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May 02, 08 - 10:29 am Comment from: macoverdose_dot_com

oh no ... macs in the office.... according to all the retard analysts out there isnt the mac the anti-christ. its not 1995 anymore

This is where I'd like to see Apple partner with IBM, CISCO, ADTRAN, even possibly DELL. The Enterprise market is huge. I've worked with several AM 100 law firms with over 1000 employees, and every single firm uses Windows XP Dell devices. Imagine what Apples stock price would be if these machines were MACs or atleast PC running OSX ... the article in business week is fair and accurate. Entterprise is a HUGE weakness for Apple and VERY MUCH A MISSED BUSINESS OPPOURTUNITY ... atleast at the moment anyway.

Enterprise, Government and the Military are the Big Three missed business opportunities of Apple.

Apple seems to be recovering somewhat on the Educational Market.

A lot of money to be made there in those sectors.

I'd love to see an Apple mainframe or super computer at some point too…not a bunch of Mac Pros or servers networked together.

The profit margins are abysmal. Corporations want to charge top dollar for their products and services, but they don't want to pay their taxes, their employees, or pay for their computers. It's why the economy is in the toilet.

Small businesses: Yes
Medium size businesses: Yes for some
Large size businesses: No, except for their graphic department

May 02, 08 - 10:59 am Comment from: Randian

@Screw the enterprise

Watch out, man: Your anti-capitalist bias is showing. And FYI: The economy is not in the toilet; only your perception thereof is.

As Hamlet was wont to say, "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

"If we believe it, it's true for us, so if we believe we're right, why then, right we are! And what the real truth of the matter may be, well, that's not our concern. We congratulate ourselves on our superior 'spirituality', our depth and sensitivity and wisdom and intuition, and pity the poor benighted materialistic wretches who deny our spiritual truths. Heads I win tails you lose, swings and roundabouts...it's a good old world, after all. -- Kassandra

May 02, 08 - 11:05 am Comment from: DLMeyer

Certain Enterprises pay their CEO's huge bonuses even as the business goes down the toilet. Now, are you thinking these CEO's - or other C-class execs - even care what computers the mere employees use? NOW who's retarded?!? Spend less money per seat for a Dell and get more in your pay-check ... sounds like a plan to these C's.
May they all rot in jail ... except, they share their (company's) wealth with the political candidates so THAT will never happen.

Thank you for sharing this moment from Your Daily Cynic.

May 02, 08 - 11:05 am Comment from: dd

If Apple doubles its marketshare in the next few years, I stand to make some nice money (not millionaire money, unfortunately :().

May 02, 08 - 11:07 am Comment from: Macromancer

Apple needs to offer bounties for the larger developers like SAP to develop Mac version of their software.

If they can get a 100 million$ seed fund for iPhone app development, then why not for the Mac in general. This could go a long way to getting more companies into the Mac fold.

I have been running a medium sized business since 1989 on Macs. It's been spectacular. Hardly any computer problems to speak of. The couple of Windows computers we had for some proprietary vendor things (very annoying because they were web based) have had all kinds of problems. Big business can adopt Macs. Someone needs to come up with big business software to compete with SAPand MS and others. It will happen. Who is going to do it. Like MDN said Apple is a huge company run on Macs....

May 02, 08 - 11:12 am Comment from: Harvey

I think Bootcamp was a top-secret Leopard feature until hackers forced Apple to let the cat out of the bag to prevent a support nightmare.

Apple wouldn't build a feature that allows Windows to run on Macs unless they were confident not just that the customer would prefer OS X over Windows, but also that software companies would prefer to develop OS X versions instead of requiring the user to use Windows on the Mac (as Stamps.com does now).

In other words, Apple wasn't just betting on OS X, they were betting on their development tools, too. Most companies wouldn't take that risk, because if they lost those bets, they'd end up making Windows boxes.

They are winning that bet.

May 02, 08 - 11:25 am Comment from: MacRaven

Cool. I have lots of stock in Juniper Networks.

"Scuse me... SAP client runs 100% native on the Mac OS. No virtualization or Boot Camping required. (it's a Java app). Been doing it for years. Kudos to SAP folk!

May 02, 08 - 11:28 am Comment from: Mac n' Cheese

Tell this to the NY Times: they want to force all the chains to drop Macs and move to PCs in the coming year.

Randian,

Watch out, your naivety is showing. If you really believe that we live in a Capitalist society, you need to take a good look around. Capitalism has devolved into Feudalism. The Corporate Lords make 98% of the money, and the rest of us serfs eke out a living from the scraps. Here's one example: Exxon makes nearly a billion dollars per week in PROFIT: how much did you make last week? I said 'makes' because let's face it, they aren't EARNING it. Earning it would mean that they're making money by creating ways for us to be rid of oil. Instead, they spend a paltry few million on wind/solar and call it investing. It's disgraceful.

May 02, 08 - 11:30 am Comment from: Grifterus

What I still don't get is, what's do damn charming about Exchange Server, that all corporations like t use it?

I personally find a good Unix-based IMAP server as good. Add Google Apps ($50/month for Professional, free for Standard) and you have a kick-a$$ group calendar.

Or you can always use another choice.

Can anybody explain to me?

@ Randian
What's wrong with criticizing the occasional example of capitalism and a free market gone wrong?
The obscene levels of CEO and executive pay levels while dropping their shareholders and employees into the crapper is a testament to human corruption in a so-called "free-market".
All a free market does is allow people to freely screw their neighbors. I would like to believe that most don't or the system would collapse under it's own weight.

And I rather like the system. It holds my world together. And the world is where I keep all my stuff.

May 02, 08 - 11:46 am Comment from: Macintosh

This always bugs me that there is concern that Macs are not ready for business. I know of a 25-30 Billion a year company with 20,000 employees in which every employee uses a Mac and an iPhone. All of the servers they use are Apple as well.

This is a MAJOR company, and is one of the most innovative companies in history. The have a huge web presence, massive sales and shipping, huge retail presence and more.

They are often looked at as a role model by other large corporations, and have been called "Wall Street's Darling".

Any guesses? I'll give you a hint... A _ _ _ E.

Thx BL5, I was doing a- What, what, what !!!

We've been running SAP natively on Macs since © 1999.
SAP NetWeaver

No Issues. Even supports Applescript.

May 02, 08 - 12:03 pm Comment from: MaLvado

Screw the Enterprise,

Were you defending the oil companies when they were losing money in the 90s?

May 02, 08 - 12:21 pm Comment from: Logan

Randian, I hope you feel aloof and enlightened while the rest of us morons are down here trying to figure things out. Good work.

Anyway...
I think that a Mac without Windows can handle enterprise business. The question is whether the enterprise can handle Mac. What I mean is that I have yet to see a problem with using Mac in an enterprise context that doesn't have a solution. It's a matter of whether or not the enterprise will go after those solutions.

@Grifterus: Something about the word "Microsoft" that makes CEO's start masturbating. I'm guessing that it's profit envy of some sort.

I agree, there's nothing that Exchange/Outlook can't do that any other SMTP server and email client can't. In fact, performance- and reliability-wise, a Linux SMTP server of any flavour makes Exchange look so last century.

Doesn't OS-X Server have an "iCal" Server component? Wouldn't that be nice - but our company, like 90% of those out there (baaaah-baaaah) is a Dell shop running Microcrap. Convincing them of change is like diverting the Atlantic Ocean.

I don't want enterprise to go Mac.

I run two small businesses, all Mac.
We don't have a lot of leverage to compete with the big guys, but I reckon that us being all Mac, and big enterprise being almost exclusively Windows, gives my little companies some measure of advantage at least in the computer realm.
If/when enterprise learns the advantages of going with Apple, I'd lose that margin of superiority.

May 02, 08 - 01:37 pm Comment from: HazMatt

It's interesting to me how people complain jealously about CEOs' pay rates when it suits them.

How many of you would criticize Steve Jobs' salary if it wasn't $1 per year, but millions? Would you say he's overpaid or "worth every penny"?

But when it comes to "Big Oil", it's soooo easy.

Government takes waaay more cents out of every gas dollar but nobody except conservatives and libertarians complain about how much government is gouging consumers.

Why these comments don't stay on topic is beyond me. I know when I talk politics here it's always in response to someone else.

Yard by Yard its very hard, but inch by inch its a cinch!

LOL! MaLvado, Big Oil has never lost money. It's only compared to today's obscene profits that the 90's don't look as good as they did back then.

May 02, 08 - 02:37 pm Comment from: bobchr

I agree with @Screw the Enterprise, Apple used to have a corporate enterprise department in the early 90's when Jobs was ousted. When his Steveness came back, among the things he did was put an end to the cloners and consolidated Apples focus in 2 markets, education and consumer and absorbed the separate business division by by refocusing them on higher education.

By making high end quality products businesses that need the high end power stayed with Apple, graphic arts, broadcasting, technical publications. Eventually as Apple built faster and faster machines during the clock cycle wars of the early 2000's research scientist inexpensive in prestigious US universities put together clusters of G5 to create supercomputers for simulations that previously were out of their reach before.

When Apple went to Intel Processors it did 2 things; the first was to lower it's cost of doing business by tapping into the vast PC component commodity market, the second was to create boot camp to allow people that are forced to use PC's at work ... make it easier for them to buy and use a more reliable product from Apple at home. Apple tapped into MicroSoft's and Enterprise's weakness in the need for an IT department to maintain their infrastructure security and upgrades.

I believe that Apple still is not courting the Enterprise market. They do tend to want everything for next to nothing. I used to work for one that grew from $10 M to $1.4B over 12 years. The attention that apple is getting from corporate offices is due to a confluence of things. The few corporate executive and middle managers that apple scored at home no doubt discovered Apple's greater ROI the technical barriers were dropped and IT support was not needed and their products just worked without a lot of hand holding.

I believe that Apple is doing the right thing in holding the corporate market in abeyance rather than actively seeking it out with specially designed custom PC , lower or differ for corporate only price structures and special tech support departments . Such unnecessary departments add costs and the profits usually aren't worth it. See Dell. Innovation costs to bring to the market and Apple has always been the highest percentage of gross income investor in R and D. This helps Apples bottom line by creating product improvement across it's entire line and allowing Apple to not allow corporate purchasing and volume discounts to erode margin and product quality. So I too say "Screw Enterprise " pay your fair share like the rest of us you will find it cheaper in the long run.

I work in a medium sized company with a little over 500 employees. We are spread out in six locations in four cities in three states. We do about $100 million a year in revenue.

While I know of several employees that have Macs at home, I am the only person in the entire org' that uses a Mac for "work." I have a lot of flexibility in what I do and a lot of say in what kind of computer I can use. I am very fortunate in that way.

Kind of like SAP, our biz is tied to a near monoplolistic mainframe/server system vendor that (thank the Maker) is unix based but only has clients for it (sophisticated telnet app) on Windoze. The same goes for their CRM system which is web based. It only works on IE, not even Firefox for windoze. It has a lot of active x and other crap like that that only IE for windoze can discern. Thankfully for virtualization I can do the bit that I need to in that world and happily live the rest of it in OS X. Luckily we are, surprisingly, not big enough or set up to really need something like an Exchange server, but we are starting to think maybe we are. Luckily, the head IT person does NOT want to go the exchange router when we upgrade. I have at least been able to say, let's wait until iPhone 2.0 comes out and then get something that will play nice with them that's not exchange. Read on for the reason why.

I do have to live in my own little world and if I didn't know how to configure, say, a static ip address and other minor tech stuff like that I'd be hosed. There wouldn't be any support available for me with the IT people. Of course, since putting my foot down about three years ago, I've never had a problem. I even take some "support" calls from people about windoze.

As much as I would love to see more Macs in our biz, it's not even on the radar picking up stuff that is not on the radar. We were just looking at purchasing about 50 more computers from the kind folks in China by way of Round Rock/Austin for a new location. Every dollar that can be spared is. Plus, we wouldn't have any support for any kind of Mac. We're talking not even having DVD-capable drives in computers. On a other note, we are one of those that would have to spend, we figured, about $400 more per machine to have them be able to run Vista. The end of 2008 will suck in that regard when we can't get XP, but even that won't be able to have Macs be on the radar that picks up the radar. The Vista ready machines would still be a couple hundred bucks cheaper than the cheapest iMac and that's before having to buy a windoze license to run that stuff that we would have to on them.

There are a lot of the typical forces in place that might be able to move some businesses to Macs thru other influences: there are several "C" level and upper management people that have picked up iPhones (I was the first of those on 6/29/07), but alas b/c of reasons mentioned above Macs aren't even on the radar of the radar.

There is even some movement from the very top. The CEO's son (I am very influential in their purchases) got a MacBook in January, the CEO's wife got a MacBook Air last month and for his couple of home offices, the big man himself is probably going to get some 24" iMacs - a lot of which was spurred by his admiring mine. Even with this, there are still insurmountable obstacles (at this point) to any kind of wide adoption of Macs in our biz.

Apple will never be able to "get them all" and I think there will always be some places where they won't be able to fit in. I could see a few more one-off people in our org' that got Macs for "work" but nothing on any kind of large scale.

I guess I am ok with that, though.

What never ceases to amaze me is that people don't understand that Apple does not go after the enterprise entirely for strategic reasons. Microsoft is very successful in the business market, but terrible with consumers. Apple can be very successful in both, but it has chosen the consumer market because it really has no competition competition. Sorry, the likes of Nokia and Sony cannot be considered formidable.

But the potential for the consumer market is far larger than the enterprise market. If Apple ever went after the enterprise market, you can expect His Monkeyness to not just throw chairs, but also billions in a war with Apple.

If Apple were to take on Microsoft now, it would be a very costly battle. As Apple becomes more powerful in the consumer market, it becomes an easier battle to fight.

Why do you think Apple doesn't spend its relatively large cash hoard? Armageddon hasn't begun yet.

May 04, 08 - 08:54 am Comment from: Cubert

Didn't SAP announce they were coming out (or maybe even have) with a Mac version of their software?

Macs work great in the enterprise. I've been balking the establishment and running my own mac in the office for 10 years. Most corporate applications work on the mac natively, some require virtualization, but it can be done.

Making exchange work on the mac is childs play. The only applications that I require vmware or parallels on are edge cases. Those who suggest 100% of the group run substandard software which impacts productivity, because 1% of the user base need to use a legacy application 1% of the time don't understand IT. The job of IT is to select the best tools at reasonable cost for most of the user base to be productive.

Consider the edge application that doesn't have any way to run on a mac...by comparison the graphics department uses its tools more often and most of the IT users don't have any use or need for the super duper advanced features. The reality is perhaps that edge application should be re-architected for open standards.

I've said it before a million times. The people who bash the mac have never used one or interfaced with one. They scream the same old tired arguement meanwhile Apple has quietly made the necessary changes. Macs integrate with Active Directory. Macs can share on CIFS networks. Macs use standard TCP networking. Macs can use exchange mail, I do it every day have have for years. Macs have many many ways to run Internet Explorer. Macs usually have a native means to do most anything...again edge cases require virtualization such as WINE, parallels, or vmware. Most users simply don't have the need for this however.

In most companies I've worked for we created email distribution lists where novice mac users ask for help from experienced mac users. In most cases people require help with setup...and once they do you never hear from them again except to let others know they found a cool new app. I've worked at my company for 7 months now and only asked IT for help once...because the permissions on my home directory were incorrectly configured. That call would have occurred on PC or Mac. We've created wiki pages for people to configure their systems with step by step directions. Basic configuration questions have pretty much stopped as a result.

The only reason IT minions continue to push PC down the user throats is because we might need a few less minions. You'll hear a million reasons why the mac isn't suitable from these people...but very few of these reasons have merit. Most of them are old, baseless, and preached by people who have never used one. In my book that is the purest form of ignorance.

Not too many companies who've done internal cost studies have found macs increase cost. Usually TCO goes down, way down. User productivity usually goes up, way up. The user base is usually more happy. It then can stop hiring an army to support desktops and divert those costs to doing things which actually make money for the company...such as work on many needed re-designs of the core services...where there is usually a huge lack of talent and money to address the problems.