12/14/2007, 4:25pm, EST
Friday, December 14th
Enterprise will stifle Apple's creativity
Apple's entrance into the business world could be a mistake, and it may render the creativity of the company who all but thrives on it sterile, according to Marketcircle CEO, Alykhan Jetha. He argues that the placid nature of an enterprise company is just the thing that will stifle the company's creative process, having to adhere to years-old practices and old standards. A great deal of Microsoft's time is spent adapting its software to be backwards compatible with antiquated office equipment, and says that it's "a ball and chain that will render Apple as 'just another tech company' should it decide to chase the enterprise market."
"The irony in all of this, is that Apple is actually getting into the enterprise" writes Jetha in his blog. "This trend is driven by the users who first experience Apple's ease of use via an iPod or increasingly via an iPhone, who then take a very small risk and buy a Mac."
Jetha reminisces how bottom-rung employees were typically the ones to insist on bringing Macs into the offices, only to be denied by management or IT. Now, because of Apple's use of Intel chips, aggressive marketing campaigns, and peripheral innovation, upper level executives are demanding Mac computers be in to practice at large firms.
Jetha cautions Apple in its approach to large business, saying that "you can't innovate when you cater to dinosaurs."
Filed under: industry, enterprise, Apple
Other story tags: Marketcircle, creativity
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Second, do you think any of the lead developers at Apple would be put to work writing drivers for old crap? They might hire it out but the skunk works is already working on stuff several years out. This guy is full of it.
Perhaps the problem is more with the corporations that ransom users by design (Intuit?) with locked in proprietary formats - competitive design with more open & transferable standards for data may be the best of both worlds ?
A great deal of Microsoft's time is spent adopting MS office 2007 to what? The MS Office default setting with full features is not backwards compatible.
There is no dock folder/stack fiasco - it's all in the heads of a few mac geeks on message boards. For me, and everyone I've talked to, stacks are much more useful than a simple menu. You can't click and drag files out of a hierarchical menu.
Not only that, if you prefer the old way, there are several freeware solutions to bring it back.
Also, In terms of the enterprise, this isn't even a consideration. It's not like Windows has extensive configurable hierarchical menus in the task bar.
In your dreams. I know dozens of people who have not upgraded to Leopard because of the dock folder/stack issue. If you use your Mac in certain ways, you can't just abandon your file system without taking a big hit in productivity.
Now that there are some third-party solutions, many who have waited are checking them out, and we'll see how good the 'solutions' work. But that's two months of waiting so far.
For most people, the forced stacks with their non-sensical dock icons didn't prevent them from upgrading, but there've been a lot of people complaining about it, including the best-known Mac writers.
I'm glad stacks works for you - have fun with it. You don't speak for everyone, though.