Mac developer urges Apple to reject lure of enterprise computing
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 13, 2007 at 12:26pm
Drawing comparisons between Microsoft and Apple., independent Mac developer Alykhan Jetha is urging Apple to stick to its knitting in the small business and consumer markets, and leave the large enterprise market to the “PC society that has stalled out on innovation.” Jetha is the CEO of Marketcircle, makers of Daylite and Billings business software for the Mac.
“If Apple has to worry about keeping slow-moving enterprises happy, it cannot innovate and thus it cannot have success,” he says. “Just look at how much effort and work Microsoft has to put into maintaining all kinds of backwards compatibility. It’s a ball and chain that will render Apple as ‘just another tech company’ should it decide to chase the enterprise market.”
U.S. Small Business Administration Statistics show that small businesses account for half of U.S. non-farm real gross domestic product, and have generated 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs over the past decade. In the U.K., small businesses employ more than 58 per cent of the private sector workforce, according to statistics from the Federation of Small Businesses. Jetha says that much like Apple, the job of small business “is to run circles around the large enterprises and push innovation—and the economy—forward.”
“The irony in all of this,” adds Jetha in his blog, “is that Apple is actually getting into the enterprise … This trend is driven by the users who first experience Apple’s ease of use via an iPod or increasingly via an iPhone, who then take a very small risk and buy a Mac. It used to be that employees in the lower rungs of the food chain would try to bring Macs into various businesses—big and small. They would inevitably get shot down by IT staff or their bosses. We know this because Daylite was often an accomplice in this kind of maneuver. Now the tables are turned, it is the high level execs that are experiencing Apple’s ease of use and those execs are demanding Macs (and thankfully, Mac business software).”
Despite Apple’s wins in the executive suites of large enterprise companies, Jetha reiterates, “you can’t innovate when you cater to dinosaurs.” Jetha’s blog entries on this topic can be found here.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
