- Adrian B
- Medlem ●
- Umeå
- 2007-08-10 14:47
John Siracusa på Ars Technica har skrivit en mycket läsvärd och insiktsfull analys av hur Apple som företag inte siktar in sig på att sälja till IT-avdelningarna utan till slutanvändaren
Siracusa menar att Apple har sitt fokus helt på slutanvändaren, på att skapa produkter som användaren vill ha. Och det är inte alltid samma sak som en IT-inköpare på ett stort företag vill ha i en produkt.
Sure, Apple makes periodic overtures in to big business. It even redirects apple.com/enterprise to someplace sensible. But nearly every Apple product or service ostensibly aimed at enterprise customers can also be seen as a natural part of some other, "non-enterprise" market where Apple is strong (e.g., creative professionals).
If you need further reinforcement of this point, just ask your local IT guy at work how much Apple is on his radar for future purchases. He'll likely know a lot about Apple, and may even be a Mac user himself, but his next purchase order for 200 desktop computers will probably be from Dell.
Detta är också svaret på frågan om varför ingen annan gjort en iPhone förut:
The further removed these two groups become—the users and the purchasers—the more "enterprise-y" the market, and the less Apple is interested in serving it.
Unfailingly, Apple markets only to the end user these days. Even with its few enterprise products, Apple sells to the primary "users" of the hardware: the IT guys that set up and manage the Xserves and RAID arrays. What Apple does not do is sell products to corporate IT that are meant for direct use by non-IT employees. That is, desktop PCs, and more recently, cellular phones.
This gets back around to one of my favorite dumb questions from the iPhone launch: "Why hasn't anyone made a phone like this before?" The answer is that every other phone manufacturer is tied up in the enterprise market in one way or another.
The "dream phone" for the enterprise looks quite different than the iPhone.
Jobs själv gjorde detta mycket tydligt när han fick den omtalade frågan om Intel-klistermärken i tisdags och det förklarar varför Apple inte siktar på businessfolket (min markering):
Still holding that thought about the Intel stickers? Listen again to Steve's final words on the subject. "We put ourselves in the customer's shoes and say, what do we want?"
This is why Apple does not compete in the enterprise market in the traditional sense. This is why no other company created the iPhone. This is why most desktop PCs are pieces of crap. When you don't focus on the user, the user gets shafted.
Omtanken om vad användaren faktiskt vill ha är det som skiljer Apple från många företag och det som är kärnan bakom varför Apple lyckas skapa produkter som folk gillar så mycket:
And no matter how you slice it, the decision to ignore markets where you must sell to someone other than the end user is pretty high-minded (for a corporation). It's also perhaps the only way to ever create great products, products that customers actually love.
Jag tror Siracusa lyckats sätta fingret på kanske det viktigaste med varför Apples produkter blir så bra - omtanken om slutanvändaren.
Läs hela: Stuck on the enterprise
