Re: [Fed-Talk] "User" v. "Consumer" v. "Enterprise"
Re: [Fed-Talk] "User" v. "Consumer" v. "Enterprise"
- Subject: Re: [Fed-Talk] "User" v. "Consumer" v. "Enterprise"
- From: Amanda Walker <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2008 21:42:44 -0500
Shawn,
Thank you very much for such a thoughtful reply!
On Dec 29, 2008, at 5:13 PM, Shawn A. Geddis wrote:
[...] Any large focused company must listen to its users, but
cannot (and in some cases should not) implement every feature
requested.
Agreed. This is one of the ways Microsoft Office, for example, has
become the monster it is ;-).
Vendors must ensure that their products truly mature and drive
towards an integrated solution. It is easy, but negligent in my
opinion, to just add every request as yet another switch or nob
within the interface -- you get bloat and out-of-control products.
Also very much agreed. This is an issue near and dear to my heart, in
fact. The product I work on (Google Chrome) faces a similar issue:
once we went public, everyone wanted their favorite Firefox extension,
etc.--but our purpose was not to reinvent Firefox, and the lack of
buttons and knobs in the UI is quite intentional.
It may not be fair for folks to consider Apple "Tone Deaf" simply
because a specific feature or capability is not there right now
directly from Apple.
That's not really what I was driving at with the tone deaf
description. Rather, there are recurring aspects of the *business*
relationship with Apple that have caused this every time I've been
wearing my "enterprise customer" hat, and these are not things that
3rd parties can solve. Examples:
- Developer Relations: Initially, every iPhone developer could
authorize 5 devices for development, no matter how large or small the
organization. This contributed to delays in getting high-visibility
applications up and running on the iPhone, even in cases where Apple
marketing was begging the vendor for them. Similarly, there is no
"enterprise" tier for ADC memberships--there's free, Select, and
Premium, that's it. It gets tedious to explain that no, even though
we're a premium ADC member, only 10 people at a 10,000+ person company
can download OS seed releases ;-). Answers like "well, each project
team can buy their own ADC membership on a separate PO" makes
accounting departments cry.
- Sales and service: Apple's sales and service infrastructure is
focused on sales of individual units to individual consumers. Trying
to buy, for example, MacBook Pros in lots of 500, and provide a better
enterprise service experience than "tell my user to take it to an
Apple Store Genius Bar", is harder than it should be. Now, I should
say that Apple has been improving in this regard over the last few
years, so I won't cite particular examples.
- Feature sets: There are particular features that are "can't have" or
"must have" for a broad cross section of enterprise users. For some
organizations, "can't specify "no camera" as a CTO option" is a
showstopper. For DoD, "use a a CAC to allow access to DoD websites"
is a prime example of a "must have". Forget the implementation
details for the moment--I admire the work that you and others at Apple
have done to integrate smart card operations into the OS; but the
*user* experience is "I can't do my job with a Mac", often combined
with "but I could under Tiger; why did you take that away?" It
strikes me as ironic that a lot of the traffic on this list concerns
exactly the same issues that were coming by 3-4 years ago on it.
There are a wide range of HW / SW features required / requested by
Enterprise Organizations which contradict each other. There,
unfortunately, is not a single voice or single concise list of
features that covers every Enterprise Organization's needs -
especially as technology and Infrastructure landscape rapidly changes.
Agreed--but there some broad common themes (which, as I noted above,
Apple *is* showing recent improvement on). I also see a pattern of
"fixing enterprise issues in rev B" (which is a fine business
strategy--Apple's not the only company to use it). The iPhone
(exchange support & remote wipe in iPhone 2.0), XServe (lights out
management on the Intel-based version), and so on do show that Apple
listens and responds.
But bringing things back to this mailing list's specific charter,
there are two things that federal users have been asking for
consistently for years now:
- Ability to order laptops without video cameras.
- Ability to use CAC and PIV cards for both authentication and
authorization.
Third parties do offer services for the former and products for the
latter, but I'm not sure how much more of a consensus there could be
on these two...
--Amanda
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