In a debate at the Gartner Symposium in Sydney, Nick Jones argued the case that Apple would never be a viable enterprise technology provider, while his fellow analyst Robin Simpson took the case for Apple’s role in business.
However, despite the fact that a high percentage of the audience were iPhone-toting Apple lovers, it was Jones who made the more forceful argument.
Employees might like iPhones, but Gartner says Apple doesn’t have a clue how to do computers for business at anything like a reasonable price.
“Apple’s management tools are a joke,” Jones said. “Apple decides which applications you get and if they don’t like an application, you don’t get it. There’s lots of applications Apple don’t like which could be very useful to you. As an enterprise platform, it’s a joke.”
As for Macs, Jones suggested that current market share made it clear there wasn’t any real business case for Apple to go after enterprise users. “You have to think the numbers tell the story.
About 1% of enterprise PCs are Macs.
As a LONG time Mac lover/supporter, I couldn’t agree with this more. For some background on how I’m involved with Macs – I’ve supported upwards of 150 Mac computers in an Open Directory environment with two different XSan installs (at different times) with over 15 Xserve systems. At the same time I also had a large amount of Windows servers installed as well. For the most part the Macs from the client perspective worked just fine – their back-end services were half-baked at times, and incomplete in others.
While Apple makes some fine products for the consumer level, their Enterprise support is extremely lacking. Things they have put out in marketing don’t line up with what it does in real life. Calling for support can result in months of “send me this log and we’ll look at it”, with no response beyond that. Feedback to management goes unanswered, or just shrugged off.
If I had a problem w/ our Windows servers (Dells), I would have an immediate response (sometimes on even out-of-warranty products) and follow-up’s were to the point where I’d have to ask them to not call back because the problem was fixed…. but they absolutely 100% wanted to make sure.
When I’d open up and Enterprise Apple support ticket I could go for months without hearing back from someone – and this was on a paid contract with systems that were under warranty!
Would I put Mac servers back into a work environment? Yeah, but I’d sure take a seriously good look around at what else is out there first… and even then I’d be skeptical.
I really REALLY that Apple would get it in gear on this aspect of their business. I know they are an event driven company, blah blah blah… but they really could do a ton to improve their business aspects of their software offerings for their customers.
I’ll keep buying them and supporting them… but it’d be nice if they met me half way. 😀
Brian