Steve Jobs Didn't Believe in Macs for Business. But Here They Are

Fifteen years after he left Apple, Dale Fuller finds his effort to push Apple machines onto big businesses is no longer at odds the Jobsian vision -- or least, not entirely.
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Ariel Zambelich/Wired.com

When Dale Fuller was trying to resuscitate Apple's PowerBook division in the late 1990s, he didn't see eye-to-eye with Steve Jobs.

Fuller saw all those PC makers selling Windows laptops to big businesses, and as he struggled to inject new life into Apple's moribund PowerBook division, he wanted to do the same. But Jobs said no.

According to Fuller, Jobs saw business IT departments as a barrier. In those days, CIOs believed in "JEDI," or Just Enough Desktop Infrastructure -- meaning they only wanted to invest in the minimum amount of computing an employee needed to do his job, and nothing more. An IT department, Jobs argued, is about control -- and not about empowering the user. Jobs' central belief was that computers should be about the user, and that's why he wouldn't let Fuller sell PowerBooks to businesses.

"I don't think Steve ever cared about money," Fuller says. "He just wanted to do this stuff the right way."

Fifteen years after he left Apple, Dale Fuller still thinks Macs are good for business. His new company, MokaFive, carries the tagline: "Finally, Apple for the Enterprise." But the world has changed, and his efforts to push Apple machines onto businesses are no longer at odds with the Jobsian vision -- or least, not entirely. MokaFive offers a way of running a company's official Windows environment on a Mac. The idea is that employees can do whatever they like on the Mac's native operating system, but then toggle over to a window running, well, Windows, where they can use official corporate copies of Outlook, Office, Photoshop and other business software.

The company seeks to ride a larger wave across the business world. Increasingly, employees are bringing their own machines into the workplace, including not only iPads, iPhones and Android devices, but also Mac laptops. Terry Cosgrove, an analyst with research outfit Gartner, estimates that Macs now account for almost 10 percent of the computers used in today's businesses -- and that the majority of those are owned by the employee. Apple is what these employees use at home, and they want to use it at work too. They're breaking the control that IT departments once wielded.

MokaFive's aim is to offer software that lets businesses manage these rogue machines -- offering a kind of compromise between employees and their Windows-centric IT departments.

After leaving Apple in 1997, Fuller served as CEO of onetime software giant Borland and later took the reigns at anti-virus outfit McAfee, before holding board seats at various other big tech names, including AVG and Phoenix Technologies. Then, in 2008, he stumbled onto a desktop virtualization project at Stanford University. Professor Monica Lam and her research team had built software that allowed users to run a separate operating system -- such as Windows -- atop Mac OS X.

The idea was not a new one. The Seattle-based Parallels has offered this sort of virtualization software for the Mac for years, and similar tools are available on other platforms from the likes of VMware and Citrix. But Fuller's aim was to take the Stanford technology and turn it into a tool that could bring Macs to big business, offering the sort of security and management tools that IT departments require.

The result was MokaFive. MokaFive runs Windows in what it calls a secure container on Mac OS X and backs up work onto a company's servers. IT managers can create a common Windows image that they can then push down to an employee's Mac over the network. They can also update the image over the network, but that virtualized Windows desktop still works when the machine is offline.

Managers can also prevent employees from moving data out of their virtualized Windows desktop, and when data is moved over the network, it's encrypted. But Gartner's Cosgrove questions whether the tool is suited for those that are handling extremely sensitive data, such as healthcare outfits and government agencies. "[Client-side virtualization tools] tend to be [used] in areas with low security," he tells Wired.

MokaFive -- which first began offering its software in 2009 -- has already signed up some large customers, including Electronic Arts, which inked a 8,000-seat deal, and a "large petroleum company based in England," which plumped for 33,000 seats.

And MokaFive is not alone. In July, Parallels introduced a business version of its Mac virtualization tool: Parallels Desktop for Mac Enterprise Edition. And Steve Perlman's new-age gaming outfit, OnLive, is offering a web service that streams Windows desktops onto iPads. Apple still doesn't sell machines to businesses -- at least not officially -- but Macs are business machines nonetheless.

Even the man himself was willing to at least acknowledge the trend. When bootstrapping MokaFive, Fuller felt the need to ask Jobs' blessing. This was partly out of respect for his old boss and partly an exercise in self-preservation. Fuller asked a friend -- a senior manager at Apple -- to run the idea by Jobs, and Jobs responded. "I'm not going to put money into it," he said. "But I'm not going to stop it."

At that tells you everything you need to know about Apple's view of the business market. At least for now.