Why businesses don't do Apple

It's no surprise, with a dismal overall share hovering around 5% in the personal computer market, that you tend to not see very many Macs in corporate environments. The historic reasons for this are open to debate but most likely revolve primarily from IBM's early decision to license PC hardware manufacture broadly while Apple largely refused to license (and does to this day--although their computers are now assembled from the same components as PCs) out manufacturing to third parties. This resulted in generally higher prices for Apple products, a perception of "toy" status associated with the Mac brand, and a significant production bottleneck, from which the company has never recovered.

But why is that? Certainly much of it can be attributed simply to the ingrained habits of corporate America (including software manufacturers, many of whom see no point in porting their applications over to run on OS X); but there are many businesses which remain open to making drastic platform migrations should they find a cost-efficiency advantage in doing so. And there are real advantages to running OS X from an individual productivity standpoint. Many small businesses have no real lock-in to line of business applications, relying on Word, Excel, and e-mail almost exclusively (all available on OS X). Yet it remains marginalized, the province of graphic design firms and perhaps small bastions clinging to life in large corporate marketing departments. From the links I'm about to present to you, you might presume that this has to do with faulty or at least inconsistent hardware. But their hardware is no worse than any other major PC manufacturer, and in many ways is superior to most. The latest issues experienced by Macbook and Macbook Pro laptops, sudden and inconsistent shutdowns, are problematic but not unprecedented for either Macs or PCs and they are apparently isolated incidents.

Apple's response to the issue, on the other hand--which is more of a non-response, really--is all too common for them, and a real roadblock for business users. I think I've mentioned before that the sort of random, unlikely, almost trivial problems that home computer users experience are a certainty and anathema to businesses, so it's a lock that problems like this are going to pop up on the radar of IT departments who are supporting Macs. In that situation, it's not acceptable for the product manufacturer to simply shrug and wait for the eventual march of iterative development to work the kinks out. Apple frequently seems to deny or minimize issues at first, which is only natural on the PR front I suppose. But they extend it to the support front as well, and that results in terrible product support.

What makes this interesting now is that apparently Apple is gearing up to go seriously after the enterprise market again. According to this recent article in Network World, the upcoming Macworld Expo will offer more emphasis on corporate applications than previously, and the upcoming Leopard release of OS X will include several important refinements intended to address certain shortcomings the OS currently has in the enterprise environment; namely, a server version of the iCal calendar software, and integrated network Spotlight search functionality.

These are only a start at addressing the issues that corporate users have with OS X. The chatter over at Slashdot tends to revolve around Apple's failings in providing a complete integrated server-based mail and calendaring application, a fully featured directory management solution, and extended desktop management functionality (curiously, or perhaps not, most posters seem to frame this in terms of integration with Microsoft's existing solutions to these requirements--Exchange/Outlook, and Active Directory/Group Policy. This seems backward rather than innovative--the current state of the art doesn't seem like what you should be shooting for if you truly wanted to develop compelling replacements for those ingrained solutions--because, as other posters point out, they are hardly the end-all, be-all of their categories).

I tend to agree with those critiques in some form or another; I don't think they are universally valid for all business models (particularly not those of many SMBs), I don't necessarily believe that they are as critical to the business universe that's being shaped today as much as they are for yesterday's, but I can see where they prevent many companies from seriously considering adoption right now. And I can see where Apple is making efforts to resolve those issues. Still, I believe that even if those issues were addressed, it's the support problem that will continue to prevent widespread migration to the Apple platform. And I don't see any moves from them to correct that problem.

Business-oriented PC sellers such as Dell and HP have had years to configure their support channels to provide the sort of on-demand support that small-business users require, and Apple isn't even close to being able to offer that, even if they were to understand that they should. Call Dell under one of their standard support contracts, you have a tech on your doorstep the next day. That's a very powerful--and relatively cheap--resource for a small business to be able to call on. A Dell Latitude laptop 3-year warranty costs around $300, for that next business day on-site service. For an Apple Macbook Pro, an AppleCare contract runs $350. For that, if you are lucky, you can mail the defective Macbook Pro back to Apple and get it, or another one, in a week or so. If you are very lucky you may be in one of those limited areas where they do provide on-site service. That's barely tolerable for home use--for a small business it's death. Moreover, you can't kick over a rock in most places these days without finding a halfway competent high-school student who can work on and repair most basic PC hardware problems. Finding a Mac technician, even in major urban areas, who can provide out-of-warranty support, is an exercise in frustration--to such extent that competing mail-order repair outfits such as Macservice.com have begun to spring up to fill in the gap (I highly recommend them, if you happen to need service for your Mac).

Until Apple can develop the same level of customer service, they're going to continue to get tarred and feathered by such luminaries as Scoble over the matter, and continue to suffer a poor reputation that will hinder their movement into corporate IT territory.