Apple simply refuses enterprise-class support for Macs, iPhones
Infoworld’s Galen Gruman has a good story about Apple’s continuing and complete lack of interest in allowing medium-to-large businesses to deploy Macs and iPhones.
The head line is a tad misleading: “Why Apple won’t let the Mac and iPhone succeed in business.” Because he doesn’t actually explain why, but in the rest of the article he does a very good job of showing how total is Apple’s non-commitment to the enterprise markets.
The basic conclusion: it’s just not worth it to Apple to waste time and money on an insignificant market compared to consumers.
A year ago, NW reporter Jon Brodkin found no discernable Apple enterprise strategy, yet some gains in Mac usage despite that. [See: “Apple lacks broad corporate strategy but still sees gains”]
“One factor working against Apple’s prospects in business environments is that fact that businesses that have gone all-Mac have had to figure out themselves how to make it work. For smaller businesses, that’s not so hard to do,” Gruman writes. “
But the more controlling and/or farflung an organization is, the harder it is to support Macs. Standard asset management tools don’t have good Mac clients, for example.” Good Mac clients are lacking for key enterprise management suites like HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli and others, for example.
“The departmental focus of Mac OS X Server also doesn’t lend itself to central management across multiple office locations, and the need to bring in a Mac to an Apple Store or authorized repair shop also becomes problematic outside of major cities or when there is no local IT staff.”
Similar lacks and limitations afflict large-scale, secure, managed deployments of iPhones. Depending on the specific enterprise requirements, and the number of iPhones, the basic security and improved management features from Apple provide the bare minimum needed in some cases. [See:“iPhone winning over some corporate security skeptics”]
To me, the perfect example of Apple’s approach is this: “Likewise, the support for Cisco VPN clients in the Mac OS X’s Network system preference means you can avoid worrying about having a compatible Cisco VPN client available, yet it’s a nonstarter for large businesses [in] that an IT person has to manually enter the shared security key on each Mac — Apple didn’t bother letting the Network system preference import a secured configuration file as Cisco’s own client app does.”
That’s enterprise support without, you know, actually supporting the enterprise.
