Applepeels

Apple's Big Misstep In Education

I am not surprised by the recent articles about Google unseating Apple in the classroom.  Back in the spring of 2013, I wrote an article, It is not the Pixel that should worry Apple.

It could be argued that Apple's business has been built on education and education is still a key market for the company.  The iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone are the current hot products for Apple and in general are well received in the education market. However no product stays at the top in education forever and Google attacking Apple's education pond is a much bigger problem than Google coming out with an arguably over-priced Chromebook (The Pixel).

I come at this as someone who spent about half of my nearly two decades at Apple selling to the education market.  Back in the last days of the Apple II, I made one of the largest single purchase order sales of Apple IIes.  It put an Apple IIe in every fifth grade classroom in Nova Scotia.  I went on to be higher education account executive of the year in 1992 and then led Apple's most successful higher education team over the five years that Apple treated higher education as a separate market.

I got ripped out of higher education during one of Apple's many reorganizations in the mid-nineties but education stayed close to my heart.

For years Apple believed in the power of computers in education to create consumers of Apple technology.  We used to take great pride in higher education that we sent college students home every Thanksgiving with full instructions as to what their families needed in the way of computer technology.

In the dark days of Apple, when it was hard to find a decent reseller of Apple products anywhere, you could discover many wonderful places to buy Macs on campuses well before Apple Stores ever showed up at the mall.  Apple at the time was a real partner with campus resellers.

When I was director of federal sales at Apple, I can remember being flown to California twice to take part in education briefings.  Schools in the period just after 2000, were worried that using Macs to teach their students would make them ill-prepared for a career in the business world.  My job was to tell them about all the successes that the federal team was having at NASA, NIH, and the many federal labs. The not so subtle message was "Do you want your child just to learn how to use Microsoft Word or how to think like a scientist?"  It was a powerful message and well received by many schools.

Apple is changed company since those days but Apple is still about convincing you that you need the next glitzy device.  At Apple I heard Steve Jobs say many times that we were not an enterprise company but rather one that sold products that are sometimes very useful in the enterprise.  He often followed that message with a comment about the heart of Apple being education.

So what happened?  It would be easy to say that Apple became enthralled with its own gadets and maybe that is part of it. However, I think it was a much more subtle change and I have to put the blame on Steve Jobs and not Tim Cook. Tim Cook might be guiding the good ship Apple, but Steve Jobs put it on this course.

One of the biggest things that changed after Steve came back was how Apple interacted with its higher education and large business customers.  There were changes with the K-12 customers but perhaps not so dramatic.  If you were at Apple in the early nineties, you would probably agree that Apple and many of the thought leaders in higher education agreed that computing had the power to transform education.  At one time Apple invested in many higher education projects.  Apple also listened to higher education customers and worked with them to deliver exactly what their students needed for a college computing environment.  There was a tremendous synergy between Apple and its higher education customers.  We gave them special pricing, told them what we were going to do before we did it, and often protected them from their own mistakes.

Much of this changed when Steve came back.  The first to go were customer meetings with publishing professionals.  Steve did not enjoy customer meetings when he was not on a stage.  While the higher education meetings continued, it was clear that Apple was not listening seriously.

The Cupertino briefings kept going for business, higher education, and K-12 customers but the amount of useful planning information that came out of the meetings declined.  It was not unusual for Apple to pay the way of some K-12 executives to come to a Cupertino briefing but the true education partnerships were gone.  However, the briefings also brought out another change that was close to Steve's heart.  Apple sales people were excluded from customer briefings when non-disclosure information was discussed.  Apple would often tell customers something that they were unwilling to tell their own sales people.

That might seem fine on the surface since no one likes sales people, but when you are company such as Apple which in essence walls itself off from its own customers except for the tiny scripted interactions that take place in an executive briefing, you need consistent, reliable feedback from your sales people as to the directions that customers are headed or the issues they need solved.

By not trusting its own sales people and giving up on customer advisory boards that often fueled Apple's own imagination, I believe Apple has become disconnected from some core elements of its customer base. Having some arrogant, perhaps even toxic sales vps has not helped Apple with its education customers. One of the worst ones is gone, but I suspect people are still trying to repair the damage that he did.

The second thing that I believe hurt Apple is the inability of the company to get web services right.  While today's iCloud is better than it was, it is way too confusing compared to Google's Drive and Docs which just keep getting better and better.

The web has been an afterthought for Apple for as long as I can remember.  Your web data has often been tied to a particular device just like your iPod.  I remember a strong push from some of us in Apple's enterprise groups for a home directory that would work from USB thumb drives. I actually saw prototypes working but Steve shot it down because he thought people would screw it up.

Google has always abstracted the data from the hardware, Apple has always tied the data to a device in the hopes that you will buy a new one.

You can use Google Docs from just about any device including Macs of all stripes.  Just try using Apple's cloud services from an Android device. Of course I have found Apple's cloud apps are often hobbled like the inability to do notes in Pages or presenter notes in Keynote.  Actually you cannot even upload files from an old Mac to Apple's own Cloud drive.  You have to use DropBox.  How many schools have you visited where old Macs and in fact any old computers that they can find are part of their educational computing program?

While Apple was diddling around with the complexities of NetBoot, difficult to manage one to one laptop deployments and trying to convince educational customers that first the iPod, then the iPad was the greatest thing for education since chalk, Google went out and solved some real customer problems and gave educational users a way to use computers without a lot of hassle.  They also gave them a keyboard, a way to collaborate, and they made it very inexpensive.

Apple makes very nice devices.  On Black Friday, my wife and I were in Best Buy.   I wanted her to have a look at a MacBook.  Since I work for a company that uses Macs, I thought it would be nice for her to get a Mac so I would have one in case I needed to edit some Pages documents when we are traveling (and yes I have used Pages on the web).   She spent some time with a MacBook Air and then went over and tried a Chromebook.  Her question to me, "Why would anyone with basic browsing and email needs spend more than three times the money on a MacBook?" I had no answer.

For education customers the question turns out to be, "Why would I spent double the money on an iPad that doesn't meet the needs of my students as well as a Chromebook which is much easier to manage?"

It is a good question and most educational institutions have figured out the answer as we can see from the education sales figures.

That is it from the Crystal Coast where being on the beach is more attractive than being in Best Buy on Black Friday or being an Apple education rep at any time.

Is The Enterprise In Apple's DNA?

Reading a sampling of this week's articles about Apple heading into the enterprise brings to mind Yogi Berra's famous comment "It's like déjà vu all over again."  As one Apple employee told me, we never stopped going after the enterprise.

There is a grain of truth in that as I will explain later, but if you read a few of this week's Apple enterprise articles, you will find that the newest Apple push is based on partnerships with other vendors and developers.  When I see articles touting partnerships like the one with IBM, I have a hard time thinking beyond what a longtime Apple employee told me a few weeks ago.  "You cannot say Apple and partnership in the same sentence."

Considering my long history at Apple in enterprise sales and that I still have some whiplash from Apple's enterprise efforts, I think a few comments are in order.

The gospel according to Steve Jobs says that Apple is a consumer company which makes great products, some of which work very well in the enterprise.

My last few years at Apple I led what might have been Apple's most successful enterprise team.  It was something of a skunk works project, but we did exceptionally well in one of the toughest enterprise markets in the world, the United States federal government.  We had some high level support including Tim Cook, Bud Tribble, and Fred Anderson. 

We were able to get operating system level implementations that made Apple products attractive to a number of agencies and especially to scientists who were tired of dealing with what at the time was a never-ending assault of viruses and malware.  We got as far as getting OS X approved as part of the federal government's enterprise architecture. Apple did an OS level implementation of smart cards.  Smart cards are requirement if you are going to do business with the federal government.  A couple years after I left, they even published a manual about how to implement smart card services on your Mac.

Apple in 2000-2004 period championed CDSA, or Common Data Security Architecture, as the middle-ware building block for smart cards.  The theory being it would be easier for everyone if security devices and providers across difference architectures wrote to the same middle-ware.  I have not followed this closely but I know that you can still use smart cards with a Mac.  However, Apple has switched how they do it all as of Yosemite and there are some questions as to Apple's direction with their security implementation.

With that as a background, here are my thoughts on Apple and the "new" enterprise push.

First Apple has done many enterprise pushes and perhaps all have shown some degree of success but the ill-fated attempt just after 2000 to get into the enterprise with iMac kiosks.  The only thing thing that push accomplished was to get a lot of enterprise sales people fired.

Since the early nineties, all of Apple's enterprise sales pushes have had a few common characteristics.

1. Lots of strategy.
2. Few actual Apple feet on the street.
3. Apple has continued to go its own way.

I still remember the Apple-DEC alliance announced in 1988.  Most of us selling to the enterprise hopped on a train and went to DEC Word in New York City.  DEC was to provide the integration support and people to get Macs into the enterprise.  I cannot remember any sales bump from the DEC alliance.  Perhaps the third time alliance with IBM will be the charm.

In talking to Apple folks, the theory is that Apple is just building the hooks into OS software mostly iOS and that the enterprise folks are going to run with this on their own with help from IBM and a sales bump to Apple.

It is obvious that iPhones are doing well in American corporations.  A new iPhone, much like a fancy Mac was in my days of selling at Apple, is a pretty nice corporate perk.  iPhones are tied down more than the Android world so there is some appeal to the corporate IT folks.

However, there are some substantial cultural barriers at Apple.

1. As my example with smart cards illustrates, Apple often changes course for what seems to Apple like very good reasons.  However, those changes are sometimes not communicated well and often the benefit is more in Apple's mind than to the customer who sometimes just wants things to work without having to jump through some new hoops.
2. Apple really does not know how to listen to customer needs. It used to be a big part of the company's culture before Steve came back. It disappeared then.  If you saw the procedure Apple uses to determine what features make it into an OS release, you would have a hard time not laughing.  I hope but doubt it has changed much.
3. Though the Yosemite Beta program  is certainly a step in the right direction, I doubt we will see pre-release versions of iPhones being sent out to enterprises to make sure that new software and/or hardware does not break their software.  Apple is built on surprise and secrets which are not favorites in the enterprise world.
4. Enterprises really like companies that keep working on something until they get it fixed.  Apple would rather invent something new than fix something old.  That is truly part of the company's DNA.
5. Enterprise sales are often built on long time relationships between executives and Apple does not do this well.  One of our biggest challenges in selling to the federal government was that no Apple executive would say in public that the enterprise was important to Apple and that Apple would stick with its enterprise products.  Beyond that Apple executives do not like to travel far beyond the safety of their offices in Cupertino. You have to make the pilgrimage to Cupertino. Enterprises want you to come to them.  Unfortunately not enough comes out of Apple executive briefings to compensate for this Cupertino-centric approach.

The history of Apple is littered with failed enterprise products from Apple's AIX based Network Server to the more recent Xserve and Xserve RAID products that were abandoned in 2010.

The whole Xserve with the RAID product was supposed to a major push into the enterprise.  They were great products but Apple had done little preparation for the selling and support of the products.  They shipped the products, the field sort of figured out how to sell them and the diehard Apple customers helped us through the many product challenges.  Apple actually did a training for the sales people after the Xserves had been selling and the people doing much of the training were the people in the field who had figured out the product's limitations.  Apple was never willing to commit enough system engineer resourses to adequately support the products.  Apple also made a major server architecture change to Intel.  Changing processors pulled the rug out from under one of the largest Xserve customers who was using the Xserve product mostly because of the small heat footprint of its PowerPC processors.  One might want to ask the VAR who got stuck with lots of outdated PowerPC Xserves about the reliability of Apple as a partner.

As to Apple listening to customers, I can still remember giving Tim Cook's Quicktime movies of enterprise customers talking about the difficulties they were having getting Macs to be good citizens on their Active Directory networks. After those made their way through the organization, I can remember Avie Tevanian flat out telling us that the customers did not know what they were talking about when they said Macs were not good Active Directory clients.  In his mind there was no problem.

The solution to that problem was that I took one of my field system engineers and had him spend months writing an Active Directory plugin that got rolled into OS X.  The employee is still writing OS software for Apple.

I was recently complaining to an Apple employee about all the incompatibilities between different versions of Pages.  He assured me there were no problems. Yet I told him we live with problems almost on a daily basis because so much of our work over the years is in Pages 09 and there are always litle problems if we open the sixty page documents in newer versions.  He said that Apple certainly did not expect enterprise employees to move to Pages but it was fine for small businesses.  As someone in a small business, I might question that assessment.

Unfortunately the problem is not really Pages.  It is Apple's attitude that it is okay to release a product that is not backwards compatible and then not even work at fixing it.  If iPhoto can die for a "better" product, what changes might Apple spring on the enterprise just because it is going to make something better for Apple.

I am not holding up Microsoft as the perfect enterprise company, but the kind of we-are-going-to-fix-it attitude that took VISTA and made it into Windows 7 helps enterprise customers stay the course.

It is entirely possible that Apple's DNA has completely changed and this enterprise push will be the charm, but pardon me if I remain a skeptic for a couple of years.

For more on the world of Apple enterprise sales, check out my book, The Pomme Company.  Of course this is not my first post on Apple and the enterprise.  Feel free to visit, Once more into the trenches on Apple and the Enterprise or Lingering regrets from Apple days.  I also stumbled across this post, Why the Apple-IBM tie-up is doomed to fail, and how it could succeed, by Jean-Louis Gassée.

As with most things Apple, time will tell better than any of us making guesses, but at least I have history on my side. That is my take on Apple and the enterprise from our spot which is almost as far as way from Cupertino as one  can get and still be in the United States.  

Our November Transformation at the coast is a much better prospect than hopping on an airplane and heading to one of the Apple Sales Conferences that are happening this time of year.

However, I will look forward to hearing how this new enterprise push is positioned internally.  It should be entertaining.

 

Reading the Apple Tea Leaves

I certainly do not claim to be an expert on today's Apple.  However, I have lots of history with the company and I have written the only book which describes what it was like to work at Apple in sales. 

With that background I can look into the Cupertino tea cup and swirl the tea leaves as well as anyone.

Recent numbers on CNNMoney based on Gartner and IDC suggest that Apple might have had a period of "negative growth" in Mac sales during the critical back to school season.  Both Mark Rogowsky, a contributor at Forbes, and John Gruber of Daring Fireball have recently chimed in with perspectives on Apple.

Others have chosen to spin this drop in sales as dramatic.  I doubt Apple is any danger.  They could keep Tim Cook in sushi almost indefinitely with their offshore billions.

The one take away that I have from Gruber's article is that today people who have the money are willing to pay for Macs.

The Mac today has roughly 10 percent of the PC market, but it’s not just any randomly distributed 10 percent of the market. Quite the opposite — Apple’s 10 percent of the market is entirely comprised of the high end of the market. Mac users are discriminating, willing to pay more for a product they deem superior.

I am not sure many price conscious buyers like me would be surprised that Mac buyers seem to have more money.

Long ago I hinted that Macs would have a hard time getting above 10 percent of the market, and price was a limiting factor then.  I think things are perhaps even more challenging today. 

My experience which is perhaps different than yours is that Macs have not delivered the value that I want in a computing platform. My computing closet still contains a very expensive 26" i5 iMac that died well before it was two years old.  Hopefully it will be this year's holiday project for my son and I to install a new SSD in it.

The only Mac in our household today is a new Mac Mini that had some challenges early in 2013. Our last Apple laptop purchase was a 2006 MacBook which was a faithful friend for years.

With Apple's continued focus on thin and light, I have not seen the type of changes that once defined Apple's computer products and kept users on their seats and might have brought me back to its laptop platform.  My Windows 8 laptop has a touch screen and it is almost a year old. Apple still does not have touch screens in their laptops and you cannot get an Apple laptop with a SD card reader for under $1,000.

Rogowsky's article, In A Declining PC Market, Opportunities For An Indifferent Apple is out of left field and must have been suggested by an old Apple enterprise sales person because he seems to think the real opportunity is for Apple to go after the enterprise market.

"What it hasn’t done so far is seized on the weaknesses of HP, Dell and others, though, to build a world-class corporate sales organization to push its tablets and PCs aggressively into thousands of organizations worldwide."

As much as I have a problem with Gruber's "discriminating" buyer argument, I came close to choking upon reading the suggestion that Apple build "a world class sales organization."

Actually I think Apple had close to a world class sales organization in the early nineties.  It was perhaps one of the things that kept Apple in business long enough for Steve to rescue the company from itself.

Certainly Steve did not love the sales organization and that is one of things that the field sales force clearly understood.  Apple's sales leaders after Steve came back were undistinguished and often off base unless you somehow believe that going after the enterprise with iMac based kiosks was a good idea.

As for thoughts that should temper any suggestions that Apple go after the world's corporations with an enterprise sales force, this post, Lingering Regrets From Days At Apple, that I wrote seven years ago is still pertinent.

Apple will never be a successful enterprise sales company, it is not in the company's genes.The company had plenty of opportunities that Microsoft threw in their laps but they punted on them all. 

Certainly after Apple's last flirtation with the enterprise which included the Xserve, I would think most large customers would have a hard time seriously considering Apple on the desktop.

If I were an enterprise CIO who had tried Xserves only to see Apple abandon them, I might be worried that Apple would completely give up desktops and laptops for iPhones, iPads, and iPods.  The CIO of the federal government was worried about that when I took Avie Tevanian in to meet her back in 2004.

The only real opportunity for Apple in the enterprise is to keep doing what they are doing and penetrate the enterprise with iPads and iPhones which users will demand be supported.

More important in reading Apple's tea leaves than either Gruber's or Rogowsky's article is the hint that the back to school season was not good for Apple.  I do not have any inside verification that back to school was not great for Apple.  However, it would not surprise me.

Higher education has been a strategic but sometimes under appreciated market for Apple since I joined the company in 1984.  One of the things that higher education has always done for Apple is put a device in the hands of the one person most likely to understand leading edge technology in a family, the college student.  College students often go home and sell their families on Apple technology.  When they graduate from college, they take their Apple devices to work and lobby for corporate support for Apple.  It was a well appreciated sales cycle at Apple during my time as a higher education manager.  Apple lost a lot of its higher education focus when it rolled the higher education division in with the K-12 folks back in the nineties.

The only time in my memory that we had a bad back to school at Apple during my career there was during Gil Amelio's brief tenure as Apple CEO.  He decided that Apple was giving higher education students too good a deal on computers so he raised prices for students.  Higher education sales tanked.

Now Apple's prices have not gone up, but their laptop prices have not gone down either.  As I suggested in the article that I wrote over four years ago, all you have to do is walk the aisles of either a Best Buy or Staples to get a feeling for just how far PC laptop prices have gone down.

In spite of what Apple folks think, there are some very nice PC laptops out there.  I use a first generation Lenovo Yoga which cost me under $1,000. It is my second Lenovo laptop and will not be my last.  When I decide to pass this one on to someone else in the family, I will be buying the next generation Yoga.  My Yoga has been one of the finest laptops that I have ever used.

Beyond the product, I also happen to like the philosophy of Lenovo.  Back in January I wrote an article for RWW, Apple and Lenovo: The Tale of Two Companies.  I had this to say.

Apple has come to believe it cannot make anything worthy of the Apple brand at a low price point. Lenovo believes it can deliver quality and still serve customers looking for a good deal.

If they are both right, that's a big win for Lenovo.

If you look at the CNNMoney charts, Lenovo has grown the most of any vendor.  While one quarter is too early to make much more than an educated guess, it is possible that the Apple price differential on laptops has finally gotten too much for even college bound parents to bear. Tuition keeps going up and family incomes have not gone up.

We are in a tough economy and the reality is that Apple is a luxury brand.  There is protection in being a luxury brand as Gruber hints, but there are limits to your growth if some of your strategic customers have decided your products are too expensive.

Perhaps Apple's actual numbers will spin all of this a little differently.  Certainly there is no cause for doom and gloom in the Apple world.  After all, someday they might actually ship that new Mac Pro that they announced in June and of course we are due for an iPad refresh.  Let me guess, they will be thinner and lighter but will still be lots more expensive than a Nexus or Kindle.  Did I tell you I suspected the "new" iPhone might sport some color?

That is it from the Southern Outer Banks where we might get summer in October but the hope of actually seeing a Mac in one of our electronics stores is as elusive as ever.  I will just keep living my dream to ease the pain.

Update- Mark Rogowsky posted some interesting charts on Apple after my article was published yesterday.

Just to make my point on price, I checked the flyer in the Sunday newspaper and compared the computer prices I found to Apple Store prices.  You can argue all you want about Windows 8 and it certainly is not perfect,  but it is very usable and in fact I use Windows 8 every day along with Mac OS X Mt. Lion and Xubuntu Linux.

As of October 13, 2013, the least expensive Apple laptop with an I7 processor is $1499.  The MacBook does have a slot loading optical drive, a thunderbolt port, and Firewire 800 port, but I live quite well without any of those on my current laptop.

Best Buy's Sunday, October 13, 2013, flyer lists a Lenovo laptop with an I7 processor, a 15" touch screen which is bigger than the 13" MacBook Pro for $829.99.  The hard drive is smaller on the Lenovo but the bigger screen would make that a wash for me. As someone told me when I bought my MacMini, you can find USB optical drives for under $70 if you really need one.

I have used a lot of Mac laptops and I judge the quality to be similar to Lenovo.  You can make your own judgment, but as of October 13, 2013, you pay a 81% premium for buying a MacBook over a Lenovo. Unless you put a lot of value on Thunderbolt, aluminum, and Firewire 800 as opposed to USB 3.0, I think the Lenovo is a better buy especially for college students.

Laptops are almost a necessity for college students and those of us who travel for work.  The word that comes to mind for someone willing to pay 81% more for a product that will likely need to be updated in three or four years no matter which one you buy certainly is not "discriminating."

 

 

Winfidels and Apple's punt on the enterprise

First off I just had to use the word, Winfidels, after I came across it in a post today by David Heath. It is such a perfect description for some Windows users whom I have met.

 I enjoyed his post, Ten Reasons why Linux is really a Religion.  I cannot figure out why we did not come up with Winfidels when my team was selling to the the US government.  It might not have made the job any easier, but it would have made for some fun after a tough sales call.

Apple has been called a cult or a religion, but Apple has actually morphed into a very slick high end consumer brand.  My guess is the only thing that can stop Apple, short of Steve leaving, is Apple somehow losing its cool factor.  Going after the enterprise might do that.

At this point I think keeping Apple's coolness is far more important than notebooks milled out of solid aluminum. Even notebooks milled out of solid aluminum might be more of a cool factor than something which actually advances computing.  We will figure that out eventually.

My real topic today has to do with what I read in the post, Letting Apple into the enterprise isn’t easy.

More specifically, I saw this quote by Anthony DeCanti, vice president for technology at Werner Enterprises.

“Two years ago, I would have been fired up and telling you this thing has wheels,” he says. “But I really feel like Apple has taken its eye off the ball for acceptance into the enterprise and put its efforts into the iPhone. From a shareholder’s perspective, maybe that’s a great idea, but from an enterprise standpoint, I really feel let down.”

The quote caught me a little by surprise.  While I never expected Apple to make a large push into the enterprise, I fully expected that their current efforts would remain at least as significant as they were when I left in 2004.

I had heard recently that Apple's enterprise vice president had departed, but I figured that might even eventually be positive.

So I decided to ask around to find out the state of Apple's enterprise organization.  What I wanted to know was whether or not Steve had said something positive to employees about going after the enterprise. We all know nothing remarkable happens at Apple without Steve's interest and support.

As far as I can tell, that has not happened.  The enterprise organization is being changed to fall under John Brandon. The three enterprise guys whom I believe are running the show under Brandon, I will call Curly, Moe, and Larry.  I know two of the three well, and the third one replaced me when I left Apple.

What this indicates to me is that enterprise is still a stealth organization at Apple.  While Curly, Moe, and Larry might be perfectly acceptable enterprise sales people, neither they nor John Brandon are part of the boys' club inner circle at Apple.  No piece of Apple can go very far without an inner circle representative.  It is just not going to happen.

Robert Crinely in his recent post, Why iPod chief Tony Fadell is really leaving, is not far off the mark in describing the way that Apple works.

Jobs can have only so many direct reports. Steve Jobs believes the key to his success is in finding, hiring, retaining, then firing the best talent in the world. He would maintain in the very moment he’s firing Fadell that Tony is better at his job than anyone else on Earth. Yet still Fadell must go and that’s because – ego issues aside – Jobs had to make room in his inner circle for Papermaster.

It might be a chicken and egg question. There may be no enterprise supporters in Steve's inner circle because Steve and the current inner circle have no great love for the enterprise.  Or it may be just the right person has not come along with the ability to champion the enterprise and survive in the inner circle.  That is hard to tell.

Apple measures its business units based on the resources committed to them and the profits they return.  There is no more expensive resource in the computer business than a direct field-based corporate sales person and the support team around them.  You cannot sell to the enterprise without these people.

High level direct sales people who can convince an enterprise to use more than just token Macs are very good sales people and not cheap though much of Apple's sales force is so addicted to the product that they work for much less than they are worth.

So if you are running a company like Apple where you can choose to put resources towards consumer products which almost sell themselves or spend lots of money fighting an entrenched enemy with foot soldiers, what would you do?

At this point in Apple's history, I would keep a token enterprise effort going and mine as much business as possible just like Apple is doing.  As much fun as it would be to defeat the Winfidels, it might just make sense to let them keep having fun with the choice between Vista and XP.

Being successful in the enterprise is an uphill battle for Apple and Macintosh users already in the enterprise.  I am continually reminded of that.  Just the other day, our real estate organization decided we now need user codes for our expensive color copier which was made by Konica/Minolta more than a few years ago.  My Macs had been printing to it without any problem.  Now I am out of luck because their driver does not support user codes in Leopard.

Being the only Mac person in a company with several dozen computers means that the problem is mine.  Fortunately I have a slow but efficient color HP Laserjet in my office.  I will use it for my Mac printing needs.  Anything I need printed in volume, I will convert to a PDF or some other format that works on my Vista laptop which of course has support for the printer codes.

While I personally think Apple could be a great enterprise solution, I am no longer sure it makes business sense for Apple.  Both Tim Cook and Fred Anderson were once enterprise advocates within Apple.  Fred is gone, and Tim is probably too busy or too smart to push the enterprise effort at Apple beyond where it is.

The intellectual battle of convincing CIOs to try Apple products was one the great fun things that I have done in my life.  The arguments for Apple products are still strong, but I can understand Apple not putting more wood behind the ball.

For my earlier thoughts on Apple and the enterprise, check out this post, Lingering regrets from Apple days or read my book, The Pomme Company.

I will retreat to my state of contentment here on North Carolina's coast. That feeling of contentment is one of the reasons that I love living here.

Once more into the trenches on Apple and the Enterprise

First off this is not about whether Apple should or should not embrace the enterprise.  I have given up on that argument.  I think the evidence is pretty clear that they have not, but I would rather not get into that.

John Martellaro, who was a member of Apple's federal team when I was director of federal sales for Apple, wrote a very interesting piece, Apple's Success in the Enterprise Won't be Due to Apple.

John talks about how Apple champions within the enterprise can properly get Apple accepted in the enterprise.

He has some very good points.  Based on my over twenty years of selling Apple products to large companies and the government I can say that many times the Apple sales force has had the rug pulled out from under them by over enthusiastic Mac users who have alienated their own IT management.

However, I have to disagree with John on at least one point.  Fortunately we know each well enough to disagree and debate the point.

John says the following.

The failure to fully penetrate the enterprise was presented as a deficiency of Apple's.

I am going to tell you that the problem is not with Apple, but rather it is a cultural problem that needs to be solved by the Apple community and Apple enthusiasts in the work force.

I have to say John is half right, because I have seen no new evidence of Apple wanting to do business with the enterprise unless perhaps keeping the same form factors for years is a secret way of getting into the enterprise.

I just do not think Apple can be a successful enterprise company unless that idea is embraced at the highest levels of Apple which would be Steve.  In the end large enterprise commitments are based on relationships built between high level executives. 

You cannot make any lasting commitment from Apple to another large company without Steve blessing it.

Apple has very few companies where they have built that kind of relationship. That is one reason Apple is not in the enterprise.

Selling to the enterprise in spite of what it might seem like from a distance is very resource intensive.

It is also a long term effort.  Just because they buy lots of systems on one purchase order does not mean the decision is taken without a lot of work from both Apple sales people and the new generation of Mac people that John mentions.  On that point John and I agree.

Apple is a very resource constrained company for many reasons.  One being that is the way that Steve likes it.  Another is that Apple commits resources to revenue it can measure.  Since Apple sells to the enterprise through their Stores, resellers, special online stores, and direct sales people, it is nearly impossible for Apple to tell what they are selling to the enterprise.

I have helped build the spreadsheets, and I know how hard it is to determine what an enterprise entity does in business with Apple.

A good chunk of the time spent by Apple enterprise people is either documenting what they have sold or forecasting what they might sell.

However, I do know that it is far less business than Apple does selling their iPods.  The iPod business has few strings attached.

I also know that the number of enterprise sales people at Apple is so small that it would shock most people.

Enterprise sales people are a lot more expensive than people who work in Apple stores so justifying additional enterprise headcount is very hard.

Certainly Steve has made it abundantly clear that he does not like selling to CIOs.  Anyone who has been around Apple will confirm that.

Having said all that, I will agree that it does not matter.  I do not think Apple needs a push in the enterprise these days.  They are doing fine without it.

Apple will make limited gains in the enterprise if folks take John's advice.  I just do not see large gains in enterprise based on Apple current direction.

I would also be a little worried about selling my company on the wisdom of betting their enterprise on Apple.

Apple is going to do what is best for Apple.  They don't convene customers and ask them what they think.

Apple produces products and people vote with their wallets.  That is the only way Apple hears your opinion.

I think it will take new leadership inside and outside of Apple before we ever see Apple a major player in the enterprise again. 

The Vista fiasco would have been a perfect time to make a push, but I believe getting into the enterprise takes more than a great operating system, cool looking products, and even enterprise customers who love the products.

My guess is that most of it is going to be on the web where what hardware you use or what operating system is under the hood isn't nearly as important.

I just have to look at what I am seeing at Box.net, Squidoo, and Google to convince me that the future is going to be highly influenced by the web, and I am not sure Apple has wired itself into the larger web as well as it could.

On other notes, the cold weather that hit part of the country grazed us a little down here on the Carolina coast, but cold clear weather does make for some great photos even if they bring a little controversy.