Macworld: Apple tries to blend corporate desires with consumer flashiness

While Apple courted enterprise customers at its Macworld Conference & Expo this week, it’s clear that going forward the focus for the company is going to be on its consumer electronics, a division that has significantly buoyed the computer maker’s fortunes since it introduced the iPod in 2001 and now the iPhone.

In fact, in his keynote unveiling the long-awaited iPhone in San Francisco on Tuesday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs also announced that the company would now be known simply as Apple, rather than Apple Computer, illustrating the move beyond its computing hardware. What Jobs didn’t mention, though, was any enterprise computing hardware updates or the upcoming Leopard release of the Mac OS X operating system.

“Macworld was really a coming out party for Apple becoming a consumer electronics company,” says Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT Research. “It makes good business sense at one level, but at another level I think it would have behooved Jobs to have spent some time talking about Mac hardware, as well as the next generation of the Mac OS X operating system.”

Indeed, prior to the show, corporate attendees said they were hoping to hear about new Mac hardware, as well as to get a more definitive shipping date for Leopard, which Jobs has said would be available in the spring.

But for the estimated 45,000 people who attended -- a 28% jump from 2006, according to show organizer IDG World Expo, a sister company of Network World -- the talk was mostly consumer-oriented. In addition to the iPhone, Jobs introduced Apple TV, a device that lets you play iTunes content on your television; and AirPort Extreme, a wireless access-point base station. 

Schoun Regan, who owns Mac training firm ITInstruction.com in Lexington, Ky., and is this year’s chair of Macworld’s enterprise-focused MacIT Conference, which was expected to draw about 750 IT professionals, seemed unfazed by the lack of enterprise-related news.

“Macworld is a consumer show and the MacIT [sessions] during Macworld are designed to educate enterprise IT managers and engineers,” he says.

Apple uses its World Wide Developer Conference as a venue to focus on enterprise-level products, he says, adding that the iPhone shouldn’t be viewed as strictly a consumer offering.

“The functionality of [iPhone] is defined by the software that can be added, removed or updated, making this an excellent competitor to other devices that currently have a foothold in the enterprise market,’ he says.

Still, there is no denying that this year’s Macworld stood in stark contrast to last year’s, when the big announcement centered on Apple’s support of Intel processors. During last year’s Macworld keynote, Jobs unveiled an Intel-based notebook computer and iMac and said that all of Apple’s systems would run on Intel processors by year-end.

The shift opened the door to more powerful computing and support for a wider range of corporate applications, analysts said. VMware, for example, which hasn’t had an offering for Macs because they ran on PowerPC processors, showed its x86-based virtualization software for Mac systems, code-named Fusion at Macworld. The software is expected to be generally available this summer.