On Dec 24, 2008, at 2:31 PM, Shawn A. Geddis wrote: - Enterprise CEs: Enterprise Consulting Engineers (Team I am on) - Dual Facing: 1) Outward: Customers; 2) Inward: Eng/AC/PM/ADR
... and which might well be one of the hardest jobs at Apple, from past and current experience.
Shawn, you and the rest of the enterprise team do a great job. But every large organization has the experience of Apple being "tone deaf" to its requirements, and having to address them again and again as engineering teams turn over and new people come on board without knowing why something works the way it does if it's not directly consumer-related. This is not limited to just federal/military--it's also true for higher ed (where I worked long ago) and private sector (where I work now). It's not just Mac OS X features--it's true for everything from ordering Macs to IT operations to the iPhone.
Apple is fundamentally a consumer product vendor. It sells to individuals, and it builds products for individuals and small workgroups. Its marketing is completely consumer-driven. As it happens, these same products do work very well in enterprise environments, and Apple has built some capabilities into Mac OS X and the iPhone in order to keep them from being rejected outright by enterprise customers (Smart Card support for the DoD, Kerberized NFS for customers like Google, Exchange connectivity in the iPhone for most enterprise email systems, XServe LOM so it would be usable in a data center, etc.), but at a strategic and management level, enterprise customers are consistently treated as a secondary market. I often get the impression that if some new consumer feature made it impossible to use a Mac in an enterprise setting, Steve Jobs wouldn't lose a single moments' sleep over it.
Even for those of us who bleed six colors (which tells you how old some of us are :-)), it gets aggravating sometimes. The benefit of running a Mac shop do usually outweigh the migraines that trying to run a Windows shop produces, to be sure :-). But the central criticism Boyd raised, that Apple as a company often doesn't seem to "get it" when it comes to enterprise and government IT requirements, is valid more often than not.
--Amanda
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