It’s always good to state the obvious: there is no way Apple will ever make a dent in overall PC market share, much less get into the enterprise desktop or server business in a way that’s relevant. The reasons are so obvious most people don’t realize it.
The Mac will never duke it out at the low end, much less hang out with the netbook crowd because the lower margins don’t work with Apple’s business model. HP, Dell, Lenovo – they get to have all the “fun” sorting out the volume/margin voodoo. Lucky for Apple there’s a large enough segment that will gladly pay a premium for an elegant, integrated, and stable computing experience.
And guess what? Apple gets nicely rewarded: in the fourth quarter of 2008 Apple’s operating profit was 11% while HP’s was 5% (for their personal systems division).
But what about the corporate market? What about all those enterprise customers who you can build lucrative, durable, “sticky” relationships with? Businesses built from hard-fought battles over market share, premised on whoever sells the most laptops/desktops/servers to corporations reaps the rewards of valuable added services that run on them. Has Apple really just punted on this?
No, they’re smarter than that. They’ve realized in a world of cloud computing and web delivered applications, their leverage into this market doesn’t come from desktop unit volume. It comes from inserting the iPhone into the information flow between businesses and their workers.
But hasn’t every big mobile device supplier tried this already? Didn’t Nokia bet a huge part of their farm on this with various “Communicator” handsets?
What about Microsoft with Windows Mobile? Wasn’t that supposed to provide the worker/enterprise tether? It was but it never did. It neither generates significant revenue for Microsoft, nor has it gotten durable traction with business users. Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider does a great job explaining why it’s a tweener in the worst way. I can tell you that my two years using a Motorola Q were the longest mobile “computing” years of my life. One of my partners compared it and an iPhone to “showing up on horseback (Q) when everyone else is arriving by jetpack (iPhone)”.
And as Network World pointed out, Blackberries are great at corporate email and “legacy” enterprise applications but are not great mobile internet experiences.
These companies forget that it’s not about them and protecting their business franchises, it’s about the user experience. Apple is the first company to get the complete mobile internet user experience right. Microsoft, Nokia, even Blackberry/RIM probably have done a better job getting mobile computing right, but in a world of web services, I think the operative term is “internet”, not “computing”.
So how does Apple become relevant in the enterprise? By virtualizing its market share. The battles to be fought in enterprise computing over the next 5+ years won’t be over email and ERP, they’ll be around cloud-based services, web-delivered applications and mobile interactions with them. Market share leverage will be measured in mobile devices, not desktops.
And until the iPhone arrived, no one had a compelling mobile internet experience. Hundreds of millions of other phones shipped, and they all suck at the mobile internet.
In an April 2008 report, Gartner found the iPhone is clearly having an impact on IT strategy. Of their survey respondents, 65% were responsible for supporting, managing and/or provisioning enterprise mobile solutions. Of these, 13% said they either currently supported the iPhone or had planned for it, 64% said they were currently researching/evaluating support for the iPhone.
This is brilliant. By having major corporations enable iPhone support Apple can get a meaningful share of enterprise users without having to sell a single desktop, laptop, or server: 13% share of mobile support is 10x+ Apple’s share of enterprise desktops.
No one is focused on this, and it makes me wonder if Apple likes it that way. Keep the “iPhone is a consumer product” head-fake going long enough to get a strong foothold with enterprise users. And if Apple can instill in those users the loyalty they’ve instilled in consumer iPhone and Mac users, well this could be brand new territory in enterprise business.
The reasons are so obvious most people don’t realize it..
Tags: apple, blackberry, gartner, microsoft, motorola
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