May 17, 1999
Apple is back, but does IT care?
By Bob O'Donnell
Though the continued survival of the company and its products has been questioned for
several years now, it seems fairly clear after last week's World Wide Developer's
Conference that Apple Computer and the Macintosh are back. The show was well attended and,
according to numerous reports from the conference, developers are not only no longer
questioning the future existence of the Mac as a viable platform, they seem to even be
rediscovering some of their long-lost enthusiasm for the Mac. Given that Apple has been
more on the receiving end of jokes than developer support during the last few years,
that's important news.
But although Apple may be on the rebound overall, it's not clear that it has made any
progress in the world of IT or that IT managers even care. The iMac, in particular, has
rekindled interest in the Mac in the consumer market, but that hasn't translated into the
company having much success in corporate America -- despite the recent resurgence. You
certainly don't hear as many stories about entire corporations performing wholesale
changeovers from the Mac to Windows as you used to even just a few years back, but you
also don't hear any stories about movements in the opposite direction.
Apple seems to have given up on big and even midsize businesses, and the Mac's status
in corporate America reflects that. In the process, the company has also lost its
once-vaunted position as the primary Windows alternative. Instead of people sneaking Macs
into work, they're now bringing Linux in through the back door. It's Linus Torvalds and
friends who are now seen as the saviors from the Evil Empire instead of Steve Jobs and his
cohorts.
On the one hand, this is perfectly understandable. After all, Apple fell down in the
execution department for several years, and it never was able to regain the position it
once commanded. And, to Steve Jobs' credit, the company has focused on only certain areas
and chosen to take on only certain battles -- and fighting for corporate mind share
doesn't seem to be one of them.
On the other hand, it's kind of a shame because Apple is starting to regain its former
role as the computer technology industry leader. In years past it was always Apple that
brought neat innovations to the computer market first, both in hardware and software. Only
later were these developments aped by the Wintel hegemony. Recently, however, the Wintel
crowd has ended up leading the way in new technologies with developments such as Universal
Serial Bus (USB), Accelerated Graphics Port, 3-D graphics, and faster memory and system
bus technologies, among others. Interestingly, though, the pendulum is swinging back
Apple's way. Standardizing on USB and, more importantly, IEEE 1394 (a.k.a. Firewire)
without looking back at the older technologies that were holding the platform back was a
gutsy move on Apple's part. In addition, simple but useful innovations such as the G3
system's "side door" panel are signs of a company willing to once again take a
technological lead.
Still, Apple has some large hurdles to overcome before it can ever regain a position in
corporate America. Certainly the introduction of Office 98 for the Mac, with its Office 97
binary-compatible file formats, made an enormous difference in the
"acceptability" of the Mac in certain environments. Now that we're on the eve of
the Office 2000 release and there's not even a peep about a Mac version, however (not to
mention the glaring holes of a sorely outdated Mac version of FrontPage and no Mac version
whatsoever of Access, Publisher, or PhotoDraw), the Mac's position of equality may suffer.
Of course, as more applications move to the Web and Linux, and other open-source
alternatives start to slowly break down the Windows monopoly in corporate America, these
concerns will become less relevant. In the meantime, however, it doesn't look like Macs
will be reappearing in the typical IT manager's view anytime soon.
©
Copyright 1999, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
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