Applepeels

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.

 

Hard to put a rosy shine on the Apple

I am sure there are diehard Apple fans who believe nothing is wrong at Apple and the company is hitting on all cyclinders.  I doubt that is the case.  Unfortunately like all large companies in a very competitive global market, Apple is finding the road to continuing success a road with some twists and turns.

In spite of the challenges, I am not going to join with Doug Ehrman, a contributor to Motley Fool, and suggest that Apple would be better off by getting rid of Tim Cook.  I actually thought Ehrman's arguments were particularly weak. The idea that consumers will give Apple a break if they are searching for a new CEO is a fantasy.

One of the biggest challenges for Apple in the nearly twenty years that I was there was the revolving door management.  The reality is that you will never replace Steve Jobs.  Tim Cook plus almost anyone is still no Steve Jobs, but I firmly believe that Tim needs to find some new leaders with a passion for technology.  He needs to stop listening to whomever is whispering in his ear currently and find some folks who can bring some excitement back to the company.  There has to be more to innovation than thin, light, high resolution screens, and prices that are higher than anyone else in the industry.

There are some serious problems with Apple.

1. Obviously Apple has not been nimble enough to respond to the Android challenge in tablets and smart phones.  Going to court also has not worked.
2. Apple's strategy of taking industry standard parts and demanding unbelievable margins in computers to add to their cash horde is unsustainable in the long run.
3. If Apple is going to be a premium product, it needs service where there are no hiccups like my iLemon. Even Tim Cook's Executive Relations team which had initially promised to solve all my iMas's problems gave up on it and gave me the remarkably sage diagnosis that it was broken.  Guess what? Computers that cost $1,900 and are less than two years old should not break.  I had five other people all with similar iMac problems contact me.  That included one Apple employee who was afraid to push the issue.
4. Apple needs a culture change.  If you can find someone who worked at Apple and is willing to talk, you will find that Steve Jobs created a company culture where risk taking was discouraged.  You will also find that aside from developers, Apple has isolated itself from customers who might at least provide some serious feedback which is not tainted by the famed reality distortion zone.  I am not talking about people talking to their local genius bar.
5. Apple still does not understand the cloud and their new beta of cloud based software is almost embarrassing.  iWork beta in the cloud cannot import RTF files. (note hyper links are now working)
6. Pre-announcing a new product like the new Mac Pro and not shipping it is even worse than the fiasco that Steve Jobs created in 2003 when he preannounced the G5s in June and was unable to ship any until the end of July.
7. I use both Windows 8 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion.  I find Windows 8 more stable and more usable. I cannot stand the dumbing down of OS X and apps like iPhoto which I have stopped using.
8. If you are going to have the best products, quit doing stupid things like putting the SD slot on the back of a huge iMac screen.  Make sure your products are also the best to service.  Having to pull the huge LCD panel to get to a hard drive should not be the first choice.
9. There are companies like Lenovo who believe they can deliver high quality and reasonable prices. If Apple is going to be the Lexus of the computer world, they need to fix problems when they find them instead of creating angry customers.  Otherwise consumers will figure it out.
10. Apple has always been proud that they ignore the competition and make their own way. That may no longer be possible.  They need people who can figure out what the competition is doing right and help Apple get ahead of the curve.  I see no evidence that Apple has people like that currently.

What's is still right with Apple

1. They have some very passionate customers, but even there their patience is limited.  We had an Apple user visiting with us recenlty  He was very ticked off that his photos which should have been in the iCloud and on his iPad were missing in action.  His comment to me was that it was becoming too complex to be an Apple customer. I promise that I did not coach him.  As far as I could tell he had everything set correctly and the photos were just not there.
2. Apple has a core of great products.  They need to get better not just thinner, lighter or weirder.
3. They have a strong developer community.
4. There are some very hard working and bright Apple employees.

What does Tim Cook need to do?

1. He has to decide what the new Apple is going to be. It will not be Steve Jobs' Apple.
2. Innovation has to once again become a core value at Apple.
3. Apple can no longer afford to screw up the cloud.  Go buy Dropbox or someone else who has a good cross-platform cloud model and then add some Apple value to it.
4. Get OS X back to being the best OS out there.  That I prefer Windows 8 and Xubuntu Linux to Mac OS X Mountain Lion should be an embarrassment to Apple.
5. People still use devices for the software.  If you cannot figure out how to create great software, you better start throwing some more support towards open source.  While Picasa might not be as pretty as iPhoto, try editing a few dozen photos with each and tell me which one does it easier and better.  I already know the answer.

Why am I still rooting for Apple.

1. I love nicely designed hardware and I still think Apple can be the best source of this.
2. I want competition. It is the way we get better products.
3. Twenty years at a company even if the last two were the pits still makes you root for them a little.

For those who have just found my Applepeels blog, it, like me, has been around for a long time. There is more about me at this link or it you want to explore my non-Apple writing a little more try this link but it comes with some upfront apologies if my page does not resize properly in your browser. 

At one time I had over a thousand pages of posts on Applepeels. Apple never challenged the accuracy of a single one of my posts.  However,  much of the older Applepeels content is now found in our book, The Pomme Company.

And for those who might care, the book is now available in paperback. It is expensive because of the large number of color pictures, but on the other hand, the Kindle version is very inexpensive.  Print production costs are what they are.

Just to be clear so potential readers understand the book's content, there are no Apple secrets in the book.  It is about working at Apple.   However, no other person that I am aware of who was at Apple for nearly twenty years has written an unchallenged book.  Every Apple employee who was part of the history and who has read the book and communicated back to me has commented that if anything I was too kind to Apple.

Little of what I saw has changed according to reports from people still at Apple. I did work with Tim Cook so my comments are not idle speculation.   If you want to see what it is like to be in Apple sales, the book will meet your needs. The book will most definitely show you a side of Apple that few people aside from Apple employees have ever seen.

 

A Sign That Apple Cares About The Desktop?

We all have different expectations from the companies that have helped define our lives.  My hopes for Apple revolve around the tools that the company created or helped popularize over the years. Many of those innovations let me do things that I could hardly imagine.

With me it started with an Apple II+, AppleWriter II, and an Epson MX-80 dot matrix printer.  Then there was the Mac, Pagemaker, and Illutrator, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. While not all of these came from Apple, their initial releases were tied closely to the Macintosh.  Since the announcement of the Mac, the Mac desktop has been an important part of my life. Today I still use the Mac, just not as much. Linux has won a significant piece of my desktop.

Even when I gave my desktop over completely to Apple, it was not always been a smooth ride. Products like Claris Emailer and iDVD were dropped.  Some things like iPhoto's integration with the Cloud and web pages have changed for the worse.  Perhaps iWeb was the best indication that Apple never could quite understand that to be successful on the web you need to divorce the device from the data. Google certainly understands that.  I would even argue that Microsoft is better at it than Apple. Then there is an application like Pages which took me a long time to embrace for a few things only to watch Apple decide to ignore it.  I might not agree with Microsoft's direction on Excel, but I doubt they will ever ignore it.

Apple's misunderstanding of the cloud imight someday be looked upon as a major mistake. Still there is no question that Apple remains a money machine.  What I am wondering is can Apple still innovate in a way that really matters.  It is not a new question.  I found this August 18, 2011 article by Brandt Dainow, Why the iAd was a failure, an interesting read.  I especially like this quotation which refers to an earlier article of his.

The thrust of my criticism was that if Apple creates aspirational and innovative new products, but then restricts access to them, it forces others to create competing systems. By refusing hardware manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia access to the iOS system, Apple forced them into the arms of Google and Microsoft. I argued that, just as the Mac had gone from 30 percent market share at its peak to less than 3 percent today, so would the iPhone go in the mobile market.

While the Mac has gotten up to 10% or so of market share, there are those who are now arguing that it has peaked. 

It turns out that a lot of what Apple has done throughout its history is to create innovations and then to try to wall them off.  There was a time before Windows 7 when many computer users would have loved to have the more secure and capable OS X running on their Dell or HP.  Apple was sure that letting OS X into the wild would destroy the company.  It turned out that Apple's success was not destined to come from OS X anyway.  It was going to come from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad and related services which now make up close to 86% of Apple's revenue.  I always thought that it was funny that I had to buy a third-party add-on for iPhoto just to do something as simple as put my photos in Google's Picasa web albums without resorting to a browser.

In a sense Apple is now trying to use OS X to drag along those of us still creating content with Macs.  It likely will not work.  The web is changing everything and Apple's walled worlds are showing some huge cracks.  Android may be as unstoppable in the mobile market as Windows was in the desktop market.

Android runs on a lot of hardware from different companies.  I like to compare the sharing options that I get when viewing an image on the Mac with what I get when viewing an image in the gallery on my Android phone.  There are twenty choices on my LG Spectrum phone instead of the seven choices in Apple's Preview.  Of course Apple is not the only guilty party in limiting our choices.  When I want to share a photo from my Amazon Cloud Drive using my Kindle Fire, I only get four choices.  That lack of choice has a lot to do with my decision to make a Nexus 7 my main tablet.  I get more choice on a lot of things.

By trying to control everything, Apple limits our choice and opens the door to innovation from others. But if the limitations that Apple forces on us are severe enough, then the market is guaranteed to respond with other choices.  Some of the choices might not be goods ones, but then again some of those choices might be really good ones like the Nexus 7 that I'm using.

While some argue that the only way for a good user experience is to let Apple control everything, my experience has shown that Apple cares little about the user experience except to want to use it to prod me towards their vision of a pure world with only Apple products and services.

It will be interesting to see how well Microsoft's experiment in using their operating system to prod us toward tablets and the Surface Pro will work.  Actually the operating systems of both Microsoft and Apple are not very high on my list these days.  I am moving towards a roll your environment using virtualization. Look for my upcoming article on it at readwrite.

For now I would like just one sign that Apple cares about my user experience.  I will nominate bringing back the "Escape" key in iPhoto as a way to return to the library instead of clicking on the annoying "Photos" button.  I doubt we will see that since the march of Mac OS X towards iOS likely will accelerate instead of slow down. 

In truth, it does not matter.  I have found a new solution, Adobe's Lightroom.  Guess what?  The "Escape key" works like it should there.  A better sign for me to pay attention to is Frank, our great egret from Canada.

A Mac user's conclusion that Vista is a quagmire

I am six months into my Vista experience.  Today I reached the tipping point.  While I have to continue using it, I am going to say flat out that Vista is not worth the effort.

My efforts at liking Vista go far beyond what I would normally do for any piece of software.  I have used Vista ever day for over the last six months.   I have let Microsoft do whatever it wanted to do to my system through automatic updates.

I have intervened once and that was only when the wireless networking on the my Vista HP laptop was so bad that I was ready to throw it into the water behind the house.  I searched out some new drivers for my wireless card.  That improved wireless performance to the point where the system became usable.

Still I struggled through the stupid situation where every time I put the system to sleep I had to deal with a distorted screen once the system wakes from sleep.  The only solution seemed to be rebooting the laptop. Any Vista user can tell you that takes far more time than any computer in recent memory.

My guess and the guess of others is that I have graphics driver issue.  So I went to the nVidia website.  After I finally got it to figure out what system I was using, I was told that I could only get driver updates from HP.com.

When I got to HP.com, I found that there were over 40 systems with the name of HP Pavilion dv6000.  So I looked on the back and found another model number HP dv6451.us.   I made a mistake typing and put "Pavillion dv6451" instead of Pavilion dv6451.  At that point I was told that over 400 products claimed the name.  I finally got the name right only to find out that HP has no recommended driver update.

While I was on HP's site, I decided to see why my system has not been updated to Vista Service Pack 1.  First I found HP Notebook PCs  - Update to Vista SP1 Frequently Asked Questions and then the even more scary HP Notebook PCs  - Precautions to Take Before Updating to Vista Service Pack 1.  After reading that I decided that I did not even want Vista Service Pack 1, but I still wanted to fix my problems with the video.

I have been a little suspicious of HP Update program anyway since it has failed to install updates recently so when I saw this paragraph I decided to roll the dice and see if I could shake things up on my system.

The HP Update utility will check for updated drivers and software, however the older versions of HP Update (v4.000.005.007 or earlier) will not work properly after upgrading to Vista SP1. To install the latest version of HP Update, open the Control Panel and uninstall the older version of HP Update. Then go to the hp.com web site and search for the softpaq SP38202 HP Update and HP Software Update - Critical Security Update (English only).

I uninstalled my HP Update software and managed to get the new version working after a number of tries. When I finally ran the new HP Update, I got a message that no updates were available for my system.

So at this point I was beginning to think there was no hope for the driver update that nVidia hinted that HP might have available for me.

I decided to run Windows Update just for the heck of it.  Windows told me that there were no critical updates available for my system.  However, when I looked in optional updates there was a new graphics driver update for my system.  I installed it, and just gave my system the sleep-wake from sleep test.  Much to my amazement, I no longer have a distorted screen on waking from sleep.  Tomorrow we will see if that was chance or it is really fixed.

One would think that I might be making some type of convoluted progress, but it was just the appearance of progress.  If you have perhaps read my On the eve of Apple's Leopard, I buy a Windows Vista Laptop post, you might remember that the overriding reason for me, a user of Apple products for 26 years, to buy a Vista system was so that I could do real estate forms.

This afternoon I once again needed to send a PDF form to a remote customer so they could renew their listing with me.  Last week I had a problem doing PDFs with the forms package that I had installed to get around the one which had become very flaky on Vista.  An older program seemed to work once I retyped the client's information.  When I tried to do that tonight, I got an error and could not create a PDF. I tried the first program, and it wouldn't work either.

I resorted to the help menu only to get this message. It is amazing to me that Microsoft would not build some sort of mechanism to read old help files.  After all Apple figured out how to run non native software on Intel processors.  I decided that it was time to punt on the two forms packages on my Vista machine.

This was a two page document so I decide to save the file to my Sony USB thumb drive which I have never used in my Windows Vista machine.  I inserted the thumb drive and Vista started searching for a driver.  It actually hung the machine, and I had to reboot.  At that point I decided to print the document to my upstairs office where my old XP machine is.  I did that successfully and entered the information on the real estate forms package on the XP machine.  The PDF file was created successfully, and I emailed it to the client.

I had carried my USB thumb drive up to perform a test.  I stuck it into my Zonbu Linux computer.  I was not surprised when it automatically was able to use the USB drive.  I took this screen snapshot and actually sent it to my Windows Vista box.  First it went as a PNG file.  I tried to upload the image to Typepad.  Typepad didn't recognize it.  So after checking to make sure it had an extension, I went to my Mac and imported it to iPhoto and emailed it again as a JPG file to the Windows Vista machine.  Once again I tried uploading from the Vista machine and Typepad refused to recognize it.

At that point I saved my post as a draft, turned around, and climbed on the stool by my Mac.  I took the same file that had been sent by the Linux box and uploaded it to Typepad without any problems.

While all this might seem like enough to chuck the Windows Vista box, it really isn't the straw that broke the camel's back.  That actually came earlier in the day.

I have multiple email accounts from a variety of providers since I live by email.

This morning I noticed that two of my email accounts were unresponsive.  Since I used to work for the company hosting those accounts, I chatted with their Director of Infrastructure using my Adium instant messenger client.  He admitted they were having "bandwidth" problems.  I did not think much of it as my Mail app on OSX just put those two accounts offline.

Unfortunately I had something to do on my Vista laptop and happened to click my Outlook email client which was running and trying to download messages. Those two unresponsive IMAP accounts hung Outlook completely.

All of this taken together shows me that Microsoft has done a terrible job with Vista.  The Linux from Zonbu works better.  The forms packages that I bought the Vista system to use barely work and certainly do not have the promised functionality. And if two unresponsive email accounts are going to lock up my email package, I need another email package.

The amount of lost productivity due to Vista is amazing.  Now there are likely people out there whose Vista systems work perfectly for them.  Mine doesn't.  It was a brand new machine, and is only six months old.  While I am getting a few problems fixed, worse ones are cropping up.  The machine is scanned regularly, and the worst thing that has ever shown up is one tracking cookie.

It all boils down to this. Windows is a time sink. This morning we were having a debriefing on a promotion that our company recently did.  Someone happened to mention that it would have been a better promotion if he had been able to get to his files off his crashed Windows machine.  Apparently our support person has been trying to recover them for a couple of weeks.

I just smiled to myself since the head of our company had told me that the flyer I produced recently was one of the best he had seen.  It had taken less than an hour on Pages.

It is clear to me that if you are an independent contractor like I am, you might have to use Windows for some Windows specific things, but if you are trying to produce high quality work with a minimum effort,  a Mac is the only way to go.

Otherwise consider yourself in the never ending quagmire of Vista.

It might be easy to say that the problems with Vista are to be expected since the OS comes from one company and the hardware is thrown together from a variety of companies who have lived in a world where no one has taken responsibility for the user's problems for years.

However, it is not easy to be that Vista user in an environment where you have to support yourself.

It is much easier being a Mac user.  Apple certainly isn't perfect, but using OS X is an order of magnitude better than fighting with Vista.

There lots of things to do here on the Carolina coast that are more fun than trying to use a Vista computer.  Tomorrow, I plan to not torture myself with Vista.  I might even go fishing again.