The Homa Files

Takeaway: Apple is a favorite at home, and many Mac Heads are now demanding their favorite computers in the workplace.

So far, Apple has turned a blind eye to the corporate customer. Perhaps this is because team Jobs worries that the buttoned-up behemoths would taint its sexy consumer brand.

That said, the recent introduction of the iPad reminds us that the consumer may soon become maxed out with Mac gear and the corporate client may become more critical to boosting Apple’s bottom line. Could a clever multiple target strategy help Apple have its cake and eat it too?
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Excerpt from itbusiness.ca, “The enterprise opportunity Apple doesn’t want you to know about” by Jeff Jedras, February 8, 2010.
 
There probably isn’t a week that goes by without an enterprise IT manager hearing one of their users lament “why can’t I have one of those cool iMacs instead of this boring, grey PC?” It’s enough to make even the strongest IT manager run for the hills.

While IT had a list of tried and true answers to bar Apple for many years – cost of support, compatibility with Windows networks, cost of acquisition – those barriers have been coming down, one by one. New management tools make managing mixed networks simple. You can even run Windows on a Mac device, and the increased reliability of an Apple machine can net-out the marginal difference in acquisition cost.

So, increasingly, there is a stronger and stronger case to be made for bringing Apple into the enterprise market. The question is, is the enterprise a market that the fiercely consumer-focused company even wants to go after?

On that question, the jury is out. Apple declined several requests to be interviewed for this feature.

The enterprise is certainly an untapped market for Apple. According to a November, 2009 report from Forrester Research on Enterprise Platform Trends, enterprise Mac OS use was at just four per cent in June 2009, up from one per cent when Forrester first began tracking the statistic in 2006.
Edit by BHC
Full Article:
http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=56341&cid=6

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This entry was posted on February 11, 2010 at 7:43 am and is filed under Mktg - Segmentation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.