“When I was selling Apple products to the Federal Government, I reaffirmed that it’s often difficult to get beyond the local heros who champion Apple products and get plugged into the business side of the customer. That’s because Microsoft understands how to cater to the entire spectrum of an organization’s needs. Of course, this was nothing new. I’ve been writing about that effect since 1998, but I bring it up to make a point,” John Martellaro writes for The Mac Observer.
“This broad spectrum of business needs is not something that’s understood by everyone. The home user, for example, has a rather limited system configuration. If she’s lucky, she has a firewall and a backup system. Some try to get along without even that,” Martellaro writes. “In contrast, corporations not only have a rich technical environment, with lots of things going on like Voice over IP, video conferencing, Exchange servers, SAN storage, Proxy servers, spam filtering, monitoring and security software, but also must comply with various regulations like “SOX,” the Sarbanes-Oxley act, and engage in various quality initiatives such as ‘Six Sigma.’ All this, of course, is what makes working in IT departments so miserable, but it also creates huge opportunities for Microsoft to succeed as a business partner.”
“So no matter how cool Apple products have been from a personal standpoint, there is always the IT department’s infamous list — the check boxes of features and functions that Apple products must comply with. If not all the boxes are checked, then Apple isn’t considered a full-fledged player in the enterprise. (Microsoft’s business products generally check all the boxes.) Along the way, learning from this stiff business competition, Apple learned something valuable about how to enter a market and maintain control,” Martellaro writes.
Full article, very interesting with much more, here.
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