The promise and heartbreak of Apple technology

I have written often of how the computer industry owes Apple for the many technologies that the company has either introduced or popularized over the years.  It's widely acknowledged so there little need to come up with a list.  Yet there's a darker side to Apple technology.  It's almost like a forbidden taste that you get but never really get to fully enjoy because it is limited to such a select group.

I think about Apple and the great advances that they have brought to market every time I log onto a wireless network or each morning when I plug my camera's memory card into a reader and effortlessly grab the digital photos that I post over at my View from the Mountain site.

Apple has done a very good job at spreading some technologies.  A good example is iTunes where Apple provided software which runs on Windows computers.  Doing software for Windows unquestionably has helped the iPod and iTunes Music Store be the great successes that they are today.

That ability to harvest money from a technology has made Apple successful even if it is in the entertainment world.  Yet there are some great technologies in Apple's bag of tricks that have never escaped the circle of Mac faithful.

The first to come to mind is iChat AV.  When it came out it was truly revolutionary.  We often used it internally when we needed to have someone in Cupertino speak in a customer briefing in our Reston, Va office near Washington, DC.  Apple iChat AV software produced better results than the proprietary video conferencing solution that we had and on top of that it was more reliable.  The other day our minister sent me a note asking me to participate in a seminar on healthcare since our family lived in Canada for a number of years.  My first thought was that it would be neat to have my friend who is a Doctor in Edmonton, Alberta video conference with our church.  Then it dawned on me that he doesn't have a Mac even though he is a tremendous iPod fan.

Last spring I got conned into buying a video conferencing camera for my Windows box by a friend in Halifax, NS.  We spent a week or so getting it working.  Still the quality was terrible.  At the end I told him to get a Mac if he wanted to talk to me by video conference.  Of course he didn't.

I'm hoping the migration to Intel chips doesn't slow down iChat AV.  I can't remember the details but somewhere in my mind there is the piece of information that it used the Altivec unit, but I could be wrong and for all I know the Intel chips have even better capabilities.

Yet the point is that Apple has wonderful video conferencing technology that is widely ignored because it is Mac only.

Another technology that Apple has developed is it address book and the syncing capability.  While there are things I would like to see different in Apple address book, the ability to have pictures of your contacts and sync those pictures with your bluetooth phone is definitely something that is outstanding technology. We've just hired a new young sales person in our company.  We're closing in on forty employees.  Having the ability to see a face to connect with contact information makes it so much easier for people to become productive

Yet even though I've taken the time to capture almost every employee's picture, so far I haven't been able to figure out how to share it with our new employee who uses Windows on Outlook.  I sent some vCards to my Windows laptop as a test, but the pictures didn't import into Outlook.  I'm not blaming Apple for this directly.  However, it does bring to mind an executive briefing that I once attended in Cupertino with some key people from NASA.  The NASA folks really wanted to see the Mac have more desktop share, and they suggested that Apple could make that happen by simply developing a Mail client and Safari for Windows.  I won't embarrass the Apple executive who pontificated on how that would be giving away the crown jewels to Windows users.  Of course it was a stupid argument, and the NASA people brought up the iTunes example.

In the end, there was no answer to their question.  The real answer is that Apple has chosen to put it's limited resources towards entertainment and not the enterprise.  Right now that looks like a wise decision, but only time will tell.  I just hope if Apple completely abandons the enterprise that some of those great technologies make it over into the corporate world where they can actually be used by a significant number of people.

Of course I can always dream about Apple figuring out how to do a really productive cross platform calendaring and email solution that would put MS on the run, but I just don't think that's going to happen.  I guess that is the heartbreak of Apple's technology promise.  We know what they could do it they wanted to, but sometimes they just choose not to do so.

Comments

[blue][erring]

in the 5 years that apple maintained a version of OS X for intel, they created a whole bunch of technologies that were great. no one 'knew' that they had this special OS X, or how well developed it was, if it existed. Meanwhile all these great things that apple made that were on 'mac os x' only... with no reason or explanation as to why they wouldn't port anything to windows.
It's pretty obvious to me that job's plan, for a long time, has been to ultimately get people to switch to intelMacs. why sell safari to windows? why not build the os x for intel into the most explosively decadent choice... one day?
look, by christmas the mac will be the only computer that can boot into Vista or Mac. That's when the low hanging fruit will shake from the windows tree and then apple can do the hard sell.
but why spend all that effort to flip the masses before the intelMacs come? then you'd just have that many more legacy users from PPC?
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[Stephen]

The Trojan Horse of iTunes is really about getting Quicktime on every WIndows desktop.

Guess what else? Bonjour for Windows.

http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows102.html

Puts a nice Bonjour Wizard on the Windows desktop for printing to Bonjour aware printers. Very handy if you have one of those connected to an Airport Extreme/Express.

What I can't figure out is that iTunes has to load a modified version of Bonjour for Windows to enable music sharing, but I can't figure out why they have to load a separate installation of Bonjour for printer discovery?

[Damain]

I think OS X is very much about the gorgeous GUI.

I've said before that I'm skeptical of claims about the current security situation being down to anything much more than the relative scarcity of the platform.

And there are some shocks here in terms of performance when its compared to Linux running on the same chips:

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2520

I think government departments and business do well to remain skeptical of OS X. I doubt the regional government of Extremadura is about to trade in its Linux machines for OS X:

http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/extremadura.html

Not only would that not suit its purposes so well - Linux can be easily built and configured to provide what is needed in each particular application and nothing more - but I doubt it could *afford* to.

But for home customers - or those with plenty of disposable income - OS X hits the spot. OS X, as I say, is about this experience:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2446159677494585380&q=apple

[Deepak]

Could you please explain how making Safari and Mail for Windows is similar to making iTunes for Windows?

Apple wants to sell iPods to Windows users and so it makes iTunes for Windows and gives it away free. Apple wants to sell songs from its iTunes Music Store to Windows users and so it makes iTunes for Windows and gives it away for free. So it is basically making money on the iPod and the songs.

How will Apple make money if it makes Safari and Mail for Windows? By selling those two applications? By selling mail servers?

In the case of iSight, I thought they would do what they did with the iPod and iTunes. I was hoping they would make iChat for WIndows available for free and then make money selling the iSight camera. That probably is never going to happen now since Apple is going the route of integrating their cameras into their computers.

Maybe Apple only wants to make one Windows product that helps lure the Windows users to switch to a Mac.

[ocracokewaves]

Actually that's pretty simple. If you want to penetrate an enterprise account, you need to make it easy for an organization to use your technology. If they get familiar with your technology, they potentially buy your hardware.

The iTunes link to the iPod is a much more direct link. However, how many people in the corporate world switched to Microsoft because MS Office runs better (calendaring for example) on Windows. Imagine for a second an absolutely great solution like iTunes except it's an office suite with shared calendaring.

It does what everyone wants it to do, does it better, and does it without the CALs required by an MS Exchange server. It makes money for Apple but do you think that it would sell Xserves? Absolutely !

Over time do you think people using Apple software on non Apple hardware might have a better opinion of Apple eventually? I think this is highly likely. Providing a great free mail client that is standards based, and perhaps hooks up to a great calendaring solution bundled with a server would be an outstanding way to sell hardware.

Providing a free standards based browser that offers an alternative lets accounts have a little more leverage with MS.

However, none of this is as easy as selling iPods to consumers.

[Rahul Sinha]

I think we're all losing sight of one thing; OS X has gone through huge changes in a short time. 10.0, 10.1 were not enterprise-worthy. between 10.2 and 10.4 there have been huge changes in the internals of OS X.

I think that Apple is looking at the last 5 years (and the next two or three) as building years. They've now completed the core developer API, they're finishing up their vision of metadata, and they are switching platforms.

You can't sell to companies while this sort of tumult is going on. Once all apps are Universal, all Macs are Intel, and at least 10.5 comes out, Apple can say "okay, now we need applications". A renewed focus on iWork and some collaboration stuff (iChat AV is old; it may still work better than other options, but Vista has some great (and "just works) collab stuff coming w/ it), and Apple will have its proposal to businesses ready.

Beyond all of this, Apple probably wants to one-up Vista before making a big enterprise push. The smaller competitor in a monopoly situation has to be better than the default choice, and Apple wants to make sure it is before "entering the public eye". Moreover many businesses are slowing their replacement cycles in anticipation of Vista, for 3rd party software. No one is going to switch to OS X until they see what the new "default choice" is going to be.

I say this all as a dedicated Mac user who would love to find 10 people on Bonjour when I use my powerbook at the coffeeshop, who would love to see every TV show on iTunes, every application _REALLY_ leverage .Mac, etc etc.

I just think that we're on the bottom of the S-curve right now. Be patient :-).

[Reader]

I don't think apple will take over untill it has two things the ability to upgrade and games. Even with apple taking over the market in media and almost destryoing all competition it still has no handle on gamers who are by far a large pc buying market (not the largest). In the end untill apple can get a foothold on games, hopefully the new intel mac will let them do that, then they won't be able to destroy the PC as it is. Also every mac except for the G5 is un-upgradable, and even the G5 can be a pain to put some new stuff in. I mean yeah it still runs great but i can't keep hurling my old mac in the trash because it doesn't come with a copy of Photobooth or the video card can't pla wow. And i don't alway want to have a PC by my side so i can pick up the slack where the Mac leaves off.