Apple In The Enterprise

It is no secret that Apple has a long history or ignoring the needs of enterprise users and has focused its attention on the consumer market. With a half-hearted approach to enterprise support at best, Apple projected an attitude that seemed to say, “Here’s what we’ve got, take it or leave it.” In response, many in the technical community looked askance at the company’s offerings and did their darndest to keep Apple products out of the corporate network.

That was why it was so surprising to see Microsoft’s Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president for the Office 365 client apps and services team, giving a demo of Office running on Apple’s new iPad Pro during the Apple “monster announcement” (to use Apple CEO Tim Cook’s phrase) last Wednesday. The demo featured the iPad Pro’s split-screen capability where you can have two applications open on the screen side by side.

Besides showing the iPad versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint running in pairs on the split screen, Mr. Koenigsbauer and his assistant also demonstrated the enhancements Microsoft has added to the iOS version of the Office suite to take advantage of the Apple Pencil, the new stylus that was also part of the announcement. Those include an extra tool bar beneath the familiar ribbon where you can do things like choose colors from a color wheel. 

In a further acknowledgement of enterprise buyers, Cook also made mention of Apple’s alliances with IBM and Cisco.

While Apple has had little success at getting its Macs onto enterprise desktops, its MacBook line of laptops has seen moderate adoption, but its iPhones and iPads have been a runaway success capturing 70% or more of the enterprise market. As a counter to Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3, I have been predicting that Apple would comeout with a touch screen/keyboard device, but I was thinking in terms of a touch screen MacBook -- clearly Apple’s focus is on the iPad rather than the MacBook line.

Brian Hall, general manager of Microsoft’s Surface group, told the Wall Street Journal the company had made $3.6 billion in revenue on Surface in the past fiscal year. In its fiscal year ending October 20, 2014, Apple sold $30.3 billion worth of iPads, down 5% from the previous year; the iPhone garnered $102 billion representing 56% of the company’s total revenues.

The one thing that had always stood in the way of the iPad becoming a total replacement for the laptop is the lack of a real file system; most people have their Office for iOS files stored as email attachments. In the Surface Pro 3, Microsoft addressed that by using a full Windows operating system so it was essentially a laptop with a detachable keyboard.

However, with the growing use of cloud-based storage, either iCloud or OneDrive, the need for extensive file storage on the tablet declines. Indeed, this represents one of the big models for computing going forward where all file storage is in the cloud and is accessible from any device that’s available.

My takeaway from this is that everyone in the tech industry now wants a piece of the Apple cache, or more correctly, needs to be part of the Apple ecosystem. During the announcement, Mr. Cook mentioned several times how much people love Apple products, and he’s right. It’s hard to think of another company that has built such a high degree of customer loyalty.

Apple owes its success to the fact that it is obsessive about design. That includes the physical design which is always eye-catching, but the whole product experience, of which the UX we talk about is only a small part. Secondly, Apple doesn't stop trying to get it better. It starts out in a good direction, like with the multitouch interface with touch, pinch, and swipe gesture, and then figures out what it can layer on top of it. This announcement brought the 3-D Touch capability that can distinguish between a tap, firm press and an extended press. Apple introduced that on the iPad Pro and iPhone 6S and 6S Plus with a capability it calls “peek and pop.”

The big thing that sets Apple apart is that it appears to have a vision that goes beyond a single product or even a product line and looks at the question, “How should life work given the technologies currently available.”

Apple may not always be held in high esteem by the technical community, but that’s not the audience we should be looking to for guidance on what will appeal to the public at large. With companies like IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft beating a path to Apple’s door to ensure that what their offerings work well on the devices people love to use, it’s clear that the people running those companies know where they need to be.