By silicon.com, 11 January 2006 16:50
Unless you've been hiding under a rock - or in a room with no newspapers, television or internet connection - you'll know that Steve Jobs has, with the usual fanfare, unveiled the company's first Macs running Intel chips.
The news came six months ahead of the announced schedule, though no surprise to Macworld prognosticators in the blogosphere.
We will not be the first to say this but it never fails to impress us just how much attention Apple gets - and not just in industry press but in mainstream media too - relative to its slim market share in the desktop computer arena.
A slightly different dichotomy holds true in the enterprise. Though it's the Apple hardware that gets all the press attention, it's really the software that's the key to Macs being welcomed (or at least allowed) in the office by IT directors. If Macs can't play well with group applications such as Outlook, it's game over for many Mac enthusiasts at work.
And while Apple is working on its own productivity suite, iWork, word on the street is that, quite frankly, it's pants. Steve Jobs himself hinted in his Macworld keynote that he uses Office.
For these reasons, it's the less-covered announcement that Microsoft will continue to develop Office for the Mac for at least five years that's key to Apple's role in the enterprise.
It remains to be seen whether at some point in the future this will lead to a 'Windows for the Mac'. Apple told silicon.com: "Apple has no plans to sell or support Windows on this platform but we have no plans to preclude that."
Were this to come to fruition (we're not holding our breaths), it could indeed alter the corporate landscape's traditional view of Macs - that they're OK for the 'creative types' but that's all.
As the facts stand, we don't expect Jobs' latest announcements to cause waves in IT departments - if we're wrong, do tell us by posting a Reader Comment below.
Nonetheless it's never boring to watch the industry's reigning king of spin in action.
As our local Mac enthusiast and columnist Seb Janacek commented in his response to the fact it was the iMac and PowerBook, not the Mac mini and iBook, that got the Intel chip upgrades: "In a word: flabbergasted. Nice to see that the company can still throw up some big surprises."
Comments
There are 7 comments. Join the discussion
1. Rusty Nail
The Microsoft announcement of continued Mac support means nothing. They made the exact same statement in 1997 at Macworld. The statement was "We will continue to development and release new versions of Office and Messenger for Mac at the same rate as we do for Windows for the next 5 years" - nothing more.
Also, what Apple said regarding the Windows OS was "While we won't plan to ever ship the new Intel Macs with a version of Windows, we won't prevent our customers from installing Windows on their new Macs".
As of yesterday, whether Microsoft 'supports' the Mac is irrelevant. The mainstream PC media just can't understand that yet.
Apple has no designs on the enterprise. They don't even care. They want the home. That's the cherry. Margins are thin in enterprise.
The new Intel Core Duo Macs will run Windows Vista natively, the same as a new Dell or HP - Intel is Intel. This point seems to be missed. Buy a new Mac and run Windows Vista at work, if you have to, and run OS X when you want to.
Microsoft-only IT staff won't have a good argument against Macs in the workplace now!
The best of both worlds for about the same price.
2. Max Rutherford
"..pants, eh?" You do talk old bollox! Keynote absolutely urinates over Powerpoint on the Mac especially; Pages is a useful app if you dont want to waste all your memory & space on some over bloated MS Word piece of junk. Word has its place - Pages isn't a Word Processor mind - its for those people who dont want to waste more money with those 'awfully' nice people at Quark or Adobe. At around 70 quid soho users that need to produce documents & newsletters quickly and eficiently can use Pages fairly easily and at speed. Think you'll find Job (should anyone actually care of course) uses Keynote not PowerPoint.
3. John Small
Pages is not a subtitute for Office and for wordprocessing it is worse that Appleworks, which is well past it's sell by date in any case. I'm no fan of MS but in the real world there is little choice but to use Office.
There is already an increased blurring of the edges beween Mac OS and Windows with changes in the new Powerbook and several Mac features have been down graded - with power consumption completely glossed over - so I can't say that I'm inspired about the future.
4. Ken Munn
I once ran a unit of 12 Mac-equipped creatives in a 70 person otherwise-PC company.
Still remember the IT manager saying "You know, I never get panic help calls from your guys."
Interestingly, he chose to use a Mac at home.
5. John Strom
For even slightly complex documents, I much prefer AppleWorks or Pages. The ease with which images and text formatting can be applied is unparalleled. Despite its richness of features, I find Word practically unworkable. Word never lets me forget that I'm working with a data structure, for instance, when it persists in "helping" me with text outlines. The only reason I have for working with Word is when I need to exchange documents with Windows users. Even then, I usually generate a PDF.
6. zahadum
ms office doesnt carry as much weight in the enterprise anymore.
oasis, openoffice, and even ms' own transition to xml, mean that apple no longer depends as much on ms for 'permission' to be in the enterprise.
indeed with the massive TCO rising against ms (malware etc), osx becomes a postive virtue in enterprise eveluation.
a year from now - when vista is up against leopard (osx 10.5) - the situation in the enterprise will arrive at the same inflection point as the ipod did for mp3 players ... the tide will be seem sudden but it will be almost as irreversible (in terms of how the CFO allows CIO's to keep dragging down the enterprise with solutions that are proven failures).
the ability to boot windows on apple hardware will remove all the risk from the transition phase.
it is genuinely hard to imagine a CIO offering a serious justification for keeping his dells when he can have the best.
as long as apple gets its tool story & middleware (hello, webobjects!) up to snuff, there is little to prevent apple from becoming an important player (albeit a minority one at, say, 10-20%) in the enterprise.
7. anonymous
Some years ago, I left Apple and went to Windows, largely because of my work environment. I have regretted the move from day 1 and nothing has changed my mind. It is interesting, however, that my work environment is becoming more and more driven by web based applications that are platform independent. Ergo, this boy is moving back to Mac.