I don’t want Apple to get all “enterprisey” either. Rather, I’d be interested in seeing what it could do to make the “9-5 experience” as nice as they do the “after hours” life of information workers. Apple is skilled at taking “boring” categories and products and making people excited and rewarded by them: like MP3 players and iPods, Unix desktops and OS X (sorry!), wireless routers and Airports (people glow about the music and print/USB hard drive burganprell).

So, the point is more: can Apple do some subtle, probably mostly non-technological things to get buisnesses looking more into using Apples? I think the answer is yes. More importantly, it seems like the Leopard release cycle (which, as a side note, tragically appears to be going Vista) has several business minded aspects.

By: Al

Al — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:21:40 +0000

Nice one Cote

Me thinks Apple going forward will have more compelling solutions for business customers in general. but don’t expect a Dell/M$ like combination here, If Apple do something they will (are?) thinking different.

They may well also need some new channel/partners/networks to help deliver however, and that fascinates me, I still can’t quite grep how they will do this but maybe they are already building the channel into their products, look carefully at this offering :
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/simplesetup.html

By: Glenn

Glenn — Wed, 02 May 2007 18:09:32 +0000

I hope Apple stays focused on being the tool of choice for “creative ~~professionals~~ people” and not worry about this whole enterprise thing. It would undoubtedly suck the life out of their products making them in to just another collection of beige boxes. I like that they are a small company (when compared to Microsoft and IBM). I think that it lets them flex their creative muscle more effectively.

By: lrd

lrd — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:01:31 +0000

Apple’s focus should be on the making superior products in order to provide Mac users with the best possible end-user experience for now. Of course they should invest in the marketing that distinguishes them from other box makers like Dell.

For Apple to get into the market share numbers game or cut throat entripise business at this point would be a mistake- busenesses want a lot for a little. Meaning lots of overhead support with minimal margins.

And Apple should continue to make consumer products like the iPhone if not for the very reason that it diversifies it’s product profile allowing for down turns in certain products as well as offsetting seasonal demand dips.

In addtion, since the beginning Apple has been dependent on two companies, namley, Microsoft and Adobe and the further they slowly divorce themselves from this dependency or take the upper the hand, the more successful they will be. The iPOD, the iPhone and iTunes are slowly but surely causing this much needed shift of power.

By: cote

cote — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 02:02:03 +0000

Thanks for the info, Ken ;)

By: Ken Court

Ken Court — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 23:54:37 +0000

apple’s not really interested in Enterprise right now although they do have AD binding, a great cross-platform SAN and also a great migration path (or two) from Exchange to the Apple platform. (And don’t forget Oracle on OS X / Xserves and Xserve RAIDs).
The article you link to is waaaay off, sorry to say. I routinely support Macs in AD environs and have very little problems except maybe a few calendar features that Entourage 2004 does not have — but probably will in a few months with Office 2007 Mac.
If anything, the main issues that I have seen is that PC admins tend to like job security — but any other BSD guy or Lin guy could have told you that ;)