How the Mac saved Microsoft in the Enterprise

Have you seen our new t-shirts?  We are now officially in the big leagues; we’ve got excellent t-shirts and our “company store” is open for business.  Peace Design

The back story is that we were having fun with these internally when a bunch of our customers and a couple of our partners saw them and everyone wanted one.  So we’ve now officially executed what in the trade is known as a “product line extension” although in this case we’re giving all the proceeds to charity.   Please check them out here.  Operators are standing by.

The t-shirts are a fun way to call attention to a very real technology conundrum: Mixed OSs in the enterprise. It is something I feel strongly about and deal with daily with Likewise’s customer base.

Full disclosure:  I worked at Apple for almost nine years.  I started as an IT intern at Apple in 1985 with an employee # in the 6000 range.  During my tenure, I was involved in some of the largest field projects involving Macs in large enterprise organizations – Mac-in-the-enterprise 1.0, if you will.

Last year I returned to the Apple flock when I migrated my work computer form Windows XP to the MacOS on a MacBook Air (love the Air, not so much Entourage).  I also have a long standing personal connection to “the other side.”  My wife Maureen has worked at two companies, Intel and Microsoft.  She recently rejoined Microsoft.  Many of my neighbors and friends work at Microsoft (I live in a Seattle-suburb).  The net of it is I know a few things about Macs in the enterprise as well as what goes on over on the other side of the OS train-tracks.

In 2009, it will become apparent that the Mac is the single “best-of-the-best” thing that happened to Microsoft and to large enterprise customers.

“How’s that?” you ask. For the last couple of years Microsoft has been distracted by choosing a variety of questionable battles.  Google is the best example but there are plenty of others.  Zune for one.  It is shocking that, given what a proven competitor Microsoft is, that it chose to do battle on ground that is so disadvantageous to them.  Search?  One could probably write a book on topic but let’s just say that Microsoft isn’t going to succeed at web-search and that’s OK so long as it does not to detract financially or by burning out top talent on the wrong battles.

There are a couple of battles that Microsoft must fight and win and fortunately, it has the high ground for some of these battles: The OS.  Applications (included SAAS). Virtualization.  Cloud computing.  Enterprise Mobile.  These are places that Microsoft can leverage their “Iron Triangle” (Windows Desktop, Office, Windows Server) as an unfair advantage.  If I were Steve Ballmer I’d be more focused on making Microsoft a bigger, cooler but more nimble (and profitable) IBM, instead of trying to compete in places it can’t win like search and music and always feeling like the dorks compared to Google and Apple.

No news here: Microsoft screwed the pooch with Vista.  We all have our Vista horror stories, I’m sure mine aren’t unique.  Let’s just leave it that Vista has been one of the biggest misses in the industry.  Ever.  While Microsoft likely managed to make a surprising amount of money on Vista, the enterprise adoption is paltry and in my opinion over-reported.   In fact, CIO patience has worn thin with Microsoft; what comes after Vista could wind up being a do-or-die issue for Microsoft.

Fortunately for Microsoft, Apple has helped them out significantly.

“Come again?” you might ask.

Apple created a superior and quite elegant OS reference platform yet stopped short of actually going after Microsoft’s throat in the enterprise.  In fact, the Mac has several significant limitations that prevent widespread enterprise adoption.  Never-mind that these Mac enterprise limitations come partially at the hand of Microsoft (Entourage, office format issues, AD integration); Truth is – Apple hasn’t put their shoulder into the enterprise.  There is ample evidence of this including that Apple’s Enterprise group is located “off-off-Broadway”, far from the main, gleaming campus.

Yet, Apple has created an OS yardstick for Microsoft in the enterprise.  It has poked fun at Microsoft in a way that hurt in its ads.  In some important areas, Apples has drawn real blood (laptops, music, mobile) but the company has failed to to go for the jugular–Microsoft’s footprint in the enterprise.

Apple significantly helped Microsoft “get it right” with Windows 7.  Our technical team has looked at the Windows 7 beta.  This is a team that doesn’t throw out idle praise and certainly doesn’t pull any punches when reviewing Microsoft technology.  To say that the early returns from our team on Windows 7 are positive would be an understatement.  Microsoft appears to have delivered.  And the timing for Microsoft could not  be better.

While much of the technology industry will be fighting to stay alive (including our competitors) over the next couple of years, Microsoft may wind up in a golden position strangely enough because of their Vista miss.  The enterprise market has ignored Vista, but their Windows OS of choice, XP , is getting long in the tooth and Apple has given many of us a taste of what a modern OS should be.  So when Windows 7 ships under budget and ahead of schedule (this year) Microsoft might score big on widespread XP to Win7 enterprise migrations over the next several years.

And you can bet that Microsoft will never give Apple the “thank you” that it deserves.