So the view from gulker.com is this - Apple's challenges are: Macs are more expensive than PCs for roughly equal specs, they are only available from a single vendor, Apple has never figured out how to build bridges into the whole IT infrastructure, and that infrastructure is completely oriented toward the incumbent vendors like Microsoft and Intel.

On the flip side, you can make a very good case that TCO for a Mac is less than for a 'cheap' Windows machine: anybody's who has done IT work in an environment like a magazine or newspaper knows that Mac users require less support than their PC counterparts. Many enterprises choose to buy from a single vendor (like Dell), and PC prices will tend to keep Apple's prices in line.

Where it breaks down for Apple, IMHO, is the same today as when I worked there in the mid- to late-nineties: IT firms and workers have bet the farm on MS and Intel. The Mac is an alien in that world: their skill set, training, certification and livelihoods are all based on other technologies, most notably Microsoft's. As long as they see Mac as a threat, it's not likely to get much traction.

Linux is succeeding, I think, because of its grass-roots, bottoms-ups adoption. Linux servers crept into enterprises that didn't even know they had them, because admins were tired of constantly rebooting less robust technologies, and they could just install Linux on older hardware that was lying around. A nifty, easy-to-administer Xserve requires a P.O.

Interestingly, Vinod Khosla made the comment in an interview last week that he though an Apple version of Linux would be a winner (presumably on Intel). I think that Ximian, aided by the legions of Gnome and OpenOffice developers, may have gotten their first. It's not as elegant and easy as Mac, but it's good enough, it's much cheaper than either Windows or Mac OS with MS apps aboard and it runs on machines that enterprises already own. Apple's already tapping OpenSource with BSD-based Mac OS X... but it will need to go farther to benefit as much as Linux from the same grass roots surge toward Open Source in the enterprise... the hardware, as much as I like it, is really the catch...
Comments 8:38:50 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures