the Verge:
A group of 70 Japanese companies including Hitachi and NEC are reportedly partnering to create a general corporation called “iOS Consortium” in order to speed up adoption of Apple products in the enterprise. According toNikkei, it will be established on June 21st, and aims to jointly develop software, train engineers, and increase the user-friendliness of the enterprise iOS experience. Hitachi and others believe that iOS products can be used in a wide variety of business applications — from customer service at banks to merchandise management at retail stores — and they want to supply the software to make it happen.Microsoft need to be very worried about this development. This is the kind of stuff that totally bites you in the ass later. Apple is driving deep into the enterprise….]]>
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where are those people saying apple products don’t get used in enterprise now?
It still isn’t used. Â Forming a consortium doesn’t mean it will go anywhere.
Another way to look at this is that Apple really needs help to be business appropriate. Somethings are limited from the foundation. This should be MS territory. They seem to have put some thought into making Windows 8 and Windows RT manageable from a business aspect. Very little tweaking will be necessary.
And I have to say, this really is not that impressive, I will wait to see what they come up with before jumping for joy. The ideology in Japan is Hardware is everything, software is a waste of time (I know, I live here). Some of the worst interfaces and software I ever seen are here. Printer drivers are pure nightmares, even worse than elsewhere, fonts and interfaces are what you would expect in Windows 95. Software vendors flat out refuse to support security patches. We yearly have to ask global for security exception for an application built on SQL 2000 without a single security patch allowed. Is this what you want for an enterprise? Talk about a security nightmare. This is extremely common in Japan.
apple will always suck in enterprise. apple is just good for design and art minded people and these new tablets that Microsoft is developing might cut into that. When they mentioned the full touch keyboard and the pen at the Microsoft thing this afternoon, people in live blog said “there goes Wacom tablets”.Â
One of my friends clients wanted to use apple for their server and get it to work with other enterprise software and after trying to do it, he couldn’t get it to work well enough so they switched to full Microsoft servers. Just because these companies for a consortium doesn’t mean they’ll be able to make it work.
I agree and that’s what W8 is about, a hybrid, integrated, seemlessly working and unified tablet/PC against which neither Apple nor Google can compete. Like I’ve often said Microsoft will kill the tablet market for Google and Apple’s Ipad market share will suffer greatly. Micorsoft will dominate the consumer and enterprise tablet market whether it be this year or over 5 years. The timeframe in which this will happen, does not really matter. It’s a fact of life, just like the air we breath, gravity, a shift in the fabric of time, the excistance of life or the cosmos itself, an ever undeniable ever persistant truth. The enterprise will love the W8 tablet/PC for sure. It will eliminate the need for Ipads and Google tablets which do not integrate seemlessly with their (windows and IT) apllications, devices, Cloud services or (other) platforms. Yes the assets on which Microsoft is building their tablet/PC empire is the 1.3 billion Windows users worldwide, which Google and Apple cannot match (sorry to say, but not really). Apple can still not match the software prowes of Microsoft, that’s why they are still so dependant on Microsoft Office. Imacs and Ipads are not truly integrated into one, which also gives them a big disadvantage when it comes to pricing, functionality and usability of tablets for enterprises and consumers. Google is even further from home, plagued by fragmentation (in the mobile and tablet market, poor quality apps and security issues) and absolutely no presence in the PC (including PC-software) market and a lot of money losing projects (Google+, Android, Automated cars, Fast internet, Google Wallet, Poject Glass etc), Google is far behind in being able to develop competing software products like W8 tablet/PC. The acquisition of Motorolla (also a 12 billion dollar losing venture, since it can’t protect it’s partners from patent infringement cases against Apple and Microsoft among others) Google is stil an advertisement company, 96% from Google’s revenue comes from advertisements. Yes bye bye Google and Apple, it’s still a Microsoft world and the order of things, which never really changed (despite the fact that some thought so), will be as it always was.