But he didn't threaten them with an Iceberg Award 

You too can help 

Get back in the ocean and eat some fish 

Wanted: OS X feedfront 

Geeks at liesure 

Hack arrives 

Blogs? They're what get you interviewed about blogs. 

Hot air 

CNN and the other U.S. TV networks are all telling the same story, with exactly the same title — the sequel to America Under Siege. Note the word "strike." By itself it tells of revenge, retaliation. Also of air. Mostly we're waging air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Would we be using the same verb if most of the action was on the ground? Just wondering.

More like a one-man Renaissance 

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For the moment, I think, the Americans are just trying to scare the Taliban.

Nonsense, of course. The statement is disingenuous, and the strategy easily discerned from openly accessible US doctrines. The bombing/missle attacks first took out anti-air assets, then moved to their present stage of fixing the enemy in position by destroying their mobile fighting capacity (tanks, trucks, personnel carriers, etc) and forcing them into bunkered positions.

Once fixed in position, you have a lot of choices in how you want to deal with them. There was much press given over the last few days to the "daisy cutter" or FAE bomb that could be dropped into cave mouths to destroy fortified positions. But that's just one option; once you've got them "stuck in the bunkers" without transport, you can wait for them to get hungry or run out of ammo.

Old military aphorism: "Amateurs think about strategy, professionals think about logistics." There are a lot of journalists thinking like amateurs.

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And I've been looking for that last line. Good one.

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Not just yes, but hell yes.

I don't have the hard numbers to back this up, but my understanding is that Apple has shipped more UNIX seats with OS X than anyone has before. Combined. In total.

That ought to get them a seat at the table and a little bit of respect. The Linux folks have been trying to push UNIX for users (not geeks and/or servers) for years, and (imo) failed dismally. Apple hasn't succeeded yet, but they're on the right path.

OS X's two biggest bottlenecks to real adoption are Photoshop and Retrospect. When those two ship, that's when serious upgrades will happen.

Dori
Backup Brain

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Add Microsoft Office to this mix and you have, as implied, a very viable corporate desktop alternative to W2K or WXP. But, Apple still has a problem in the enterprise; hardware. There are two issues here. Paucity of models suitable for office desktops (meaning Macs are too cool for most companies) and single source. With no one else making computers that run OS X, many companies are uncomfortable buying.

The single source issue also leads to questions of performance, which are often the main driver in UNIX workstation purchases. Large workstation orders often hinge upon a few benchmark advantages, with whole installations being switched to different vendors if a competing brand is faster or offers some other performance benefit. Apple has a long way to go to compete in the performance arena, their marketing aside.

Perhaps, as so many have suggested in the past, a future version of OS X for Intel, perhaps Itanium or a successor chip, would resolve this issue. OTOH, Jobs is no fool. If significant numbers of OS X Macs start backdooring into enterprises, there would be business Macs within six months.

Barry Cohen Progressive Strategies

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Maybe they could find a partner to be their Enterprise Supplier Partner?

I do remember in one of the previous unsuccessful rounds, one of their big (and very unhappy) enterprise customers saying "We do business with Apple in spite of them."

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First, Apple service and support is infinitely better than it was when Steve Jobs arrived, even though he immediately shut off the 1-800-APPL free support line, pissing off a lot of people (me included) in a big way. But credit where due: when I call for service now I get somebody almost immediately, and help is always patient and useful. There's plenty of evidence (e.g. Consumer Report's recent survey of PC vendor support) that Apple is now doing a good job there.

And let's not forget that they're making computing easy and fun again with some outstanding hardware. I don't want to discount that.

But that's individual stuff. At the enterprise level, you're right: it's not there. When Apple looks in the enterprise direction it sees many, many burned bridges and a Microsoft Empire on par with Rome under Augustus Caesar. It also that doesn't appear to interest their CEO much anyway. And who knows what unspoken agreements exist between Bill and Steve, quite aside from Microsoft's huge holdings in Apple, whose legitimacy rests rather largely on a steady series of Microsoft Office upgrades?

Steve Jobs is in the first rank of both technology innovation and consumer marketing. Even that may be an understatement. He's profoundly original, and wickedly smart. What he's done with Apple, from product choice through design, branding, retailing, merchandising and even service (through the "genius bars" at Apple's stores) has served to reposition Apple as a premier consumer electronics player. We're only seeing the beginning of it. Your Mac will be the "hub of your digital lifestyle" Steve said at Macworld last January. SKU by SKU, you'll see Apple get back into the peripherals business. Maybe not in printers (where they once had a fabulous position under Terry Bailey but wouldn't let the profitable division operate independently), but certainly in MP3 players, DVD players, and other devices that flank what Sony is doing, rather than taking that giant head-on (in, say, Camcorders).

Consumer electronics is far from the enterprise, where desktop hardware margins are molecule-thin.

So you're right. Relationships are the only way in. The question is, with whom?

Sun would make sense. There we'd have a couple of high-margin, high-style players working together. Oracle would make more sense at a personal level for Steve and Larry, who serves on Apple's board, as I recall.

I think the biggest problem for Apple in the enterprise is hardware. Its gear isn't, as they say, "compatible." Sure, Macs can get along in the enterprise, in the sense that anything that lives on the Net is compatible. But too much of the enterprise computing conversation is about what can only be done on Microsoft OSes and X86 iron. This is Linux' problem to a lesser degree; but Linux runs on X86 iron and is too easy for geeks to sneak in, set up and put to use without showing up on the corporate radar. Apple's stuff won't get past security unless it arrives in the laptop bags of outside contractors or high-clout employees.

Another partner that might make sense is AOL, or perhaps AOL in cahoots with Sun. That's because AOL/Time Warner through its publishing empire is already a huge Apple customer. And affinities between AOL and Apple go back a very long way. AOL is also big in Entertainment, where Steve Jobs is perhaps the most expert executive around. (At Pixar he has driven Godfather-grade deals with Disney — and he's still going strong there.)

But I think other parties will need to take the initiative here.

Meanwhile millions of new Apple desktops are trojan horses for UNIX. To the extent these boxes find their way into enterprises, Apple at least achieves a secondary significance.

discuss

First, Apple service and support is infinitely better than it was when Steve Jobs arrived, even though he immediately shut off the 1-800-APPL free support line, pissing off a lot of people (me included) in a big way. But credit where due: when I call for service now I get somebody almost immediately, and help is always patient and useful. There's plenty of evidence (e.g. Consumer Report's recent survey of PC vendor support) that Apple is now doing a good job there.

And let's not forget that they're making computing easy and fun again with some outstanding hardware. I don't want to discount that.

But that's individual stuff. At the enterprise level, you're right: it's not there. When Apple looks in the enterprise direction it sees many, many burned bridges and a Microsoft Empire on par with Rome under Augustus Caesar. The enterprise also doesn't appear to interest Steve much anyway. And who knows what unspoken agreements exist between Steve and Bill, quite aside from Microsoft's huge holdings in Apple, whose legitimacy rests rather largely on a steady series of Microsoft Office upgrades?

Steve Jobs is a peerless technology innovator and consumer marketer of the first rank. He's profoundly original, wickedly smart and an unusually tough businessman. What he's done with Apple, from product choice through design, branding, retailing, merchandising and even service (through the "genius bars" at Apple's stores) has served to reposition Apple as a premier consumer electronics player. We're only seeing the beginning of it. Your Mac will be the "hub of your digital lifestyle" Steve said at Macworld last January. SKU by SKU, you'll see Apple get back into the peripherals business. Maybe not in printers (where they once had a fabulous position under Terry Bailey but wouldn't let the profitable division operate independently), but certainly in MP3 players, DVD players, and other devices that attach to PCs and flank what Sony is doing, rather than taking that giant head-on (in, say, Camcorders).

But consumer electronics is far from the enterprise, where desktop hardware margins are molecule-thin, thanks to the very cloning business that in retrospect Steve was wise to have dumped when he returned to Apple in 1997.

So you're right. Relationships are the only way Apple gets into the Enterprise in a big way. The question is, with whom?

Sun would make sense. There we'd have a couple of high-margin, high-style players working together. Oracle would make more sense at a personal level for Steve and Larry, who are old friends.

I think the biggest problem for Apple in the enterprise is hardware. Its gear isn't, as they say, "compatible." Sure, Macs can get along in the enterprise, in the sense that anything that lives on the Net is compatible with everything else on the Net. But too much of the enterprise computing conversation is about what can only be done on Microsoft OSes and X86 iron. This is Linux' problem to a lesser degree; but Linux runs on X86 iron and is too easy for geeks to sneak in, set up and put to use without showing up on the corporate radar. Apple's stuff won't get past security unless it arrives in the laptop bags of outside contractors or high-clout employees.

Another partner that might make sense is AOL, or perhaps AOL in cahoots with Sun. That's because AOL/Time Warner through its publishing empire is already a huge Apple customer. And affinities between AOL and Apple go back a very long way. AOL is also big in Entertainment, where Steve Jobs is perhaps the most expert executive around. (At Pixar he has driven Godfather-grade deals with Disney — and he's still going strong there.)

But I think other parties will need to take the initiative here.

Meanwhile millions of new Apple desktops are trojan horses for UNIX. To the extent these boxes find their way into enterprises, Apple at least achieves a secondary significance.

discuss

My opinion is that since this is, essentially, Unix on the Mac hardware, I think that either MacWorld should be renamed or merged with a big Unix show(presumably and preferrably LinuxWorld) as Mac is no longer Mac centered, and is now BSD/Unix centered. This will never happen, mind you, as the Mac community would die if they had to share their top trade show with the Unix geeks.

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