Why isn't Apple attacking the enterprise market?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41277626

by edgefield • 2 years ago

21 41 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There are few markets Apple can enter to continue its growth trajectory, given its size. Enterprise computing is such a market. With Apple silicon, supply chain, support infrastructure, and Mac laptops increasingly used on the client side, why isn’t Apple more aggressively attacking the enterprise market? Seems like a lost opportunity to me. Curious to hear thoughts on this.

znpy• 2 years ago

It is. Macbook are very common in enterprises, as well as iphones (for the mdm features)

greenthrow2• 2 years ago

What product are you envisioning that Apple doesn't offer? Rackable compute? Not worth their time.

Look at the products they make. They try to make stuff that targets the widest market possible; everybody. They try not to go for niche markets.

carbotaniuman• 2 years ago

This is from the company that just made the Apple Vision Pro. I don't see any reason they couldn't do limited forays into enterprise.

greenthrow2• 2 years ago

Their obvious goal is everyone buys a Vision Pro.

Obviously they could make a foray into enterprise hardware. They did it in the past. They have no interest. The addressable market is too small. As I already said, when Apple makes a product they want to the addressable market to be everyone.

icedchai• 2 years ago

Apple used to have some enterprise hardware products, like the XServe (rackmount Mac.) They also had Mac OS Server. They must've had a reason to stop.

talldayo• 2 years ago

Seems pretty clear, in hindsight. Microsoft won the enterprise "stack" by bringing Active Directory and the Office products to Mac. They were blatantly willing to go cross-platform, which meant Windows Server would be a sure choice for expanding companies that wanted to pay extra to ignore compatibility (and even then, neither MacOS Server nor Windows Server were that good of an idea).

So if Apple couldn't win the integrated product segment of the server market, they had to compete against the post-dotcom-bubble cloud behemoth. The one that had been more or less cannibalized by Linux and brought down to-cost or even below-cost by AWS. MacOS Server could carve out a cutesy niche as an accessible FTP server and Time Machine host, but they couldn't make a business out of it when Linux did it all for free.

lukeh• 2 years ago

Mostly agree, but MS did not bring AD to the Mac: their server only runs on Windows, and the AD client was developed by Apple (as part of DirectoryServices/OpenDirectory, Heimdal and smbx).

kyriakos• 2 years ago

Apple is a consumer (or prosumer) company and as of late its mostly into mass marketable products. They are already trying another trajectory, subscription services (targeting a wide market again).

jmclnx• 2 years ago

These days and probably for the past 30 years or so, companies want nothing but cheap in up front costs. If they wanted good hardware, mainframes would still be selling very well, much more than now.

qeternity2• 2 years ago

This is just financing optics. There’s no reason Apple couldn’t do the same thing.

okanat• 2 years ago

There is no point in investing in good displays, good speakers or high-end performance parts for a laptop that's going to be hooked up to a monitor and run bland accounting apps for 8 hours, 5 days a week.

kthartic• 2 years ago

At every tech company I've worked at, 99% of the software engineers are using company provided MacBooks (if that counts).

blueyes• 2 years ago

My personal belief: Because the enterprise market, separating as it does the user from the buyer, creates incentives that lead to bad products.

unfocused• 2 years ago

The short answer is: Apple would give away control of their products if they did.

Enterprise/Corporate/Govt all have tedious amounts of niche needs and requirements to endlessly grow.

Can’t find the quote as I’m on my phone, but when a former exec from Apple left and joined a corp, and asked Steve if he wanted to expand to corporate, he said he won’t stop him, but he isn’t going to help him either. (I’m sure I butchered it), but something like that.

Remember, IT = Control.

kingkongjaffa• 2 years ago

They do but mostly in their peripherals. The monitors they sell are for the enterprise creative and entertainment industries: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/pro-display-xdr

Their mainstream prosumer computers are also fine and widely used in many enterprises industries

FooBarBizBazz• 2 years ago

It is used in enterprise, but it's linked to status. Above a certain level, you don't have to explain that you won't be getting the Windows laptop; it would just be disrespectful.

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

I guess Apple could afford to buy Oracle.

throw0101d• 2 years ago

[…] why isn’t Apple more aggressively attacking the enterprise market?

Apple seems to be doing just fine (including financially) selling widgets to 'regular' consumers. They're already one of the largest companies in the world doing their current strategy: what would they gain from doing "enterprise"?

Further: please define "enterprise market".

Are we talking about hardware like servers? Data storage? Networking? Are you talking about ERP solution? CRM? Supply chain management? Business intelligence / analytics? HRM? Payroll? Identity management? Project management?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_software

What are the margins on those things? What are the volumes on units? Do you need a sales staff (perhaps working on commission)?

Apple products seem to already be quite popular and in demand, so I'm not sure what 'going after' another market would get them.

justin662• 2 years ago

what would they gain from doing "enterprise"?

They are valued at 3.4 trillion dollars with a P/E ratio of 34. They can give a lot of that up, or they can continue to grow, as their current valuation demands.

Further: please define "enterprise market".

It's simple enough to think of it as some thing they are not doing, but can do, to make money. It's much less of a stretch than cars, which is one thing they've explored.

qeternity2• 2 years ago

Their trailing PE is 34. Markets are forward looking however. Their forward PE is ~30. Whether or not that is reasonable is another story.

Nevermark• 2 years ago

what would they gain from doing "enterprise"?

Enough sales to bump their market cap needle to the tune of an additional $1 trillion or three.

I think if Apple revisited their old "bicycle for the mind" focus, with computers and software as productivity multipliers for individuals and business, it would naturally have an upstream path to enterprise.

Instead their newer unifying view of devices, apps and media, seems to flow through a services, social, entertainment and store/middleman/gatekeeper/kiosk lens.

They stumbled onto Vision Pro as being a great Mac enhancer, but I predict that with their loss of productivity focus, they won't lean into where that could go.

"Apple Vision" (not Pro) should be the lower cost, shiny iOS-type $2.00 app sales kiosk "in 3D!" for "everyone" and "anyone", that Apple knows it wants out there.

"Apple Vision Pro" should become a fully Mac-independent Mac-eclipsing no-sandbox powerhouse that leverages visual and gesture computing into highly productive interfaces for deep individual and collaborative work. Justifying prices like $3500, $4500, etc. I know my Vision Pro desperately wants to be that!

Enterprise would see the value in that, once it was on their face.

I hope Apple creates that. But their ambitions seem to be much lower lately.

gtvwill• 2 years ago

Apples products aren't suitable for enterprise. They aren't repairable, aren't easily deployable, they make poor engineering choices which put the integrity of their hardware at risk, they don't run most business software, their security and update posture is a complete joke, they nerf products just to bleed more money out of consumers, they treat their employees and b2b dealings like sht. I can go on, the list is borderline endless with Apple.

Just all round dealing with Apple and their products is a effin nightmare. It's impossible to explain ethics to Apple users too. They literally have their head in the sand. Apples so crap to service and work with its gotten to the point where I just double my rate to 160 an hour if you want to bring an apple device anywhere near me just to discourage it. Please if you have apple take your business elsewhere. But alas they keep coming and I keep replacing macbooks with real work machines.

jeffreportmill1• 2 years ago

Apple once bought an enterprise company called NeXT:

https://web.archive.org/web/20011017163151/http://www.apple....

browningstreet• 2 years ago

Personally I think they are happy leaving that work to others. It’s dirty, thankless work. Apple is still well represented in every enterprise I’ve ever worked in. But they don’t want to build an AD server that also manages PCs and their commitment to their office suite isn’t about the market penetration that office and Google have with their competing offerings.

But every enterprise is chock full of iPhones and MacBooks, for which they collect very healthy margins.

jerrymcflurry• 2 years ago

Because their products are not enterprise-level. I work in a company that provides macbooks to developers and we have over 500 apple silicon macs and managing them is an absolute nightmare.

Hardware is terrible quality, they have so many issues with faulty screens and charging and every time you have to send one back to Apple via a reseller it takes weeks and the fix cost is usually not worth it, so we have to write them off before they depreciate. Intel Macs often have issues triggering the installation for some reason, sometimes it takes dozen reboots to kick it off.

There's no staging for the OS, each device gets updates straight from the internet and every update breaks something. There has not been a single minor update in 13.x and 14.x that hasn't broken some backwards compatibility (breaking Keychain seems to be Apple's favorite thing) or changing user's settings such as notifications or security&privacy breaking third party software annoying the user and making our lives miserable and there's nowhere you can raise an issue, so you can't rely on building out (limited) automation because API calls keep getting removed, changed or removed in binaries but left in code like the call to trust a cert key in Keychain...

Safari is absolute trash. I have the worst opinion about people who made it, that browser doesn't not belong anywhere outside of testing. It's a complete and utter garbage, the only browser that doesn't know how to handle SSO sessions, can't remember certificate preferences and keeps prompting user for authentication when accessing Keychain when other browsers don't.

Apple Mail is the next worst piece of software I've ever whitnessed in my entire life, it's possibly the only mail client in the entire world that doesn't know how to re-use a connection to an IMAP server, it opens a new connection for every single thing possible absolutely hammering a mail server. This is just absolutely insane.

MDM is incomplete because of MacOS restrictions, there are lots of things you can't do which you would expect from the most basic MDM tool and the most annoying thing about it is that signing into an iCloud account prevents MDM from wiping the device essentially giving someone a device free of charge so what's the point of MDM then...

Apple's devices are built for retail consumers, not enterprise users.

fetzu• 2 years ago

I see a lot of “technical” reasons being given here, but my gut feeling is that it would also clash with the image Apple is trying to project through its products: tools that are used by individuals to “be creative” and connect to their loved ones. If most users interactions with their Apple device (in this case, mostly computers) started to be bland business tasks and interactions it would probably just taint that image and users would start to equate Apple as “yet another boring hardware company”.

So not only is the enterprise market a thankless one, but it would also clash with their message.

hi-v-rocknroll• 2 years ago

They tried half-heartedly a few times, but SJ dissuaded them culturally from trying again. There was Apple's "OLE" and Xserves, but they were never sold correctly with an enterprise outside salesforce. Furthermore, the enterprisey products Apple created were still retailish and lacking in key features enterprise wanted. Apple also failed to listen to enterprise customers, and still continues to ignore the desperate pleas from other MAANGs and enterprise customers to this day (i.e., MDM and configuration management).

yobid20• 2 years ago

Because nobody wants the pay 3x the cost for the same hardware as an intel pc. Plus ios sucks.

runjake• 2 years ago

Apple used to, on multiple occasions, but failed. Apple isn’t good at enterprise and never has been, and the margins are too small and competitive to be of interest to them.

vouaobrasil• 2 years ago

I think there's another psychological reason: Apple doesn't want their product to be perceived as annoying and ugly. And when you use enterprise-level tech, it gets ugly, buggy, and exceptionally annoying. Ask anyone who uses enterprise-level Windows -- even in the best cases, it's still rather annoying even if not buggy. It's ugly.

oso2k• 2 years ago

Cost of customer acquisition, length of sales cycles.

Selling enterprise software or hardware means paid lunches and dinners to steakhouses, 3-24 months sales cycles, multiple free workshops or demos or presentations. This all costs anywhere from $10K to even millions of $ plus sales teams and internal training, marketing, management and other overhead.

In the consumer market, there’s probably a lot fewer overheads.

textlapse• 2 years ago

Maybe they went through the conundrum of ‘beautiful, shiny metal boxes - one size fits all’ that sits hidden in some server warehouse or dusty room?

I can’t think of any successful, non-consumer facing product that Apple has ever built - it’s not even clear it’s in their DNA. The closest I can think of is Xcode cloud.

Also most companies have already opted their employees into using Macs so that’s something that sells itself with very little sales prowess from Apple’s side.

Spooky232• 2 years ago

They are. I work for a big enterprise… we probably have $25M of iOS devices. Apple is a huge supplier, through the channel.

Mac is growing as well, probably 20% yoy for my place. They probably have the best security and compliance story in the business.

They have a model that prints money. Getting deeper means sales teams skimming 20%.

iJohnDoe3• 2 years ago

That’s not enterprise. That’s just mobile devices. Everyone needs a cell phone.

Verizon or AT&T could do the same thing for you, whether it’s iOS or Android. It’s a consumer device that happens to be used by employees.

Spooky232• 2 years ago

No way. iOS is more blackberry than blackberry was. They own the space.

daviddever23box• 2 years ago

The on-premise compute (server) market doesn't offer anything unique for Apple to contribute; they are themselves, purportedly, continuing to use quite a bit of white-box and third-party branded compute, with Linux as one of the OSes. (Disclaimer: I have not stepped into an Apple-owned data center anytime within the last six years, so any of this may be subject to change, which itself might be very interesting!)

As for the on-premise workstation market, this is long rumored to be shrinking, leaving the Dell-HP-Lenovo (DHL) triad to the spoils for Linux or Windows on commercial PCs. That dominance yields when remote / BYOD enters the fray (as Microsoft 365 and Google Docs run nearly anywhere).

iJohnDoe3• 2 years ago

I can actually answer this with direct knowledge.

We were an enterprise customer of Apple. We deployed Xserves in production. Xserve RAIDS. Really cool stuff. We even had an inside enterprise account team.

Steve Jobs simply did not want to do enterprise. He personally told everyone this, including the enterprise team. He always wanted Apple to be a consumer company.

Apple did not want to support enterprise customers for 5+ years. They discontinued parts and support for Xserve and other things way too early for enterprise customers. Dell, IBM, etc., supports their enterprise hardware easily for 5 years and even longer. We bought piles of drives and other parts whenever we could once Apple told us support was being discontinued.

Dell, Lenovo, and others have onsite support for repairs, especially for enterprise servers. Same day and even 4-hours onsite repairs. Apple wanted you to go to an Apple store or in mail it in, even for clear recall items. This is a complete nightmare for enterprise. Wiping drives before going to a store or mailing it, ugh. Dell, etc., a tech shows up, replaces a motherboard in 5 minutes while you watch and done.

I’m not saying I’m a fan of Dell or they are perfect. However, they are an enterprise company that Apple never even tried to match in the slightest.

If you didn’t have the support of Steve Jobs on anything then you didn’t do it. I’m sure that legacy has continued regarding enterprise. I think it’s a okay. Apple doesn’t need to do enterprise.

obarthelemy• 2 years ago

Corps put value on TCO, repairability, sturdiness, LTS... Not on looks and image.

NaOH• 2 years ago

Why doesn’t the successful bodega owner open a supermarket? It’s the same general idea of grab and go, just bigger.

Why doesn’t Toyota go after the semi truck market? They’re all vehicles.

Why doesn’t Hilton have a line of bed and breakfast locations? Both are just short-term accommodations.

Why doesn’t the excellent restaurant also have catering services? It’s all making and serving food, right?

Why doesn’t UPS get into the trans-ocean shipping industry? It’s just another form of moving boxes.

When we see sufficiently successful businesses there’s an alignment between the customers’ needs and how the business operates. Once the targeted customer changes too dramatically, the unseen skeleton supporting the company is no longer appropriate, and altering (or adding to) the bones of a business is so difficult and rare that it’s hard to find successful examples. All of this is often reduced to, “It’s just not in some company’s DNA” or “Money can’t fix/create everything.”

So when it comes to Apple and enterprise, all facets of how they do things are geared toward consumers, not businesses and their IT setups. That’s product design, marketing, sales, support, etc. Like most long-term successful companies, Apple has generally been good at working with its strengths and steering clear of its weaknesses. Instead of adjusting itself to accommodate the enterprise market, for example, it’s “easier” (and likely more profitable) to develop AirPods, which I’ve heard on their own would be a Fortune 500 company.

Why isn't Apple attacking the enterprise market?

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