Advice to Apple: Ignore the Enterprise

by James Gaskin

December 18, 2007 —

Technology has become such a big business the current leadership lacks any
measurable amount of guts, much less cujones or brass ones. Who knew we'd miss
Scott McNealy mouthing off? At least he said what he thought and didn't back
down.

So I was thrilled to read this blog
from MarketCircle CEO Alykhan Jetha. Short summary: Apple should ignore the
enterprise business and focus on small and medium businesses. Why? Enterprises
don't appreciate the innovation and user interface improvements Apple brings,
they move too slow, and they're glued to Microsoft. Small businesses need all
the help they can get, and Jetha says a renewed focus by Apple on companies
with 200 and fewer employees will help Apple and the small businesses.

Does Jetha have the Apple history to make these statements? Absolutely. In
1990 he started working with NeXT machines, the system so ahead of its time
and so cool it turned the market frigid and flopped, unless you count clearing
a path for Steve Jobs to pick up the Apple cart once again. MarketCircle is
a small company making Apple-only software for other small to medium companies.

Apple seems to want to bring their famous cool to the enterprise. Sorry, but
there's nothing cool about an assistant department manager sitting in a cubicle
farm. Apple can't help that person because corporate IT dictates too much and
in-house developers sold their soul long ago to .NET and VisualBasic. Where's
room for innovation?

There's room galore for innovation in small to medium businesses. These companies
are embracing Web 2.0 and Social Networking and a variety of other fads, but
that's OK. All these ideas include a better Web experience including multimedia.
Apple focused on multimedia from the start, and guess what, computing in general
has become almost nothing but multimedia streams.

Apple's servers work great in small and medium businesses, especially those
focused on media storage and processing. As YouTube takes an even larger piece
of total Internet bandwidth, and companies create blogs and podcasts and videocasts,
why not use Apple servers? Or try Linux servers, which support Macintosh clients.
Everything costs less and is easier to manage than Microsoft servers.

Jetha says, "Apple always thinks about individuals when developing."
Can you say that about your corporate IT environment?

ITworld.com