Apple- "to change the world and serve users"

I just read the Information Week article, "Does Apple Have A Moral Obligation To Serve The Enterprise Market?"  It made me smile.

In the nearly twenty years that I was with Apple, I never heard anyone at a high level at Apple talk about morals.   There was plenty of talk, but mostly it was how great Apple was and how some people just don't get it and probably never will.

You often hear about the famous reality distortion field impacting customers.  Trust me, the impact over employees is beyond measurement.

The whole debate about enterprise customers misses the mark because it does not take into account the way that Apple works internally.

While many companies try to serve their customers, Apple tries to serve their products and the products' internal constituencies.

Unless they have been re-recreated in three years since I left Apple, there are no Apple customer advisory boards that actually have any measurable impact on the products.

Apple products come from within Apple and are designed to meet Apple's goals.  If they happen to meet some non-target customer goals (read enterprise) along the way, Apple will be glad to take their money, but do not expect any special consideration for those markets.

In my early years at Apple, I always thought that there was this grand vision of where Apple was headed.  I finally figured that Cupertino was making it up as we went along.

Granted some absolutely stellar products got created, but all the grand plans that people come up with trying to figure out Apple's strategy are just interesting reading and have little to do with what really happens.

Apple does not do strategy.  They do products, and the products might create a semblance of strategy but that is it.

Even the grand strategy of Apple Stores wasn't so much a strategy as a last ditch effort to provide a place where Apple products could be seen positively given the fact that all major chains and computer stores had responded to market pressure from the Windows world.

People proposed it for years as a strategy, but no one would buy into it because of the opposition from the people at Apple who were making their money off the reseller channel.

The best way to understand this is through OS X.  As I was leading Apple's federal team, certain OS X features were absolutely critical to our success.  We were doing very well so we were invited to the OS table.  It was an interesting process.

We rapidly found that the greatest power over the OS was actually held by the education market because they had the largest number of consulting engineers who had the closest relationships with the software engineers.

Education's power might have diminished since I left, but I suspect they still have many of the cards.   In 2001-2004 figuring out what features would be worked on for an OS release was something akin to a group brawl.  Pieces of the organization, like K-12, those selling to creative professionals, and the tiny Apple enterprise group which included federal put together requests for features in the OS.

Those features were then pushed up the chain for management filtering.  Active Directory support got filtered out in our case.  We ended up doing it at the field level.  Whether something got in the next build or got dropped had nothing to do with a grand vision for the OS.

The OS strategy seemed built on appearances at times.  If you added too many enterprise features product marketing would be unhappy because we would be appearing to be an enterprise company which we were not.  It was just as important to have the buzz about the OS right as it was to have the features right.

Perhaps Apple now has a grand strategy of where the OS is headed now, but I doubt it.  Many of the key players have changed since I left, but I doubt that has changed the fact that products drive the strategy instead of the strategy driving the products.

OS X was built based on feature requests and the careful allocation of Apple's very scare programming resources rather than a careful plan that would position OS X for a series of particular markets.

Getting the OS out the door required giving something to each internal group to keep them happy.

Apple certainly wasn't a place where someone said this is the direction we're headed in and this is how it all fits together so we can get there.