How Microsoft Is Pushing Apple into the Enterprise
June 23rd, 2008
To date, Apple hasn’t made much of a move into large enterprises. Dell, HP, IBM, and others still dominate that space. However, enterprise adoption of the Mac platform is increasingly important to Apple if they want to continue to grow their market share. After all, the enterprise is where the big money is when it comes to computing. So, it’s only logical that Apple wants into this space but their push into it is surprisingly being spurred by longtime rival Microsoft.
Apple has realized that Microsoft’s inability to support the Office suite on the Mac is holding back Mac sales in the enterprise. Even the most recent version of Office 2008 lags behind it’s 2007 Windows counterpart. For example, Entourage lacks server synchronization of tasks and notes (on the Mac, these are stored on the local machine and not the server), a feature that many office workers use since tasks and notes sync with their Blackberries.
Personally, I’ve refused to use Office 2008 on my Mac because of compatibility issues with its Windows counterpart and instead run Office 2007 in Parallels. Setups like this are an ideal scenario for Microsoft since the user pays for both the Windows OS as well as Office whereas on the Mac, the user would only be paying for Office. However, this additional cost and the related complexity has to be hurting Mac sales. In other words, having an inferior product on the Mac has no downside for Microsoft (it actually helps their revenue) but has a large impact on Apple.
Apple’s big response which hasn’t garnered much media attention is in part Snow Leopard, the next version of their OS which will naively support Microsoft Exchange. In theory, users won’t need Entourage anymore since Apple’s Mail, iCal, and Address Book will directly integrate with Exchange (we’ll see about those tasks and notes).
All this sounds well and good but Apple’s going to have to do more than simply support Exchange in their current lineup. Outlook is incredibly powerful, much more so than Mail and enterprises often value power over simplicity. Pages, Apple’s word processing software pales in comparison to Word, as does Numbers, a competitor to Microsoft’s Excel. It’s going to take more than simple Exchange integration to convince enterprises that the Mac has a software lineup that can go head to head with Microsoft’s Office.
Apple’s other enterprise battle will be the iPhone which will have to beat out Blackberry. For that, they’ve taken a similar approach to Snow Leopard: Exchange support.
Long term, Apple and Microsoft will battle it out for the office desktop but don’t expect Microsoft to go anywhere. I think they’ll start focusing more on backend services that power enterprises like Exchange, something Apple probably isn’t interested in; at least not yet.
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