What’s wrong with Apple’s Enterprise Strategy
Funny as they are, Apple’s current PC vs. Mac ads have a downside. They paint the Mac as the groovy and fun computer, leaving the PC in the other corner as the boring accountant type of guy. The PC is not fun, but it’s where the work happens. It’s the computer in the office. Symbolically, it “is” the office.
One of my pet peeves is how Apple seems to ignore the productivity muscle its computers provide. Perhaps because my own workflow was transformed by switching a few years ago, I feel it more keenly than I should.
John Martellaro, former Apple Senior Marketing Manager for science and technology and Federal Account Executive, has written an interesting piece 
on five problems that bedevil Apple’s enterprise strategy.
First, he suggests that Apple’s determination to preserve its freedom costs it business customers. Businesses want guarantees that a particular product will be around for a fixed period. Apple’s virtue is a vice here, Martellaro suggests:
Apple is a quick change artist in the consumer world, responding rapidly, inside the competition’s decision cycle. Apple’s response to business is this: here’s the product we’re selling today. Take it or leave it. But you will love it.
Apple also loses out to Microsoft by not having the right software solutions:
Microsoft’s Exchange Server is a behemoth, awkward and fitful, hard to maintain, and a disaster when it goes down, but it checks the boxes for a corporation in ways that a simple IMAP/POP server cannot. Microsoft, a software company, supplies every business tool that a company could ever need, and they make a best effort at integrating them. Often it isn’t pretty, but what they produce, in terms of raw technology is light years ahead of FileMaker, iCal and the Apple Mail app.
When I stop to think, his claims ring true. Apple only has a foothold in educational or enterprise settings (known to me anyway) where the IT people are committed evangelists, the business is small enough for a Mac fan owner to make his or her own business decisions or individuals like me are prepared to shell out for a Mac of their own and do the hard yards to interact with those on the Dark Side.
Who can tell me a happy story about Mail.app in an enterprise setting? Surely the news can’t be as bleak as John suggests.
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Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, business strategy, enterprise, iCal, mail.app, Productivity, work muscle
October 5th, 2006 at 8:57 am
Something better than Exchange could be accomplished perhaps with IMAP and Mail.app, yet IMAP is a lot harder to comprehend. Add the dubious integration in Mail.app, especially when dealing with folders…
Even more important are the limitations in other groupware sections under Mac OS. dotMac may be nice for some home users, but others and especially businesses need address book and iCal to sync with corporate servers.
October 5th, 2006 at 9:47 am
You are missing the point. This has nothing to do with Mail.app. It is fully an integrated “shared calendaring” play. Forget about GTD, forget about widgets to track things in Spotlight — it’s about whether your secretary can schedule your calendar for you (via Outlook and Exchange), or whether someone can say “I want to book a meeting between Wednesday and Friday when Ralph, Marry, Akeem, and Fred are in the office… go do it.”
Mail.app cannot do this. Only Exchange Server can do this (well, not true, there are options like MeetingMaker and Zimbra), and the clients that work with Exchange server are Outlook, and to a lesser extent, Entourage (the 2004 version with the right slew of patches works okay).
Mail.app works fine in any corporate environment, *as a mail client*, so long as the companies enable either POP or IMAP access. The sad thing is that many Exchange shops disallow IMAP and POP access to their Exchange server, feeling that any additional protocols (even if they are RFC standard protocols with billions of successful users) are a security rish.
October 5th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Well, here’s the thing about Mac people — we’re the “rebels”. The mere word “enterprise” makes us scoff. We look at the sort of people who use that stuff and we’re like, what a bunch of wankers, who cares about them or the idiotic nonsense they think they need because they don’t know any better?
Sure, there’s another side to it (their side), and it’s valid too, but — who’s going to MAKE the software for them, when the people who would be making it hold it and the people who use it in utter contempt? That just leaves big companies like Microsoft, and they’re not going to make their “enterprise” (spit) stuff for the Mac, and there we are.
October 5th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Anyone try Kerios Mail Server? Support Windows, Mac and LInux, and it seems highly rated.
October 5th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Well, doesnt Leopard Server solve this with iCal server? Plus its open source.
October 5th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Jamie, excellent point!
I wasn’t aware of that, but Google learns me about iCal server on Leopard released as OOS as Darwin Calendar Server.
Not that I’m planning on running my own Mac server, but this means iCal under Leopard supports a true syncing (syndication) protocol as well.
I hope I will find a (free) solution online (Google Calendar?) so I can abandon Oracle Calendar to sync several computers.
October 5th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
I’ve been a Mac user in a Windows environment for the last three years. I started as the only one of course – the company has about 50 employees. I have been able to do most of the things I needed to do except for calendar sharing for all of that time. In the last 3 months I have even been able to do the calendar sharing properly, now the Groupcal is a little bit more stable. I have also started using the Address X product to ensure that I have a copy of the company address book available.
I have been lucky in the last year or so because the VP who oversees the IT department has started using a Mac as well so he has exerted some influence over what is available and from where, etc. Unfortunately, I believe that my job is going to get harder now, because we have been purchased by a large company and everything that they do on thier internal net is MS only (even some of the sites only work on IE for windows. What the hell is wrong with standards for basic stuff like web pages!? Drives me batty!
October 5th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
I worked for a company that had systems like that too. When we were busy it would’ve been great to pick up my powerbook and work somewhere quieter, but no…chained to the admin desk.
October 5th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
I’m not sure what’s so great about Outlook. I used both Outlook and Apple mail to read my mail in a corporate environment, and Apple mail was much faster and more efficient to use.
(The search feature of outlook is both horribly designed and slow, at least when I used it).
A web-based CRM application I developed did calendaring so that part of the Outlook feature set was not of interest.
D
October 6th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Exchange is an Excellent product-no doubt about it.
Kerio Mail Server is very good and runs on an OSX workstation or server, Windows Server, Linux. It will integrate with Directory Services. It has most of the feature set of Exchange. It still has some room to mature compared to Exchange but, in its current state, it is very good.
Full support for Entourage, Outlook (Windows). Web mail is excellent-looks just like Outlook Web Access (Exchange).
Calendaring is very good, Public Folder Support, Global Address Lists, etc
Out of Office Assistants.
POP and IMAP are supported as well.
Pricing is very good.
Ease of Administration.
Their new version which will be shipping in the near future will be supporting “push” calendaring–wireless syncing ala Exchange/Blackberry Servers.
October 6th, 2006 at 12:02 am
Lotus Notes is being revamped for Mac OS X, and it should work fine for those companies using it. I work in a newspaper corp. which has about 8000 users about 10% of which use Macs. So there are solutions out there.
October 6th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
See: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/icalserver.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/ical.html
And to really see the rest… http://www.calconnect.org/
October 6th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Re: Scott Little (even some of the sites only work on IE for windows): You could always set Safari or Firefox to identify themselves as IE (using the Debug menu in Safari), though some of the other stuff you might be asked to do might not be so easy.
October 7th, 2006 at 6:19 am
You people are missing the point. This isn’t about finding an alternative mail server. Large corporations with tens or hundreds of thousands of users aren’t going to change their mail infrastructure to make some Mac users happy. Until Microsoft releases a mail client for Mac which is on par with Outlook (which I’m sure they will never do), Mac users will always be screwed in the corporate world.
That being said, I’m having relatively good luck with running Outlook in the Crossover Mac beta. However, since this requires a relatively new Mac, most users will have to wait a while for this functionality (unless your company is going to run out and refresh all their Mac users to Intel machines).
October 8th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
This didn’t seem like a very good article to me. It seemed that the author wants to see Apple having a strategy like it is much larger than it is now – he’s mainly complaining that there’s not enough business support reps and that they’re unable to throw a whole bunch of money at breaking into new enterprise markets. The fact of the matter is Apple focuses on 3 core markets: they focus on the creative professional, portable entertainment (iPods and such) and home computer users. It’s not a company like Microsoft that can produce pretty much everything your enterprise needs, from IT management all the way up to CRM and such. The only point that I found particularily useful was the 5th – Apple does need to step up to the plate a bit more with their enterprise software. ARD is nice and it’s kinda cool that NetInfo has replication, but Active Directory does a lot more. Exchange does a lot more. I think that Apple could frankly make a killing in this particular market if they pulled together their OS X Server product and spent more time becoming the cornerstone of IT operations. They’re the only company that I really believe could pull it off and sell it successfully.
(As an aside, I didn’t get the grousing about Apple’s product line. Yes, new machines come out, but that happens everywhere. The product line configuration very rarely changes and there aren’t a million different kinds of products to decide to get. The one way this is frustrating in a corporate enviroment is the same way it’s frustrating for home users – Apple won’t tell anyone anything about what’s coming down the line and they’re fairly unpredictable in that sense. Dell usually always updates their product lines during the summer, whereas Apple does it whenever.)
October 9th, 2006 at 4:24 am
Apple’s products are generally superior to the Windows side but there are industries that they ignor or worse alienate with thier policies. Case in point. I am an attorney and had transfered my office over to Macs many years ago because I wanted to be able to get real work done instead of spending a entire day trying to figure out what new problem developed with the network. The Macs were reliable, stable and completely a pleasure to work on. (well after the secretaries stoped complaining about have to learn new stuff) One area that I worked in was Bankruptcy. We used a Filemaker pro based program to generate our documents. Which worked well. Then a major change occured in the Federal Courts. They went to an electronic filing system. All documents had to be filed Electronicly. Now our software program for document generation would not work. This occured about the same time that OSX was coming out. Understand there are only a handfull of software companies that make this type of software and it is not cheap. As I started to look for software package I found that there were no Mac based packages. It should be noted that several of the companies that write the document generation software had initially written Mac software. The reason that no software existed was because Apple would provide them the information about the new operating system in order for them to write the software. The companies decided that there was no reason to fight and concentrated on the Windows side. Understand that at that time 25 percent of the Attorneys in the United States used Macintoshs.
Unfortunately our office had to go back to the PC side since that was were the needed software was. Virtural PC was not stable and failed to interface with the Courts’ sytems consistantly.
Apple needs to work more with its software vendors since without them Apple would not exist.