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Apple Targeting Small Business Customers at Retail Stores
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Few years ago, we had four MCSEs answering to our IT Director keeping all our information systems running with the latest and greatest in architectures and data frameworks and all kinds of other amazing BS no one but them ever heard of but needed desperately.
Ditching all that fancy crapola, we switched to Mac and went low-tech, put all those extremely expensive people and their toys out on the street looking for other beleaguered companies to leech off, and waited. The result? The work still gets done on time, no change. Except, it now looks prettier, and our employees don't mind sitting in front of their screens for 8 hours a day, as well, running Macs is far, far cheaper. The difference in the cost of similar hardware specs between Macs & PCs is peanuts compared to the big picture total cost of ownership.
We still run a few hefty windoze-only programs, but like that we don't have to put up with windows' BS. It acts up at all, and in seconds any user can restore the virtual machine from time machine and get a fresh install. We just use what functional parts of windows there are & skip the rest, using windows like the cheap whore is.
"Home" technologies have come so far that they surpass the "Pro" tech from a very short and decreasing amount of time ago. A small business consultant at a mac store will be a nice bonus.
Ditching all that fancy crapola, we switched to Mac and went low-tech, put all those extremely expensive people and their toys out on the street looking for other beleaguered companies to leech off, and waited. The result? The work still gets done on time, no change. Except, it now looks prettier, and our employees don't mind sitting in front of their screens for 8 hours a day, as well, running Macs is far, far cheaper. The difference in the cost of similar hardware specs between Macs & PCs is peanuts compared to the big picture total cost of ownership.
We still run a few hefty windoze-only programs, but like that we don't have to put up with windows' BS. It acts up at all, and in seconds any user can restore the virtual machine from time machine and get a fresh install. We just use what functional parts of windows there are & skip the rest, using windows like the cheap whore is.
"Home" technologies have come so far that they surpass the "Pro" tech from a very short and decreasing amount of time ago. A small business consultant at a mac store will be a nice bonus.
As a registered business customer at my local apple store, I applaud this move. However, I'd argue that as a business customer I don't like having to fight my way through hoards of consumers and college kids.
I've said for a long time, stores need to redo their floor plans to get the sales people in one place, genius bar people in another and class/one-to-one people somewhere else. In small store such as here in Indianapolis, everyone is shoved together. In the sales area I would break it down into iPad, iPod & iPhone in one place, MB, MBP and MBA in another, MacMini, iMac & MP in a third and a fourth area for AppleTV, TC, AirPorts/AirPort Extremes...basically home networking. Finally, depending on demographics I might reserve a small area on my sales floor for small business and professional users.
I've said for a long time, stores need to redo their floor plans to get the sales people in one place, genius bar people in another and class/one-to-one people somewhere else. In small store such as here in Indianapolis, everyone is shoved together. In the sales area I would break it down into iPad, iPod & iPhone in one place, MB, MBP and MBA in another, MacMini, iMac & MP in a third and a fourth area for AppleTV, TC, AirPorts/AirPort Extremes...basically home networking. Finally, depending on demographics I might reserve a small area on my sales floor for small business and professional users.
Apple won't be able to play in the Enterprise Market until they change parts of the EULA. One huge thing that kills us is not having Site/Volume licensing and the ability to spin up Virtual Machines. Also, Apples Servers are over priced, under powered, and the software is lacking. If Apple wants to be a major player they need to start being able to 100% natively support and integrate into an Active Directory world.
If Apple does push through in this space, there's going to be little room left for the AARs, as corporate or SMB sales and service make up a large portion of an AARs revenue.
I'm sorry that your local AARs aren't that good. Gives a bad name to the others who excel, and those who really have a passion in what they do.
The local Apple Engineers aren't very good either. They are basically titled sales people that keep trying to sell us Apple servers. Its never going to happen. Why buy an Apple server when we can buy a *nix server that does all the same things without the pretty GUI.
True. The all in one iMac is not seen as a good business investment because monitors often outlast computers. Both the iMac and Mac Mini limit greatly any expandability.
A Mac tower is necessary if they are really going to be serious here. I don't see that happening though. But this is good news. Apple still paying some minute attention to OS X can only be a good thing.
Initiate world domination phase 2!
muahahahaha
This foreshadows Apple's entry into the enterprise market!
don't hold your breath. these are small businesses they're targeting. apple already missed the boat on the multi million dollar corporations, and those companies are still using Windows XP because it's too costly to upgrade to Win 7, so they could switch to the Mac platform if Macs become cheaper than a PC upgrade including training, but that will never happen.
Targeting them with what?
Expensive, out of date hardware, slow upgrade cycles,
extemely limited model range, absurdly limited hardware options,
and completely missing new technologies?
Yeah, small business are going to be all over that.
+1
They also need to be less secretive. Businesses like product road maps.
I can understand the secrecy for its consumer products.. but its pro products such as Final Cut Pro?
Also, why the secrecy for XCode? XCode isn't cutting edge development IDE by any means.
I can understand the secrecy for its consumer products.. but its pro products such as Final Cut Pro?
Also, why the secrecy for XCode? XCode isn't cutting edge development IDE by any means.
What is the state of how well OS X works in a business environment? I use a Mac (or two
For example, we have a lab of Windows PCs that we reimaged yesterday remotely via OSD (an SCCM feature). By the time we got there with the replacement machines, the old ones in the lab were imaged and ready for their new placement. Additionally, we routinely push out software updates automatically.
Are there similar solutions for OS X? (Or maybe this is why they're saying small business...)
They are two difference environments, there isn't a direct replacement for what your talking about.
You can netboot mac ofcourse, every intel supports it, (except maybe the MBA,) With Apple Remote Desktop you can take over any mac you access to, push/pull files run shell commands, open/close apps. I had 9 xserves + xsan I had in colo. I had to do a clean install them all to 10.5. I set one up to host the install image, then booted 4 of them against it, took control of the installer and had then all up in only slightly more time it'd take to do a single machine. After those machine took over the load I did the same for the other 5.
With Apple server you can also control the updates, but again it's different then with windows. For our environment we had to build custom apache, java, and mysql so we had to be a bit more careful then the average group, but usually you just install the updates as they come out. You don't worry about SP3 coming out and hosing the system.
There is something similar to group policy, but again it's a lot different. Its more like super advanced parental controls your used to on your mac desktops.
Oh, btw.. other then ARD all those features are included with OS X Server.
OMG your kidding right? Volume licensing what? The OS? It comes with the computers... if you mean upgrades, well you can either get a support contract on the machine and updates come to you as soon as they come out, or just buy the upgrade a-la-cart. You buy as many as computers you have active in your company. The only difference is you pay one no-nonsense prices.
The servers have the same issue the desktop and notebook lines you have. If you need exactly what they offer they are an awesome value. If you want something other then what they offer you need to the next biggest model and get a bunch you don't need.
Yes you would. Horrible hours and very very low pay for techs. And management that dont know ANYTHING about technology. So happy i left.
Your right about ARD not doing imagining... that function is build into the Disk Utility. If you want over the lan disruption you can do that too with Apple Server.
Apple has been doing this for years to some extent too, just not high profile and not with any sort of real end service. When I worked at an Apple Retail Store I was that store's designated Retail Business Specialist (special t-shirt too, ooh) and I was trained at helping business customers set up leasing of equipment. It was a pretty sweet deal as they had a very favorable leasing program, and in my time there I helped quite a few businesses with their Mac needs.
Problem was there was no exposure, none, so it was almost impossible for people to know about the program. Added to which there was really no hardware design aspect, we simply didn't offer server and networking design and/or implementation.
However, we did have a directory in-store that we could point customers to 3rd party Apple Consultants for setup, greater needs assessment, networking, etc.
Read up on the Microsoft EU if you want to see how a REAL Enterprise Software License Distribution system works. I'm sorry I don't have the manpower to ala cart 5000 machines. Also Apple not allowing VM's seriously hampers a lot of things for large businesses. VM's are the future and not only that almost all the servers we use are Virtual. Testing in a Virtual Environment for Packaging and Image building is important as well. These are all major hurdles.
The iMac is more than enough for non video editors. The problem is the client line its the Licensing agreements, Support, and Integration.
Targeting them with what?
Expensive, out of date hardware, slow upgrade cycles,
extemely limited model range, absurdly limited hardware options,
and completely missing new technologies?
Yeah, small business are going to be all over that.
Lets rephrase that.....
A simple set of hardware choices that a non-technical business owner can get their mind around, rather than a mind-numbing set of options that makes comparisons between vendors near impossible.
Hardware that is not "bleeding edge" and therefore still being tested by using the market as beta testers (though to be fair, Apple's 1st generation systems often feel this way).
Upgrade cycles that don't make the business owner feel that they have to upgrade very 6 months to stay current.
Systems that use common, standardized technologies that you don't need to download a driver for just because you decide to add a peripheral. Systems that are so standardized that in a multi-system operation things will work the same way, because the hardware is the same.
Systems that just tend, for the most part, to work.
Small businesses tend to like predictable. And the reduced cost of maintenance is factored into the equation, TCO tends to be lower for Macs.
See here for the ZDNet study
And from Pfeiffer research "What surprisingly is no longer a differentiating factor between Macs and Windows PCs, is cost. Pfeiffer states the purchase cost of a Mac and a Windows PC have become very close, particularly when compared on a per-year basis for the expected life-span of the computers."
Very good. I work for a very big company and we can choose Macbook Pros as our laptops if we want to. Around 6% of the staff actually do so.
I agree the VM thing is a real head-scratcher. My memory may be failing, but I thought that they allowed OS/X server to run in a VM, but not the clients? It's been a while, but regardless it is completely idiotic.
Last time we looked at getting an XServe was a while ago, I'll admit, but I thought by the time you put everything together (OS licensing, etc) that the cost was relatively on par with what you could get elsewhere. Assuming you bought it at the "right time". The problem is that most of the time the kit you are able to buy is outdated. The software was actually pretty good for our needs.
Real active directory support would help them penetrate most enterprises where that is important, so agree with that one too (we don't use AD here, so it didn't matter so much to us).
Another excellent point. The secrecy amounts to Apple trying to make sure that people don't stop buying their kit because they expect to have something new on the market in the next couple of weeks/months.
That's kind of what I meant by my post. They need to figure out how to produce updates to the hardware (and as you rightly point out) their software on a regular (e.g. expected) heartbeat. At least for their enterprise stuff.
Client side VM is important for testing because of the large amount of Software pushed out. We keep our entire environment version from PC's to Macs so keeping up to date packages, images, and settings is important. Having to reimage a computer everytime you need to run a capture is a pain in the ass. Also OSX Server in a VM has proven to us to be mediocre at best. Apple needs something like MDT and USMT for imaging and Migration. Apples imaging and migration tools are terrible for large to medium businesses. If Apple had AD integration 100% we'd probably be a 50/50 Mac PC company, but until they do that we are 10/90 and we still have 5000 clients.
This is great, but I think the biggest current limitation for Apple is the lack of a little bit more variety in the desktop area. There should be a a desktop model (with BYODKM) more powerful, and perhaps bigger than a Mac mini, while less powerful than a Mac Pro. The iMac sort of fills this role, but there are a lot of areas in business and even education where the iMac is an awkward fit. A bigger and slightly more powerful version of a Mac mini would be perfect for this.
Yes, thats all fine and well for consumer products. Not for businesses : they don't know that product 'A' will be supported in a years time. Why would a business invest in a product if there is uncertainty?
If I were running a business, I'd be worried about buying Mac Pros - no updates in a long time. To me, the Mac Pro seems very much like a discontinued product.