Apple's Leopard: Closer to the Enterprise but Still Too Far: Page 3

Apple never really understood you need to embrace the analyst community to move servers, something AMD did to move around Intel by hiring one of the leading Gartner analysts, Kevin Knox, to lead the effort. While it’s nice to ignore the rules, I think AMD has done a vastly better job penetrating the Enterprise than Apple has in vastly less time simply because that company played the game, and Intel is just as powerful in AMD’s space as Microsoft is in Apple’s.

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If none of the analysts take them seriously the large business buyer won’t either and they’ll never be more than a small niche player until they step up to what is required in this market. If they are serious about servers they likely should just buy Sun and use them to leapfrog into the segment (it wasn’t that long ago that Sun looked at buying Apple and concluded the company, at a fraction of its current value, wasn’t worth it – bet Sun would like to get a do-over on that deal now).

They may be trying to force servers into some shops but that is incredibly dependent on the iPhone’s success which is anything but certain From Lisa to Today

Apple is making some solid progress but they still don’t fundamentally understand the large business and enterprise market, which is kind of funny given they are a large enterprise themselves. But, from Lisa till now, Apple has refused to play the game as it needs to be played and until that changes, product progress alone simply won’t close the gap.

They can continue to do well at the low end of the mid-market and with small business though, and maybe, that’s where they should remain. Generally it is more profitable and the large “enterprise vendors” haven’t done that well with this end of the market so, even if it was intentional, it wouldn’t be a bad strategy.

I guess I’m saying, if you expecting Apple in the enterprise anytime soon: don’t hold your breath. In the mid-market or education (I’m getting a lot of folks asking if they should buy their college bound kind a Mac all of a sudden) they are looking vastly better though, and who knows, they may hit the enterprise yet.