Apple has made exceptions in the past, I don't see why they can't for large businesses. They used to sell the white macbook for education even after discontinuing it. The rules might be a bit more flexible for businesses.
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Apple Expanding Enterprise Efforts, Developing Dedicated Sales Force
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Apple has made exceptions in the past, I don't see why they can't for large businesses. They used to sell the white macbook for education even after discontinuing it. The rules might be a bit more flexible for businesses.
As good as the air 2 is I don't think its selling well at all. It had never been out of stock and it's the first new iPad I know I didn't run out to purchase.
I'm a little worried.
Steve from after his NeXT days realized enterprise was destroying the PC market. Enterprise wanted all of these features that companies started to cater to their needs, bleeding into consumer products.
When he brought Cook on, he told him, stay away from enterprise/corporate, we're going to focus on consumer, part of the reason why Cook left his position to come to Apple.
Enterprise is great, I hope Cook remembers what made Apple, Apple..
Steve from after his NeXT days realized enterprise was destroying the PC market. Enterprise wanted all of these features that companies started to cater to their needs, bleeding into consumer products.
When he brought Cook on, he told him, stay away from enterprise/corporate, we're going to focus on consumer, part of the reason why Cook left his position to come to Apple.
Enterprise is great, I hope Cook remembers what made Apple, Apple..
With Apple going down the route of soldering all there hardware together , I seriously doubt a lot of companies would buy apple hardware.
I work in an engineering office and I work on CAD and revit , every few years we upgrade some internals of the machines, maybe more ram , maybe a new graphics card maybe even the processor.
The only machine you can do this with Apple is the Mac pro. Yet even the processor seems a time consuming main in the arse to change with that.
Until Apple releases a machine that is reasonabley priced , but you can upgrade yourself easily enough I doubt most companies would move.
There is also the fact Apple often doesn't support certain features of the current operating system on older devices , and they also drop support after a few years on older operating systems, unlike Microsoft that have a 10 + year window of supporting older systems.
I work in an engineering office and I work on CAD and revit , every few years we upgrade some internals of the machines, maybe more ram , maybe a new graphics card maybe even the processor.
The only machine you can do this with Apple is the Mac pro. Yet even the processor seems a time consuming main in the arse to change with that.
Until Apple releases a machine that is reasonabley priced , but you can upgrade yourself easily enough I doubt most companies would move.
There is also the fact Apple often doesn't support certain features of the current operating system on older devices , and they also drop support after a few years on older operating systems, unlike Microsoft that have a 10 + year window of supporting older systems.
I would love Apple to be more representative in Enterprises. But there are so many hurdles to take.
A lot of sectors have very specific hardware. They really are going push non Apple developers to create industry standard apps from scratch? bookkeeping software is rated and licensed per country, preferably done by big specialised companies that offer different solutions and packages. Who wants to be the fool to be dependent on some developers to add new law restrictions in bookkeeping software? The market is a niche here in Belgium. I work at a worldwide company and we are getting rid of every software that is dependent on these 'small' developers. It's going to take years to get there! I hope they make it, but I doubt it.
no file system on iOS? IF everything works perfectly then this shouldn't be a problem. But in business nothing ever works perfectly.
MS' most important product is Office on the desktop side. That's one of the main reasons why they sell Windows. numbers and pages are still laughable on Enterprise level.
All their native programs are aimed at non professionals or small enterprises. Filemaker is laughable vs SAP, or Dynamics AX, even against Navision! And yes, no one ever said "this looks as pretty as this enterprise software". It's business it doesn't need to look pretty!
A lot of sectors have very specific hardware. They really are going push non Apple developers to create industry standard apps from scratch? bookkeeping software is rated and licensed per country, preferably done by big specialised companies that offer different solutions and packages. Who wants to be the fool to be dependent on some developers to add new law restrictions in bookkeeping software? The market is a niche here in Belgium. I work at a worldwide company and we are getting rid of every software that is dependent on these 'small' developers. It's going to take years to get there! I hope they make it, but I doubt it.
no file system on iOS? IF everything works perfectly then this shouldn't be a problem. But in business nothing ever works perfectly.
MS' most important product is Office on the desktop side. That's one of the main reasons why they sell Windows. numbers and pages are still laughable on Enterprise level.
All their native programs are aimed at non professionals or small enterprises. Filemaker is laughable vs SAP, or Dynamics AX, even against Navision! And yes, no one ever said "this looks as pretty as this enterprise software". It's business it doesn't need to look pretty!
regarding enterprise and server side.So they are pushing Macs as well to enterprises, or is it just iPads and iPhones? I am not sure if Macs will be able to gain much traction in enterprise even with their continued success in the consumer space.
Exactly.
I must confess I was speechless when Apple canned the Xserve and *didn't* change the licensing for OS X Server to allow running on the major enterprise hypervisors. So obvious and so simple a solution.
Exactly!!! Apple... you have to actually SUPPORT enterprises... I know, I is one!!!
...and I don't give a flying' about iOS... I need proper server side solutions that I trust and feel have a future... FIRST!
Apple's in a strong position to compete with other competitor's enterprise business models, so why not have a dedicated sales force?
Yours is a typical example of why Apple is not big in enterprise: Too much compromise. There are already a bunch of solutions out there for companies who need their core businesses to be supported. IT departments are stretched thin, and many companies do not understand that they are the life blood of their organization, so they continue to be asked to do more with less.
If I am a CIO, and I have 100 companies falling all over themselves to give me commoditized pricing on hardware, and are developing out of the box apps that fit my needs with little or no customization, why would I want to spend resources I don't have, either in higher capital costs (higher priced hardware) or increased Op-Ex spend (higher labor costs) to make Apple products "kind of" fit into my environment?
Personally, unless some of this "best product pipeline in 25 years" includes some real wow stuff coming out for the enterprise I don't know why Apple would even do this. They have a sweet little gig going coming through the back door of enterprise (iPhone-iPad-MacBook Air) and could continue to wash the foundation out a little at a time with sand buckets full of water.
A full frontal assault is just wasted resources and time, IMO. And I, personally would rather they focus their attention on keeping my personal life in order for now. Wait until they've bloodied the 5000 ton gorilla that is the WinTel beast some more before trying to go in for the kill.
I keep asking for a Mac at work but no one listens
Seriously though, why did Apple ignore the business world for so long while packing every school with iMacs? Subsidies?
I am very happy that they finally want to focus the businesses directly.
One little suggestion though : they need to roll out a powerful version of iWork if they're serious about the enterprises, something that finally competes well against Office 2013.
One little suggestion though : they need to roll out a powerful version of iWork if they're serious about the enterprises, something that finally competes well against Office 2013.
WinTel? I think you mean just Microsoft / Windows. Intel isn't taking sides in this - so long as Apple doesn't swap to ARM for OS X, Intel wins whether Apple or Microsoft is making the most popular computers (or even if the most popular OS is Linux or Unix or Z or any other OS - pretty much all of them run mainly on Intel.)
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We at IBM do not use Office. If the #4 company in the world with 400K employees isn't using Office, I think it indicates that Office isn't necessary anymore. We use a mix of iWork, Google Docs (unofficial - we're not really supposed to use this but sometimes we do with new hires), and IBM Notes.
This is weird, but also a welcomed statement; Apple slipped out of the business market, killed the Xserve, left Xgrid die, killed OS X Server software and computer models, "pro" tools have been pretty much left behind, etc.
They really need to jump back into it.
They really need to jump back into it.
Plus there can be even simpler reasons. Sometimes it's the little things.
For example, I know enterprise users who buy thousands of tablets, and refuse to buy any tablet that does not have a standard micro USB charger port. (This is partly because they buy thousands of standardized vehicle mounts.)
Of course, that leaves out the iPad. It also leaves out some Samsung and Windows tablets. OTOH, it gives many Android tablets a foothold. And once a company has made all its apps work for one OS, these things tend to get entrenched.
Ideological dogma. Also, there's no evidence they've woken up on this until they directly address the MS Office/Project file compatibility issue ie there are lots of PCs that aren't going to be discarded overnight and document data needs 100% fidelity.
Agree Totally
I agree, this has been something that has aggravated me for a long time. I know a lot of people will say that iCloud is only for home use, etc., etc., but if they want to get us small business owners they need to do it. It would be a win-win, we would get to consolidate our email accounts into one service, they could steal people away from Gmail and Google!
I agree, this has been something that has aggravated me for a long time. I know a lot of people will say that iCloud is only for home use, etc., etc., but if they want to get us small business owners they need to do it. It would be a win-win, we would get to consolidate our email accounts into one service, they could steal people away from Gmail and Google!
Funny you mention this. I tried opening a Word doc in Pages last night and the fidelity of the formatting was horrible. I'm left with the hard reality that I will have to always have a copy of MS Office. Why Apple? Why hath thou forsaken us?!
There are all sorts of ways to spin a story, but this one's a real winner. The notion that Apple cut that deal with iBM, a process that can hardly occur overnight, in response to an iPad sales curve that had flattened between 2012 and 2013, and showed a 5% drop between 2013 and 2014... Really? Really? Enterprise is so much bigger than that.
This is about Apple becoming what IBM was back when Steve and Woz were still tinkering in a garage, PLUS being the consumer powerhouse that it already is.
MacRumors has been covering the "move into Enterprise" story for a while now. Apple's been talking about it for a while. All the reporter had to say here was, "This is consistent with Apple's announced push into Enterprise," and link a dozen or more MacRumors stories to that effect.
That, of course, would be a boring, Wall Street Journal approach to the story, and is not the kind of hook that generates forum activity.
And the forum members? I'm astounded that there's hardly any mention of "ecosystem." All I'm seeing is the same, tired, Mac vs. PC in the workplace debates that have been going on for 30 years. It's not about the PC, baby - the PC is the side show.
Back in the day, IBM sold oodles of over-built, over-priced typewriters to their mainframe customers - and they couldn't make a case that the office would run better because the typewriters and mainframes would "work better together." No, they had full-time staff on the customer's site to make sure that everything the customer bought would be Big Blue. And despite the higher cost, IT had a saying, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Big Blue."
The PC should have given IBM the opportunity to be even more deeply embedded in the office ecosystem, but they blew that opportunity when they chose to unbundle OS and apps from hardware. Apple saw what happened, which is why Apple is still so institutionally driven to closed systems. And it's why Apple and IBM are now buddies. It's time for a do-over, and Apple's likely to be a better partner for IBM than Microsoft ever was.
And when Apple talks about a "post-PC" era? It's not about the PC becoming useless or obsolete. It's about mobile devices becoming the key factor in IT decision-making.
Good. Now bring back real rack-mountable servers with dual power supplies and hot swappable drives. And please fix Remote Desktop. Thanks.