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http://www.macnn.com/articles/04/02/25/apple.corporate.strategy/

Apple exec quits; corporate sales strategy in limbo?

updated 01:25 am EST, Wed February 25, 2004

 

Apple corporate strategy


An ex-Oracle executive that Apple hired a few years ago to head up its corporate sales efforts has left the company, according to BusinessWeek: "When Apple hired Sebastian Gunningham away from Oracle in the spring of 2002, some analysts thought CEO Steve Jobs had brought him on board to crack the corporate-computing market...Two years have gone by, though, and Apple has yet to make serious inroads into the corporate market. Worse, its efforts took a huge hit when to become the CEO of a small Miami-based software outfit. Apple says it remains committed to enterprise computing and is actively seeking a replacement for Gunningham."


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  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 02:08am | report spam | Reply |

    BFD

    Execs quit all the time, especially if it means that they'll become CEO of some other firm.

    Non-story.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 02:42am | report spam | Reply |

    Apple Needs to hustle!

    OP is correct - this departure may mean very little alone. And Apple has made some significant gains in the enterprise sphere, most notably the Xserve and distributed computing. I'm just hoping they won't rest on their laurels, because it won't profit the company much to do so. Where is the thin client companion to the Xserve? Apple needs to hustle and regain market share now. The company should be deciding on how to market successfully to enterprise, and that will take nothing short of a paradigmatic shift in corporate thinking.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 03:15am | report spam | Reply |

    Old news

    By at least a couple of weeks.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 08:23am | report spam | Reply |

    Enterprise

    Yes, he quit a while ago, but the column just appeared yesterday.

    The real issue is that in order for corps. to go for XServes, they need to be able to buy clients as well. And on the client side, the fact that it's clear you have to pay 130/year to keep the OS up to date, that key apps (Safari) are tied to the "next" version is a major disincentive. Any manager worth his salt who has 100 Mac desktops would be laughed at for his choice of platforms when he asks for 13,000 dollars in his operating budget year after year.

    While initial costs are quite a bit higher to get Macs (remember, we're talking numbers here, not ones and twos), that really isn't much of an issue to corps as those costs are capitalized. You can't do that with yearly OS fees of 130/machine.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 09:02am | report spam | Reply |

    Enterprise

    The company I work for has about 4000 employees and we DO NOT buy system software for Windows everytime it comes out. As a matter of fact we still have people running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS9, Mac OS X.2, Mac OS X.3. Once the system works the next version of an OS does not mean the your current one stop working.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 09:10am | report spam | Reply |

    Are your serious?

    Many companies still use windows 98 as the operating system on PC workstations. For one, most operating systems aren't proven and/or "certified" as secure for a year or more after their initial release. Any manager worth his salt wouldn't be upgrading his firm's OS every MacWorld. He'd only be laughed at for trying to justify an upgrade for the newest browser.
    MacOS 10.2, for what it was, is just as functional and secure as it was then. Sure it may not have all the features that you may want, but the same goes for any software, or hardware for that matter. Your argument is as silly as suggesting that firms shouldn't use the WinTel platform because they'd have to spend $200 a year per computer to keep their processors up to date. The fact that for the last what, three years, Apple has released a new operating system light years ahead of the last is what it is. No one is required to upgrade. In reality, I don't see many firms who adopt 10.3 feeling the need to upgrade any further. And they could do so. Because their not worried about the newest versions of iLife and DVD Player being incompatible.

    -Hertz

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 09:16am | report spam | Reply |

    Enterprise customers

    won't be interested in new features added to Safari, iLife, etc. Apple should release a public statement declaring how long they will provide security releases for OS X release versions, like what MS does. That would be helpful. Low end macs (eMacs and iMacs), due to high amount of integration, also tend to not make good managed clients. If future macs had more modular components, that would help out too. It's not wise to pitch the whole logic board just because of bad onboard video. A affordable headless mac would also be useful in that sector. I don't see Enterprise computing in Apple's real long term strategy, not that Apple needs it anyway.

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    02/25, 09:30am | report spam | Reply |

    spyinthesky

    Yesthe situation has been skewed by the fact that OSX was a fundamentally new operating system and has in its earliest years understandably changed a lot. I doubt that at least in terms of redundancy of past features, consistency etc that post Panther updates will be anything like as intrusive. Might take a little longer for people to be assured of that I imagine mind.

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 12:05pm | report spam | Reply |

    small inroads.

    ...

    ...

    Well, the enterprise market, as has been repeated before, is not the primary target. Granted its OS is network-friendly, h*** even network-centric, but people, it's a User-oriented OS, a user-oriented computing platform. That is its primary strength, and unique selling point. The enterprise/server/cluster market is just icing.

    hello?

    ...

    ...

    (And begone, Windows trolls!)

  1. MacNN.com Reader

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    02/25, 12:25pm | report spam | Reply |

    Hmmm

    From the snippet:
    Two years have gone by, though, and Apple has yet to make serious inroads into the corporate market. Worse, its efforts took a huge hit when Gunningham quit in January to become the CEO of a small Miami-based software outfit.

    Hmmm, did it ever occur to anyone that Gunningham was the problem, not Apple per se?

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