Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – Apple’s 5 stages of enterprise grief are still in its first stage. As you recall, the company lost out to Microsoft in the eighties by its lack of enterprise understanding. Sadly, it appears to be déjà vu all over again.
Apple’s enterprise philosophy seems to consist of one sentence, ‘I’ll sell you anything you want as long as it’s for the consumer’. Why Apple hasn’t learned from its history lessons is something they’ll need to take up with its shareholders in the future. For now, they are still drunk from the success of their mobile products.
For Microsoft, the history lesson seems to be that if you don’t get your enterprise strategy right you won’t get your financials right, which is why they don’t believe the view that Apple has found the magic formula of forcing IT departments to accept its products without so much as a phone call. While Apple’s strategy appears to be working in the short term, it will soon fall victim to either a Microsoft, IBM or Google focus on creating holistic enterprise experiences with devices and software.
The Microsoft Office and SharePoint App Store (beta)
While no significant announcements have been made yet, Microsoft is quietly developing the Office App Store (in beta now). They appear to understand that addressing the needs of the enterprise from a global and strategic level, are far superior to a tactical consumer approach. This approach will serve them well and preserve their enterprise dominance.
Product Marketing Manager, Vivek Narasimhan describes the three reasons for building the store: “integration, simplicity and developer opportunity”. He seems to be understating it.
More importantly, it’s about getting as Yaacov Cohen, CEO of harmon.ie describes as, “one billion pairs of eyes focused on apps that solve specific enterprise use cases.” Cohen’s company (see disclosures)has a featured app in the store, and likes Microsoft’s strategy of enabling apps that work across mobile and laptop devices.
“We’ve built the store so you could integrate the very best of the web with the powerful features of Office and SharePoint,” Narasimhan explained further. Microsoft has also enabled a powerful administrator function that allows global provisioning control over apps the enterprise uses – thus saving thousands of hours and reducing the risk of security breaches.
Is it Really Happening to Apple Again?
One would expect Apple to be congruous with the enterprise, but it’s actually the enterprise that is congruous around them. At least temporarily. But since they don’t have an enterprise strategy, corporate leadership will eventually shrug, and move on.
And watching this scenario unfold yet again, one has to wonder if Apple has a form of corporate dementia. The corporate market is far too important to ignore, and it’s not, as Apple seems to believe, ceding the selection of devices and software to its employees. Bring your own device (BYOD) may indeed be the future, but bring your own software (BYOS) will not. And over time, as you will see, Apple will become more insular, while the rest of the market opens up.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen this story before and we all know how it ends.
