Hey, Apple’s releasing the Insanely Great iPhone SDK so we can all write enterprise iPhone applications! They’re going to make the iPhone compete with the BlackBerry and hook it up to corporate Exchange email servers! Whoopee! Apple has a Business strategy!

Apple and Business — Is it 25 Years Too Late? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

I think he protests too much.

Most of the points make are not in error, though obviously intended to incite fan boy rage. I’ve had similar thoughts myself for years. And expressed them to Apple executives and other industry folk.  I have only a few issues with the entry.

First of all, it’s obviously written from a “anti-Apple” perspective. I know I’ve probably been reading this column for years, but I’m not a fan of anything and don’t recall whether this blogger (either Larry or Jason) are pro-Apple, anti-Apple or just the sorts of writer who like to put down people and organizations because the negativity excites readers and builds traffic. Perhaps they’re positioning themselves as the Rush Limbaugh of computing? My issue – enough with the Apple and Steve Jobs bashing. It seems you’re jealous or something. Get over it.

What’s more important and much more annoying is the assumption that Apple wants to have an enterprise computing strategy that makes their products just like everyone else’s.

Some quotes to illustrate:

For Apple to have a real Enterprise strategy, they are going to have to do better than iPhones and sex appeal.

Much of this enterprise cluelessness stems from a 25-year history of Steve Jobs and his legacy at Apple of not really caring about what businesses actually want.

Mac OS X technology is elegant, and there is nothing wrong with it from a pure software architecture perspective. The problem is that Steve Jobs and Apple doesn’t really give a a damn about how to apply the technology to business and make it attractive to enterprises in order to mass adopt it.

The last sentence is the important one. If my interpretation is true – that the author, whomever it may be, believes that Apple’s enterprise computing strategy is to conform to the mold set by IBM, Dell, HP and so forth and that mass adoption is the ultimate goal for any computer technology company selling to business – the author is missing the point. Apple doesn’t need to be HP or Dell. It needs to be Apple.

Not all business users need to have absolute conformity. Or don’t you actually recall the point of that ground breaking 1984 ad?

All Apple needs to do is be a good enough corporate citizen so that enterprise computing groups don’t reject it out of hand and enable those would benefit from the enjoyment of an iPhone or the greater good looks,  stability, security and reliability of an iMac, MacBook Pro or whatever to participate as network peers.

Maybe I’m just an old hippy, but conformity is not the only, or even the best corporate culture to emulate. Even IBM doesn’t have the corporate culture that that 1984 ad satirized.

I agree about some of the technical arguments and would love to see Mac OS servers running on enterprise class hardware at least as VMs on x86 boxes from various vendors on any virtualization architecture (VMware, XenSource, Hyper-V.)

It would be even more important if Apple collaborated with the BMCs, Tivoli’s  and CA’s of the world to make sure that enterprise management platforms can easily administer Macs without the absolute need to use Apple’s own tools, excellent though those may be.

But go for dominance? Why? That’s Microsoft’s thing – and all that’s done is get them in trouble they didn’t need. If Apple can beat their 1% of smart phones target with the iPhone this year because of corporate acceptance that’s great. If they can get even 5% of corporate laptops to be Macs – that’s even better. And if the get secretarial desktops and executive desktops to even 5% it would be a huge jump in sales for them. Why do they need to strive for bigger things right now?

There are grammatical errors even in his silence.
  – Stanislaw J. Lec

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.
  – Kurt Vonnegut

Technology will go forward and scaling won’t be a black art, it’ll be something built into the software you license

Scaling is like memory management (Scripting News)

Very good point. And it’s something that already exists to a small extent, though not as automatically as Dave expects. For example various “On Demand” models from HP, IBM and SUN all focus on this very issue. But “On Demand” is a hardware based model while Dave is talking about the software side.

Here Dave is 100% on track.

Scaling capacity up and down in an “On Demand” universe requires software that recognizes its changed circumstances and adjusts accordingly, automatically. Some of this is there now or will be this year. For example, SQL Server 2008 can be expanded to run on additional processors if they’re made available. Supposedly without restarting the instance. (It already can adjust to available memory on its own.)

I pay attention to larger server platforms than Dave usually does, but the story of scaling covers everything from a small site to the largest enterprises. Even the smallest companies have exponentially growing application performance and storage needs – especially if they’re on the WWW./

It may be just me as I love learning how to use the software on my PC and to understand the servers, switches, routers and software we use to run our business. And by learn, I don’t just mean the steps required to perform a task, but also to learn about how a product was designed to work and where applicable, the science behind that functionality. When I observe how people use their computers, though, I’m surprised to see that many people don’t seem able to used them with the efficiency and comprehension I see in other aspects of our communications.

I know, using a computer efficiently is not their job. Building a marketing plan, or closing a sale, or writing some code or configuring a firewall is their job. But isn’t everyone today supposed to be able to use computers? Especially the recently graduated?

I’m not talking about difficult stuff – like configuring multiple IP addresses on a desktop or setting custom port settings on a firewall or writing a bash script. I’m talking about things like keyboard shortcuts such as Command-C for copy or pressing the Windows key to bring up the start menu. How about putting shortcuts to frequently used network (or web) folders into their “My Documents” folder? I won’t even get into complicated things like using styles in Word.

I guess I’m a curmudgeon.