“Steve Jobs was notoriously ambivalent, and often outwardly hostile, to the idea of marketing Apple products to the enterprise,” Bill Detwiler reports for ZDNet. “In 2010, he told Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (then with The Wall Street Journal) that what he hated about the enterprise market was the fact that ‘the people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused.'”
MacDailyNews Take: The IT Doofuses. All “Microsoft Certified” out the ying-yang, of course.
“Five years later, and a lot has changed. CEO Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor, has embraced the enterprise market,” Detwiler reports. “Cook said the company has a good foundation to work from: ‘The arc is longer than in consumer, which can immediately go out and buy things, etcetera. And I think we’ve done a lot of the groundwork as you can tell from these numbers that I’ve given you, and I would expect that it would have more and more payback in the future.’ Indeed, thanks to the groundwork Cook mentioned, Apple has positioned itself to take a serious chunk of the enterprise hardware and software market, which has been long dominated by companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.”
Here are five things that Apple has done to make it easier for enterprise IT to support, and even prefer their products.
1. Apple makes products people want to use
2. Macs and Windows machines now play nice
3. Software is less os-specific
4. Enterprise-class device management tools
5. Apple Retail Stores: Apple’s secret weapon in their enterprise campaign
Tons more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Our run-ins at various companies with IT doofuses who were throwing up roadblocks in order to blindly protect their turf to the severe detriment of their companies and fellow employees brings back a tangible reminder of the frustration we faced.
Imagine how Jobs and Apple executives felt.
Finally, the world has woken up. The Dark Ages of Personal Computing are over!