“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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Thank you all for straigtening me out. Apple, Mac, the OS, all their s’ware, all their plastic, and all their aluminum is perfect. It all works, never breaks, never gets sick, and will save our democracy.
What was I thinking?
rasterbator:
Wait, you’re saying Apple needs to “work on integration”? um…ok.
i would be very interested to hear how you came to this conclusion. Because, from my experience, Apple seems to have a firm grasp on the concept of integration.
“what was I thinking”
you weren’t, obviously.
MDN word is talking, as in you were talking out of your ass
Apple Doesn’t Work:
Nobody ever said our stuff is “perfect”, it just happenss to be better than the crap you use.
I think John Martellaro’s article is excellent. Very interesting.
@Six Sigma Sucks – Agreed. Six Sigma = You’re about to be brainwashed by the company under the guise of a “Quality Improvement Program” – I hate that shit. They sent one guy at a company I worked for for Six sigma “training” (i.e. programming). He received what is called a “black belt” (I kid you not). A month later they fired him. Not sure why, but they sure wasted a hell of a lot of money to get him his certification.
Apple is getting a lot of complaints about the MaSHITa SDs they using in the current Macs. Seems as though there is a high failure rate. Just data – process as you whish.
“Apple Doesn’t Work”:
Your rants would be more appealing if you learned to spell…still utterly ignorant, but at least readable.
And “PC Apologist”:
Why screw around with MSAccess when you can use SQL in unix if you have a Mac? MSAccess doesn’t even have the capacity to store the entire DB of a simple text based RPG. And frankly, one has to resort to VBS to accomplish anything significant with Access.
thats a very good article.
recommend you guys read it if you havn’t.
Jooop,
What about WebObjects?