I was once told that if any Apple employees used the term 'business-to-business', they'd be sacked on the spot. That's just the kind of over-egged Apple story that people like to chuck around of course, but the root of that is true: the Apple does not want to consider itself an enterprise, B2B company.
Photo by arquera on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
That doesn't stop people in businesses wanting to use Mac at work, especially in design and creative firms. The Guardian is about half PC and Mac right now and is switching to be 100% Mac when we move to the new building at King's Cross in November.
Someone even had a vague memory of Steve Jobs saying the Guardian is one of the biggest Apple hubs in Europe or some such, but that quote has been lost in the mists of internet time. (I can't find it on Google...)
Business Week's cover story this week looks at the rise of Apple in the corporate world, explaining that the new chief operating officer of Juniper Networks, Michele Goins, is allowing around 10% of the 6,000-strong workforce to pick Macs.
"Funny thing is, she has never received a single sales call from Apple. While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference. After a series of failed offensives by the company in the 1980s and 1990s, Chief Executive Steve Jobs decided to focus squarely on consumers and education customers when he returned to Apple in 1997.
"As a result, the company doesn't have ranks of corporate salespeople or armies of repairmen waiting to respond every time a hard drive fails. Nothing that could divert his minions from staying focused on Apple's core calling: creating the next cool thing for the world's consumers."
