It has been
25 years since Apple launched the Mac, with
its groundbreaking $1.5m Superbowl ad. It has been through its dark
year, and is now looking at a bright future. But how did it get
here and where is it going next?
The firm is the darling of the consumer technology industry but
never really made it in the enterprise. When it did try to get into
enterprise markets, it lost its way, say commentators.
"It made some attempts. It had the Apple Unix operating system
(AUX), but in its DNA, the company has a creative element and
leveraged these creative users around graphics, desktop publishing
and marketing," says Barry Crist, who joined Apple in 1985 after
leaving college, and is now CEO at LikeWise, a firm that sells
software integrating Macs with Active Directory. "It lost its
momentum in the enterprise. The value proposition in the products
suffered and it really diluted the brand."
The company was failing in the enterprise and the consumer space
during its darkest years, after John Sculley's tenure at the
company, before Jobs returned in 1997. Since then, the company's
turnaround has been legendary.
The reinvention of the operating system based on Jobs' own
NeXTstep OS and
FreeBSD has given Apple the opportunity to innovate more
effectively with operating system features and enhancements. The
switch to
Intel's
commodity platform has made it easier to innovate in
hardware.
But Apple still represents just 8-10% of the global enterprise
market. So how do Apple developers make a living?
Michael Simmons, marketing and business development manager at
Cultured Code, a software
startup that has just released a task management application for
the Mac called Things, says, "We love the platform and we see as
users how much better it is to develop for.
The developer tools, the community - the whole operating
system," he says. "If our main goal is to make money, then I don't
think things would be the way they are. But I believe our main goal
is to be developers that produce best-in-class products and are
unique. So the priorities are shifted. There's money and there's
quality."
'1984' Apple Macintosh Commercial
With many Mac development shops still coming from modest
beginnings, it is not surprising many of them cling to the Mac for
reasons of personal preference. Some developers, like Steve
Shepard, used to work at Apple.
Shepard, who developed
software for writers called
Storyist, worked in the firm's advanced technology group during
the Sculley era before leaving to pursue a career in Silicon
Valley. "We're a mom and pop shop," he says.
Some believe Apple is now wheedling its way back into
enterprises. "One municipal department here in California is
rebuilding its entire technology department to open up the
possibilities for Linux, Solaris and Mac," says Gray Rothkpf,
founder of 01.com, which offers
hosting and enterprise service solutions for
Zimbra, Yahoo's online
collaboration suite.
The general dissatisfaction with Microsoft's Vista has opened up
an opportunity for Apple to capitalise on this, points out Clift,
and with Windows 7 still a way off, it has more time to build on
its success.
And that consumersation of IT, where IT departments capitulate
and decide that they have to give users more choices, could see
Apple's mobile platform also making inroads into the enterprise,
too.
However, Apple faces challenges. Jeff Moss is the organiser of
the Black Hat security
conference, which had a spat with Apple this year when the
company stopped its engineers from speaking. He argues the firm
still isn't as serious as it could be about security because of its
focus on the consumer market.
The other challenge revolves around pricing. The
firm is known for selling superbly designed products at a premium
price. In an economic downturn, how willing will customers -
consumer or otherwise - be to pay that extra? Hopefully for Apple,
even in a deep recession, its customers will continue to think
different.