Apple Grrl

Apple doesn’t chase after the business market the way Microsuck does. That’s been a fact for many years. The reason why is the big question. Fanboyz and Fangrrlz will spout “because Apple doesn’t need to” and other company jargon until the cows come home as a reason (which is why people sometimes see Apple users as a cult, not a user base), but is that the real reason?

You can rattle off a list of things that Apple does not do that makes its products and services a poor fit for corporate IT, and this list has not changed for years. To the extent that Apple products have actually infiltrated big businesses, it’s been through small groups of enthusiasts—the canonical example being the art department that somehow manages to get themselves Macs, despite a company-wide standardization on Windows. We’re seeing some of the same phenomenon today with the iPhone: employees purchasing iPhones because they’re cool, despite corporate IT’s prohibition against them.

Some see this as the seeds of an uprising. Here’s Gruber’s take:

Self-important IT experts will continue to insist that the iPhone “must” or “needs to” support “business software systems”, but in the meantime, their employees will be buying iPhones on their own. [...] Like many successful revolutions, this one might come from the bottom.

Ars Technica thinks that the main reason Apple doesn’t market to enterprise is that it would require an entirely different marketing strategy than the one it has so successfully employed for years. Marketing to business means selling to an IT department, and Apple markets products directly to end users. I agree – it really is that simple.

Because Apple markets to the people who will actually use the products they sell, and not to the IT geeks who would have to maintain them, Apple users really are happier with their purchase and overall experience. IT departments are shunning the iPhone, for example, because it doesn’t have the traditional clunky interface or support hard to use business software like Exchange. Well, no shit sherlock. and customers are buying them because of that – they don’t want a clunky interface, or to be tied down to hard to use corporate products, not because that hard to use product is better, but because the IT department is familiar with it and doesn’t want to change.

This is why Apple does not compete in the enterprise market in the traditional sense. This is why no other company created the iPhone. This is why most desktop PCs are pieces of crap. When you don’t focus on the user, the user gets shafted.

Truer words were never spoken. Read the rest of the Ars Technica / FatBits analysis, it’s worth it.

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Tags: Apple, Enterprise

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