However, "an enterprise-friendly organization would provide staff to go into the enterprise to support them; they'd give customers visibility into future products over a year's time frame; they'd provide detailed lists of changes every time they released a device," Dulaney says. "That's not something Apple does today. They want to do just enough to get past the enterprise barriers involved."
While Apple will support the kinds of customers it wants to have, like Disney or Nike, Dulaney says, "if you're talking Ford Motor Co., I'm not sure that's in the cards."
Not that Dulaney blames Apple; after all, he says, it's certainly fulfilling its commitment to stockholders through its current efforts, and "the enterprise market takes time and effort," he says.
While Gartenberg concedes that Apple hasn't made a major push into the enterprise, he believes it's in the cards. He points to the next major OS X release, currently called Snow Leopard, which promises integration with Microsoft Exchange. "It's just a series of slow steps that allow Apple to become a credible player in the market," he says. "As we move into 2009 and 2010, we'll see a strong, concerted effort to go after this market in a big way."
Apple declined to comment on its enterprise strategy and instead referred Computerworld to analysts familiar with Apple's market strategy. And that strategy, says Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research, is to maintain its focus on the end user.
"They're happy to support the enterprise, but they're going to do it for the most part by creating the desire to have their products inside the enterprise," Gottheil says. Whereas the IT guy is the customer of Microsoft and other PC vendors, he says, "Apple doesn't want any disturbance to their strategic center of balance, which is oriented toward the end user." That means the company will be reluctant to make any compromises to design or product decisions based solely on the desire of the enterprise, he says.
"I think they're sticking with their ground game, doing what they've always done, which is to increase the desire for their products by making them work well and increasing their compatibility, but they don't want to be driven by the desires of the enterprise," Gottheil says.
He does find it interesting, however, that Yale School of Management Dean Joel Podolny was recently hired by Apple to serve as vice president of a new program called Apple University. It's not yet clear what the program's goals are, but Gottheil says the move could signal a certain increase in responsiveness to the needs of the enterprise or to help inculcate Apple staff in dealing with the enterprise.