The Macalope’s not gonna lie to you: He continues to be astounded at Apple’s success in the enterprise. This beast had always assumed the usual herd mentality of corporate IT that has them lowing toward Redmond (and also sending them all their cow money) would continue to stay in effect.
But it turns out they really wanted tablets, ones that actually work and are easy to use. Who knew? Not Microsoft. Oh, and they wanted phones that don’t suck. RIM did not know that.
How did this happen?
OK, you know Apple’s secret weapon? (Well, one of its secret weapons.) You probably do, but the Macalope’s gonna lay it out for you: Apple’s secret weapon is to make a good product and let the rest take care of itself. Maybe that’s not fair to Phil Schiller, because he probably does a lot of work, but, basically, you make the product good and people are going to want it. End of story.
Joe McKendrick notes the effect this has. If you’re an enterprise IT manager, you probably never get a visit from an Apple rep …
Yet, your company is probably crawling with Apple sales representatives. Not paid representatives, mind you, but your employees, many of whom are Apple customers (who are more powerful sales representatives than any other vendors’ rep forces combined).
Because they’re there all the time. Constantly bugging you, always trying to get their iPads on the corporate Wi-Fi, dressing and smelling way better than you do …
God, you hate them sooo much!
Another thing the Macalope’s surprised by is how poorly Android is doing in the enterprise.
A survey that Gartner conducted in April showed 58 percent of enterprises have or will make iOS, used in iPhones and iPads, their primary mobile platform in the next year, compared with 20 percent for BlackBerry and 9 percent for Android.
Admittedly, he didn’t predict it would be a cesspool of malware, one that gets bigger each year. 9 percent, though? That’s pretty low compared to Android’s overall market share. Apparently Android users aren’t the evangelists that iPhone and iPad users are.
That, at least, is not surprising.
[Editors’ Note: In addition to being a mythical beast, the Macalope is not an employee of Macworld. As a result, the Macalope is always free to criticize any media organization. Even ours.]