Can Apple change its enterprise spots?
Published: 02 May 2007 13:56 BST
...the later adoption of its computers in the consumer space, as parents purchased machines for their children to do their school work on at home.
But the vendor's position was also sustained by its role in helping to create the desktop publishing (DTP) market. A year after Lisa, it introduced the first reasonably priced laser printer in the shape of the LaserWriter, and PageMaker, an early DTP package, both of which ran on the Mac and exploited its advanced graphics capabilities. As a result, Apple at this time became — and remains — a mainstay of the publishing, design and graphics arts worlds.
By the early 1990s, however, things were not looking good in its ongoing competition against Microsoft. Apple was not only selling a broad range of machines that it failed to differentiate clearly, but was also unable to come up with a response to the improving quality of the Windows graphical user interface. It was likewise unable to match the wide range of business applications and peripherals that had been developed by third parties to run on and with Windows-based PCs.
A final nail in the enterprise coffin came in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned to the company after resigning more than a decade earlier when he lost a power struggle with then chief executive John Sculley. A key move at this time was to reverse a decision that had been made several years previously to develop an Apple OS clone market. This had succeeded in boosting the company's market share to a certain extent, but eroded its margins and profitability.
"They under-resourced the effort in the 1990s and finally abandoned the [enterprise] segment, leaving their early adopter clients high and dry, and folks don't forget that kind of thing easily. They also refused to do the two things that enterprises require — to provide a roadmap for at least two years and to allow a second vendor to sell the solution," says analyst Enderle.
Windows' dominance in the business world
This is important because enterprises can only source Apple machines from Apple, which means it is not possible to bid competitively for them, "limiting dramatically the available market for the solution". So while Jobs' move helped stem the company's financial losses, it also helped to kill any enterprise ambitions it might have had.
For the vast majority, Apple has already lost out in the corporate environment
Ben Gray, analyst, Forrester Research
A general dearth of Mac skills in the enterprise also does not help, and, even if organisations decide to switch out their current PCs to go with iMacs, which since January 2006 have become Intel rather than RISC-based, the benefits are unclear.
Alex Kwiatkowski, lead analyst for Datamonitor's technical team, explains: "A key issue is the dominance of Windows. Why would large corporates want to go through the pain of replacing Windows-based PCs with something different? And, if they're so hacked off with Microsoft and desktop PCs, they'd still have to run Microsoft's productivity applications in most cases anyway."
He also cannot see Leopard changing the situation very much. "Leopard is about evolution. While it may bring various inherent advantages and pick up a few more enterprise-class customers, I can't see it transforming Apple into an enterprise company," he says.
But Ben Gray, an analyst in Forrester Research's infrastructure and operations practice, takes it a step further. According to the company's latest infrastructure survey of 676 PC decision-makers in North American and European enterprises, Apple provides a mere one percent of client operating systems, although it is still prevalent in desktop publishing, graphics and communications departments.
"As we're still at the long tail-end of the last corporate PC refresh cycle, in the hopes of increasing PC support efficiency by having a single, unified platform, more and more IT operations professionals, who are wary of instigating a culture war within, are feeling pressure to remove Macs altogether from their corporate environments," Gray adds. Moreover, most enterprises are currently in the process of planning their Windows Vista rollouts, even if they have not yet made the jump per se, and so "for the vast majority, Apple has already lost out in the corporate environment".
To make matters worse for the Mac, most organisations are also buying...
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