[HN Gopher] Why isn't Apple attacking the enterprise market?
___________________________________________________________________
Why isn't Apple attacking the enterprise market?
There are few markets Apple can enter to continue its growth
trajectory, given its size. Enterprise computing is such a market.
With Apple silicon, supply chain, support infrastructure, and Mac
laptops increasingly used on the client side, why isn't Apple more
aggressively attacking the enterprise market? Seems like a lost
opportunity to me. Curious to hear thoughts on this.
Author : edgefield
Score : 11 points
Date : 2024-08-17 20:19 UTC (2 hours ago)
| znpy wrote:
| It is. Macbook are very common in enterprises, as well as iphones
| (for the mdm features)
| greenthrow wrote:
| What product are you envisioning that Apple doesn't offer?
| Rackable compute? Not worth their time.
|
| Look at the products they make. They try to make stuff that
| targets the widest market possible; everybody. They try not to go
| for niche markets.
| carbotaniuman wrote:
| This is from the company that just made the Apple Vision Pro. I
| don't see any reason they couldn't do limited forays into
| enterprise.
| icedchai wrote:
| Apple used to have some enterprise hardware products, like the
| XServe (rackmount Mac.) They also had Mac OS Server. They must've
| had a reason to stop.
| talldayo wrote:
| Seems pretty clear, in hindsight. Microsoft won the enterprise
| "stack" by bringing Active Directory and the Office products to
| Mac. They were blatantly willing to go cross-platform, which
| meant Windows Server would be a sure choice for expanding
| companies that wanted to pay extra to ignore compatibility (and
| even then, neither MacOS Server nor Windows Server were _that_
| good of an idea).
|
| So if Apple couldn't win the integrated product segment of the
| server market, they had to compete against the post-dotcom-
| bubble cloud behemoth. The one that had been more or less
| cannibalized by Linux and brought down to-cost or even below-
| cost by AWS. MacOS Server could carve out a cutesy niche as an
| accessible FTP server and Time Machine host, but they couldn't
| make a business out of it when Linux did it all for free.
| kyriakos wrote:
| Apple is a consumer (or prosumer) company and as of late its
| mostly into mass marketable products. They are already trying
| another trajectory, subscription services (targeting a wide
| market again).
| jmclnx wrote:
| These days and probably for the past 30 years or so, companies
| want nothing but cheap in up front costs. If they wanted good
| hardware, mainframes would still be selling very well, much more
| than now.
| qeternity wrote:
| This is just financing optics. There's no reason Apple couldn't
| do the same thing.
| kthartic wrote:
| At every tech company I've worked at, 99% of the software
| engineers are using company provided MacBooks (if that counts).
| blueyes wrote:
| My personal belief: Because the enterprise market, separating as
| it does the user from the buyer, creates incentives that lead to
| bad products.
| unfocused wrote:
| The short answer is: Apple would give away control of their
| products if they did.
|
| Enterprise/Corporate/Govt all have tedious amounts of niche needs
| and requirements to endlessly grow.
|
| Can't find the quote as I'm on my phone, but when a former exec
| from Apple left and joined a corp, and asked Steve if he wanted
| to expand to corporate, he said he won't stop him, but he isn't
| going to help him either. (I'm sure I butchered it), but
| something like that.
|
| Remember, IT = Control.
| kingkongjaffa wrote:
| They do but mostly in their peripherals. The monitors they sell
| are for the enterprise creative and entertainment industries:
| https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/pro-display-xdr
|
| Their mainstream prosumer computers are also fine and widely used
| in many enterprises industries
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| It _is_ used in enterprise, but it 's linked to status. Above a
| certain level, you don't have to explain that you won't be
| getting the Windows laptop; it would just be disrespectful.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| I guess Apple could afford to buy Oracle.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > [...] _why isn't Apple more aggressively attacking the
| enterprise market?_
|
| Apple seems to be doing just fine (including financially) selling
| widgets to 'regular' consumers. They're already one of the
| largest companies in the world doing their current strategy: what
| would they gain from doing "enterprise"?
|
| Further: please define "enterprise market".
|
| Are we talking about hardware like servers? Data storage?
| Networking? Are you talking about ERP solution? CRM? Supply chain
| management? Business intelligence / analytics? HRM? Payroll?
| Identity management? Project management?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software
|
| What are the margins on those things? What are the volumes on
| units? Do you need a sales staff (perhaps working on commission)?
|
| Apple products seem to already be quite popular and in demand, so
| I'm not sure what 'going after' another market would get them.
| justin66 wrote:
| > what would they gain from doing "enterprise"?
|
| They are valued at 3.4 _trillion_ dollars with a P /E ratio of
| 34. They can give a lot of that up, or they can continue to
| grow, as their current valuation demands.
|
| > Further: please define "enterprise market".
|
| It's simple enough to think of it as _some thing they are not
| doing, but can do, to make money._ It 's much less of a stretch
| than _cars,_ which is one thing they 've explored.
| qeternity wrote:
| Their _trailing_ PE is 34. Markets are forward looking
| however. Their forward PE is ~30. Whether or not that is
| reasonable is another story.
| justin66 wrote:
| Only 30? I'm sure that takes all the pressure to grow off
| of them.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > what would they gain from doing "enterprise"?
|
| Enough sales to bump their market cap needle to the tune of an
| additional $1 trillion or three.
|
| I think if Apple revisited their old "bicycle for the mind"
| focus, with computers and software as productivity multipliers
| for individuals and business, it would naturally have an
| upstream path to enterprise.
|
| Instead their newer unifying view of devices, apps and media,
| seems to flow through a services, social, entertainment and
| store/middleman/gatekeeper/kiosk lens.
|
| --
|
| They stumbled onto Vision Pro as being a great Mac enhancer,
| but I predict that with their loss of productivity focus, they
| won't lean into where that could go.
|
| "Apple Vision" (not Pro) should be the lower cost, shiny iOS-
| type $2.00 app sales kiosk "in 3D!" for "everyone" and
| "anyone", that Apple knows it wants out there.
|
| "Apple Vision Pro" should become a fully Mac-independent Mac-
| eclipsing powerhouse that leverages visual and gesture
| computing into highly productive interfaces for deep individual
| and collaborative work. Justifying prices like $3500, $4500,
| etc. I know my Vision Pro desperately wants to be that!
|
| Enterprise would see the value in that, once it was on their
| face.
|
| I hope Apple creates that. But their ambitions seem to be much
| lower lately.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Apples products aren't suitable for enterprise. They aren't
| repairable, aren't easily deployable, they make poor engineering
| choices which put the integrity of their hardware at risk, they
| don't run most business software, their security and update
| posture is a complete joke, they nerf products just to bleed more
| money out of consumers, they treat their employees and b2b
| dealings like sht. I can go on, the list is borderline endless
| with Apple.
|
| Just all round dealing with Apple and their products is a effin
| nightmare. It's impossible to explain ethics to Apple users too.
| They literally have their head in the sand. Apples so crap to
| service and work with its gotten to the point where I just double
| my rate to 160 an hour if you want to bring an apple device
| anywhere near me just to discourage it. Please if you have apple
| take your business elsewhere. But alas they keep coming and I
| keep replacing macbooks with real work machines.
| jeffreportmill1 wrote:
| Apple once bought an enterprise company called NeXT:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20011017163151/http://www.apple....
| browningstreet wrote:
| Personally I think they are happy leaving that work to others.
| It's dirty, thankless work. Apple is still well represented in
| every enterprise I've ever worked in. But they don't want to
| build an AD server that also manages PCs and their commitment to
| their office suite isn't about the market penetration that office
| and Google have with their competing offerings.
|
| But every enterprise is chock full of iPhones and MacBooks, for
| which they collect very healthy margins.
| jerrymcflurry wrote:
| Because their products are not enterprise-level. I work in a
| company that provides macbooks to developers and we have over 500
| apple silicon macs and managing them is an absolute nightmare.
|
| Hardware is terrible quality, they have so many issues with
| faulty screens and charging and every time you have to send one
| back to Apple via a reseller it takes weeks and the fix cost is
| usually not worth it, so we have to write them off before they
| depreciate. Intel Macs often have issues triggering the
| installation for some reason, sometimes it takes dozen reboots to
| kick it off.
|
| There's no staging for the OS, each device gets updates straight
| from the internet and every update breaks something. There has
| not been a single minor update in 13.x and 14.x that hasn't
| broken some backwards compatibility (breaking Keychain seems to
| be Apple's favorite thing) or changing user's settings such as
| notifications or security&privacy breaking third party software
| annoying the user and making our lives miserable and there's
| nowhere you can raise an issue, so you can't rely on building out
| (limited) automation because API calls keep getting removed,
| changed or removed in binaries but left in code like the call to
| trust a cert key in Keychain...
|
| Safari is absolute trash. I have the worst opinion about people
| who made it, that browser doesn't not belong anywhere outside of
| testing. It's a complete and utter garbage, the only browser that
| doesn't know how to handle SSO sessions, can't remember
| certificate preferences and keeps prompting user for
| authentication when accessing Keychain when other browsers don't.
|
| Apple Mail is the next worst piece of software I've ever
| whitnessed in my entire life, it's possibly the only mail client
| in the entire world that doesn't know how to re-use a connection
| to an IMAP server, it opens a new connection for every single
| thing possible absolutely hammering a mail server. This is just
| absolutely insane.
|
| MDM is incomplete because of MacOS restrictions, there are lots
| of things you can't do which you would expect from the most basic
| MDM tool and the most annoying thing about it is that signing
| into an iCloud account prevents MDM from wiping the device
| essentially giving someone a device free of charge so what's the
| point of MDM then...
|
| Apple's devices are built for retail consumers, not enterprise
| users.
| fetzu wrote:
| I see a lot of "technical" reasons being given here, but my gut
| feeling is that it would also clash with the image Apple is
| trying to project through its products: tools that are used by
| individuals to "be creative" and connect to their loved ones. If
| most users interactions with their Apple device (in this case,
| mostly computers) started to be bland business tasks and
| interactions it would probably just taint that image and users
| would start to equate Apple as "yet another boring hardware
| company".
|
| So not only is the enterprise market a thankless one, but it
| would also clash with their message.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| They tried half-heartedly a few times, but SJ dissuaded them
| culturally from trying again. There was Apple's "OLE" and
| Xserves, but they were never sold correctly with an enterprise
| outside salesforce. Furthermore, the enterprisey products Apple
| created were still retailish and lacking in key features
| enterprise wanted.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-17 23:01 UTC)