A Blog About Making Culture
The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition
August 12, 2007
The Premise: Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition, and settling for less denies many people the chance to discover tools or technologies that can improve their lives.
I was struck by John Siracusa's 'Stuck on the enterprise', which he wrote a few days ago. His assertion:
Sure, Apple makes periodic overtures in to big business. It even redirects apple.com/enterprise to someplace sensible. But nearly every Apple product or service ostensibly aimed at enterprise customers can also be seen as a natural part of some other, "non-enterprise" market where Apple is strong (e.g., creative professionals).
Unfailingly, Apple markets only to the end user these days. ... What Apple does not do is sell products to corporate IT that are meant for direct use by non-IT employees. That is, desktop PCs, and more recently, cellular phones.
Siracusa then goes on to list a series of enterprise desires for phones that he claims look "quite different than the iPhone", mainly centering around manageability and predictability. This is followed by a contention that these aims are incompatible with usability.
This is, to be blunt, horseshit. It's apologist blathering to cover up a failure of imagination and ambition. And it's saying that people cease to become people when they're at work, and are instead Enterprise Employees. These are the excuses that let the tech industry off the hook for failing to engage as many people as it should be.
This leads to an alarmingly wrongheaded conclusion:
[T]he decision to ignore markets where you must sell to someone other than the end user is pretty high-minded (for a corporation). It's also perhaps the only way to ever create great products, products that customers actually love.
No, this decision is elitist and lazy. Here's the truth: You can meet all the (reasonable) requirements of an Enterprise while still creating a product that delights and inspires the people who make up that organization.
In fact, you have to do so.
The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time. Look at email, instant messaging, hell -- look at the telephone. These staples of business communication are so popular because they meet the "I want this as part of my life" threshold. They can even be so good as to inspire addiction, complete with withdrawal in their absence.
If you create a tool as powerful as instant messaging, for example, you won't be able to stop adoption in the enterprise -- you'll just need to add enterprise features. And to those who proudly point out that the iPhone is "too cool to ever go to work", you can't also claim that enterprise IT will have to deal with it because it's popular. Unless you want to perpetuate the myth that we somehow transform into emotionless robots when we go to work, you have to acknowledge that Apple's going to make more and more improvements to accommodate them, and that's a good thing.
Of course, I have a dog in this fight. I'd advocated for years that blogging should be an enterprise tool, and helped my company ship Movable Type Enterprise, which was the first is the most popular enterprise blogging app around. I wrote a little bit about why in "Why do you care about business blogs so much?"
For the normal people, the ones who kind of maybe have heard of blogs, but certainly haven't tried them out yet themselves, discovering blogging as part of work will lead them to thinking about how blogs can change every part of their life. It's just like the millions of people who first used a web browser as part of their job, or the people who had an email address at work or school before they ever signed up for Hotmail or Gmail.
When I talk to companies about blogging, I ask them how their Knowledge Management or Enterprise Content Management deployments have succeeded. And they almost invariably mumble a bit about "it's sort of underperforming...". This is the dark outcome of people trying to draw a line between who we are at work and who we are at home. You end up with shoddy, compromised products like KM or groupware. And the folks in IT aren't unfeeling, tyrannical monsters; When I tell them "well, we'll give you LDAP integration, but it'll also have a UI that's easy enough that people choose to use these tools in their free time as a hobby", their eyes light up. They want to delight people, too.
That's the truth of it -- if you don't change the way people work, you can't claim to be changing their lives for the better. In the developed world, we spend most of our waking hours at work, and the impact is enormous. The success of PCs in the enterprise helped indirectly subsidize computers getting cheap enough to buy at home. The requirements for reliability and stability of a lot of enterprise software makes for better consumer user experiences. And of course, most of the shopping on eBay or Amazon or most of the ad-clicking on TMZ or Gizmodo happen while people are at work too. If the anti-enterprise advocates had their way, none of us would have web browsers at work, but we'd still be ideologically pure and stickin' it to the man. Yeah!
Except we'd be sticking it to ourselves, for 8 to 10 hours a day. If you believe in a technology, like I believe in blogging, or you believe in a company, like many fans believe in Apple, then expect more. Don't settle for compromises where we're supposed to have crappy tools for the work we do -- any good craftsman takes pride in using the best tools he can.
And above all, stop making excuses for the arrogant and exclusionary voices that want to limit promising new technologies to just those who can afford to pay for them at home, or who have the interest to chase down the latest tech. Everybody deserves to benefit from this stuff.
Previously: Fake Steve Jobs and the Triumph of Blogs
Next: Behold, Movable Type 4.0
Anil Dash
Groupware Still Sucks: Rule #1 in nerd blogging: jwz said it first. If you enjoyed The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition last week, you'll want to read Jamie Zawinski's essay that was so burned into my subconscious that I forgot it influenced me. If you want to do... read more »NoahBrier.com
Fixing Business Software: For a whole bunch of reasons I've given a lot of thought to building software for businesses. First off, I work for a business, so it's interesting to me. Second, I'm quite fascinated by the idea that you can build software to help things and people wo... read more »Mark Bean
I love this post. I have been involved in the ECM space for over 10 years and more recently trying to firstly get ECM vendors to make their solutions more usable (FileNet BPF and Altien Document Manager) and secondly, to promote “Office 2.0”.
I may not have been successful in either attempt but hey, at least I’m trying.
Tom
“And the folks in IT aren’t unfeeling, tyrannical monsters; When I tell them “well, we’ll give you LDAP integration, but it’ll also have a UI that’s easy enough that people choose to use these tools in their free time as a hobby”, their eyes light up. They want to delight people, too”
I can’t remember the last time I met an IT rep who wanted to “delight” me. I can, however, easily remember the last time I was told I’d have to change something to accomodate them. To the vast majority of them this is just a job, and their primary goal is keeping the status quo.
I certainly don’t dispute your quote above, but I think you’re dealing with the exceptions. The fact that they’re consulting with you in the first place indicates that.
As for Apple, they have consistently made great products people love, and IT groups have just as consistently fought like Hell to keep them out of the enterprise for 25 years.
If Apple never makes it into the enterprise because they refuse to build a sales and marketing group dedicated to humping IT management’s leg that’s fine by me, and it’s not Apple’s fault. The products are there and available. IT need only open their eyes.
Deepak
This reminds me of the time when I visited an unnamed pharma company to tell them about OS support for our next software. Amongst other things, they were not happy with our decision to end support for Windows NT (we were only supporting Win2K and XP). In 2005 they had just begun migrating to Win2K
Anil
I certainly don’t dispute your quote above, but I think you’re dealing with the exceptions. The fact that they’re consulting with you in the first place indicates that.
Point taken, and I largely agree with you. But I think I’m speaking not just of the clueful IT grunts, but also most people who are sr. IT management (CIOs/CTOs) in large companies. You don’t usually get to that level without having at least a modicum of people skills.
John Siracusa
Weasel words to the rescue: “It’s also perhaps the only way to ever create great products, products that customers actually love.” (Emphasis added.) You claim that it’s possible to “meet all the (reasonable) requirements of an Enterprise while still creating a product that delights and inspires the [users].” Maybe, but it’s really hard—exponentially harder than creating a great product by aiming straight for the user, while (mostly) ignoring the enterprise.
This is not an apology on behalf of Apple, nor is it elitist. There’s nothing inherently more prestigious about being confined the consumer market; it’s quite the opposite, in fact. The thrust of the post was that Apple has consciously chosen it’s market, and that this choice makes the creation of products that (to use your word) delight users, if not uniquely possible, then much easier.
The thing about enterprise entanglements is that, while they may not totally rule out greatness on the first outing, the burden of compatibility and (more insidiously) tradition/expectations grows quickly. After a certain point, it doesn’t even occur to the people making these products to consider ground-up re-imaginings of the interface or hardware or product segmentation because that type of thing is looked upon with great skepticism by their enterprise customers.
Established enterprise players simply can’t make big, radical shifts. Players in the consumer market can (and, arguably, must). This is why Apple, unique among PC makers in its near-total neglect of the enterprise, can repeatedly strike out in new directions while the rest of the industry moves more cautiously.
Would it be “more ambitious” to try to do both, to innovate radically while also providing the stability and predictability the enterprise craves? Certainly, but it’s hard enough to be “the best” at either one of those pursuits. There’s a fine line between ambition and foolhardiness.
Anil
Damn you and your reasonableness, John! You raise a series of valid points, but I do think it’s overly forgiving for a reviewer or journalist to mention Apple’s (or anyone else’s) compromise on these issues without calling them out on it. Let alone lauding them for it, as many do.
I’d point again to the Blackberry — obviously Enterprise-focused, but crackberry obsessives use it extensively in their personal lives. It can be done.
Ian Betteridge
And look what RIM has done with the Pearl - a phone which is both enterprise-ready and consumer-friendly.
John’s point that “established enterprise players simply can’t make big, radical shifts” is both true and an indictment of the suppliers of large-scale enterprise solutions. If you take a step back for one second, it’s worth asking why radical shifts are so hard for enterprises, and the answer is largely to do with the lack of “friction-free” solutions for making those shifts - and the blame for that lies squarely with technology companies.
Yes, IT managers are usually conservative and don’t want to move from platforms which work. But that’s largely because of the nightmares they’ve had in the past making such moves.
Pat Berry 
cough PeopleSoft cough Oracle *cough.
John Siracusa
“I do think it’s overly forgiving for a reviewer or journalist to mention Apple’s (or anyone else’s) compromise on these issues without calling them out on it.”
I don’t consider it a compromise. If anything, the decision to be entirely consumer-focused is an uncompromising stance. There’s nothing to condemn here unless you think Apple has some obligation to serve a particular market. You wrote, “[If] you believe in a company, like many fans believe in Apple, then expect more.” I do expect more, I just don’t necessarily expect it all to come from a single company.
Anonymous
My vote goes with John for darker reasons other than his: Post-iPod Apple has no choice but to pursue huge market sectors because success must be fed on even bigger success. It’s not in Oz anymore; nowadays Apple lives on black and white (and red) Wall Street. The clock is ticking. Apple has at most five years to double revenue. So Apple has chosen a sector that is not already monopolized, to try to monopolize.
Anonymous
My vote goes with John for darker reasons other than his: Post-iPod Apple has no choice but to pursue huge market sectors because success must be fed on even bigger success. It’s not in Oz anymore; nowadays Apple lives on black and white (and red) Wall Street. The clock is ticking. Apple has at most five years to double revenue. So Apple has chosen a sector that is not already monopolized, to try to monopolize.
Anonymous
What part of the Apple experience do you think should be made available to the corporate world? The iLive suite? The other consumer apps? If Apple is to be taken to task for not meeting enterprise needs, then you should be a bit more specific about what they should to to meet those needs.
The corporate world and the consumer world have different priorities. Or would you furnish your home with the equipment from your office? If not, why not?
Or perhaps you would like your office to be equipped like your living room. Excellent idea, but somehow I doubt if it’s one that could be sold to management.
So exactly what is it that Apple should provide to the enterprise??
Viswakarma
I have been at the receiving end (as a user & CAD/CAM system implementer) for nearly 30 years in a very large Fortune 500 US Corporation.
The large corporation IT/IS Departments are scarry cats. They are not Americans but American’ts. They are dependent on vendors to tell them what they need to do. It was IBM in the beginning, and now it is Microsoft.
Further, “Corporations” or “Enterprises” are like large oil-tankers. They are pretty slow and can not change direction rapidly! The IT Systems in these organizations take anywhere between 5 to 10 years to implement a minor technological change, if at all they want to change.
Apple, is more agile and introduces technology paradigm changes in 2 to 3 years. Only individuals and small business can be that agile and take advantage of what Apple does.
The individual and small business universe is much bigger than the “Corporate/Enterprise” universe. Apple is clever enough to realize that, and finds it not worthwhile to go after this market.
It is not laziness, but an eye towards rapid return on investment!!!
Laird Popkin
What Apple’s doing makes sense. In business, you can only be “excellent” at one thing at a time. If you want to make your customers thrilled, you you have to make your customer the top priority, and you have to know who your customer is. For Apple, their top priority is thrilling the consumer. For Microsoft, their top priority is maximizing revenue across a wide range of “customers”. Microsoft has several “customers” (primarily OEM’s and Corporations) so MS switches between them in priority based on business value.
This has some implications: - Apple doesn’t care about corporate IT. They don’t mind if corporations buy Apple products, and they occasionally put in features that make IT happy (e.g. Apple Remote Desktop, IP SEC VPN support) but when they make choices between end users and corporate IT, the end users win. For example, the iPhone has a camera, and plays video, which are things that consumers care about, but not corporations. - Microsoft doesn’t really care about end users. They make most of their OS money from OEM and corporate licensing deals. - Since Microsoft doesn’t focus on one “customer”, all of their products are a negotiated balance between multiple customers, and no customers are thrilled. For example, corporate IT wants an OS to be stable, efficient and manageable, so MS put tons of “security” into Vista. OEM’s want exciting new features that require people to buy new PC’s, so MS put flashy graphics into Vista. But the “security” irritates consumers, and the “flashy graphics” irritates corporate IT. The result: an OS that neither corporations nor consumers want.
I certainly wouldn’t mind if Apple old more to businesses. But I wouldn’t want them to lose focus on the end user to try to make corporate IT happy.
mattbucher
I’d say that Apple does focus a lot of attention on solutions for education. Look at some of their Profiles in Success. I think this is a smart move because in ten or fifteen years, your corporate IT directors will be kids raised on Apple products and know that they are just as robust and reliable as any other brand (more so).
elkrun1
“Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition….”
In the 80’s and 90’s, Apple forgot who it is. Steve Jobs brought back a sense of identity (It stood for excellence), a sense of purpose (Computer products for the rest of us) and the discipline to “say no to a 1000 things” (Job’s words). This is the essence of creativity: vision, focus, discipline and the highest standards.
The overriding aim is to return control to the end user. This is the antithesis of enterprise organization. This is why IT managers whom I’ve met fear and loathe Macs and push them as far to the periphery of the organization as possible. The user has too much “control.” Woo! Woo! How scary can you get?
The real compromiser has been Microsoft trying to make mediocre products for everyone that “sort of work.”
Todd
“… a failure of imagination and ambition.”
Wow, those two things would not be on my list of Apple’s shortcomings. Do you think anybody has ever accused Steve Jobs of having not enough ambition? In his entire life?
mitchell Magouirk
take a look at what apple offers it. unix certified(windows is not),servers,storage,xgrid,osxserver with unlimited client license,lights out server management.pro tools.multiplatform compatibilty etc
zato
People like watching Football because it’s a metaphor for the way things work in the world. Whatever you try to do, and the bigger that thing is, someone or some entity will oppose you. The furthur you encroach into their territory and the more powerful they are, the higher the price they will make you pay.
and “elkrun1” …very good post.
Paul Reitz
Unusual, isn’t it, that the smug corporate IT fanboys now think Apple should pay them some attention, now that they find Apple has several compelling products.
Who cares that it might be possible to have fully buzzword-compliant IT solutions and user-inspiring applications and interfaces? Frankly, I doubt they are mutually compatible. But it’s certainly not necessary for Apple to waste its money on them.
I trust Apple will not indulge the IT culture, continuing to treat it with benign neglect until corporate IT attitudes change. I’ve lived through too many Microsoft shops to think otherwise.
Kingsley
Preach it braw. The enterprise can go were no mac has gone before, in a shiny, sexy outfit, no less.
dbt
the problem is that, by and large, “ready for the enterprise” means “built email around exchange”. Screw that. Turn on your damn imap over ssl, lazy exchange administrators, and quit expecting the rest of the world to build software tuned to your idiosyncratic preferences and cargo cult administration.
The worst part is, I know people who worked on the IMAP support in exchange. It’s brilliant. And nobody uses it.
Andrew Jaquith
Anil — You don’t know me, but I have admired your work for a while. I totally agree that consumer technologies should be embraced in the enterprise, because they make employees more productive and happy. We just released a short research note I wrote on the iPhone (“Talking Sense About iPhone Security”) that describes how enterprises can prepare themselves for employees who bring their iPhones to work. E-mail me if interested, and I’ll shoot you a copy.
jcricket
Wow, gotta love the “love” for your IT support people. Yes, they’re all intentionally trying to f* you over and not support your favorite new toys.
There’s no reason why they can’t support an endless supply of new gadgets, software, allow you to do whatever you want to your PC, install every new widget that comes along, etc.
I’m sure that if they just give up control and let you do whatever you want everything will work out ok, right? You’ll never have to wait longer than you expect because the entire network is down with malware? There will never be a security breach because your personal laptop wasn’t patched that IT now has to take days to recover from?
Get a goddamn clue, people. Everyone has a unique job in the organization, which requires they look at the world in a different way. Operations, IT, Finance are inherently conservative because they’re tasked with making sure things work for everyone, and are done in a scaleable and secure fashion.
None of that might matter to you if you work over in the art department or in R&D, but they matter to the organization.
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