Dell, HP badmouth Apple's iPad A top Dell marketeer says that Apple's "magical and revolutionary" fondleslab is doomed to enterprise irrelevancy, and an HP senior vice president blasted Apple's partner policies as being "just absurd." My, how novel: competitors bashing a front-runner. In other news, Pope Benedict XVI has been revealed to be a Roman Catholic …
If you had a choice of windows laptop or a Mac, most people would buy the windows laptop.
Why? - Choice and flexibility that windows has. Not that the MAC is bad, its very good technology but its a 'lock in' strategy by Apple.
Iphones and ipads are the same lock in strategy but covered up by being revolutionary and first to market. Coupled with perfect use of free news media to boost hype and desireability.
ipads, iphones and mac's are brilliant and have their place and if you live on a the Apple Island, then you will have a good life. If you live with the rest of the world in freedom of choice, then windows and android is the platform of choice.
Your comments regarding lock-in hold true for the iPhone and iPad etc, and you can either choose or not choose to buy into that market.
But don't tar the Mac with the same brush - Mac OS X is no more "locked in" than other operating systems. In fact, it's easy to argue most people are more "locked in" to Windows as they already have software for it already.
Don't think that just because Mac OS X now has an App Store that it is the ONLY way to get software on to a Mac.
"lock in", "lock-in" and variants?
I suspect that the term is used in multiple contexts to mean slightly different things. However, it also seems to me that to some extent each such statement is the repetition of an article of faith i.e. dogma. How, functionally, does purchasing an Apple product bind you more-or-less inextricably and, presumably, painfully...? There's no blood pact involved. You can still spend your dispensible income however and where-ever you like. You remain free to sell your Apple tat and try something else. Where's that anguish coming from? Your patella tendon?
If most people had the choice, they'd buy a Mac. It's just that most people spend a few hundred quid on a computers -- where a Mac isn't a choice.
There was a report done a year or so ago (since when Apple's share has only grown) that stated that Apple took 90% of money on all computers over $1000. I can't be arsed to Google the report right now, so you'll just have to take my word for it.
So, it would appear that when people do have the choice, they buy Mac.
That was at a point where very few non-specialist meachines cost over $1000 as the market was competing on price with Netbooks being the major growth area.
But I'd agree in general that a lot of domestic punters would buy a Mac if price wasn't an issue.
In the corporate environment it's a bit different though as the purchase cost differences dwindle to almost nothing as a proportion of the total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the device and management and support are much more important.
iPads work well with something like Citrix to deliver office applications to staff but although there's a Citrix client available for the iPad there's no simple and cheap way of rolling out a lot of them at once configured properly and identically. This is much simpler with Android or Windows Embedded.
In organisations with strong technical control of the IT budget I'd expect Apple to lose out on the big orders unless someone comes up with a good centralised management tool that makes it possible to set up, apply policy and update them without having to work on each one individually.
Where apps aren't virtualised there will also be calls for better synchronisation tools as well - ActiveSync is far from perfect and it's only with the latest iOS update that we got the ability to copy more than one document file at a time.
There's a core of truth to the corporate mud slinging here - I expect at least 10% of the 'PCs' my employer buys over the next 24 months to be tablets and the requirement is going to be for something that gives us the control - that may not be Apple's environment however much people like the products themselves.
@Anonymous Coward
'iPads work well with something like Citrix to deliver office applications to staff but although there's a Citrix client available for the iPad there's no simple and cheap way of rolling out a lot of them at once configured properly and identically. This is much simpler with Android or Windows Embedded.'
Please do tell how much easier it is. We are talking tablets here, with full security settings. How do you do this with any flavour of Android on a tablet? Froyo... not suitable, Honeycomb... not finished and buggy as hell and both severely lacking in some security respects. Windows Embedded? ... not much modern functionality there
Sorry to, *POP*, burst your bubble there bub, but average Joe Public couldn't, in the main, give two monkey's about any gadget lock-in! The public want shiny, so long as it's shiny, plays MP3s, allows access to FaceBook, Twitter and Youtube, most people are happy!
Only tech-heads care about stuff like lock-in. When you see most people with iPhones or Mac laptops on trains, they just want some tech to get their shit sorted out, that's the be-all and end-all for most users these days. The tech gadget is much like the washing machine, the fridge or the TV, it's does stuff or provides a service, a means to an end.
Average Joe Public is precisely the market that is not being talked about here.
It is not only tech heads that care about lock-in.
A business customer that might be buying hundreds or thousands of units is not going to go for something they don't have the ability to configure centrally and customise to suit their needs.
In that market Apple might find they lose out to Google and partners, and Microsoft.
And that's potentially a very large market indeed with the knock on problem for Apple that if work has provided you with a tablet device, you're less likely to go and spend your own money on another one.
It may be that Apple's happy to ignore this sort of customer - they don't sell a great number of their PCs into businesses either and have never had much of a presence in the server market either without suffering too much as a result - but that doesn't make all the claims reported in this article inaccurate.
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Anyone remember this peach?
"When it comes to the state of Apple Computer, everyone has an opinion.
And at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97 here today, the CEO of competitor Dell Computer added his voice to the chorus when asked what could be done to fix the Mac maker. His solution was a drastic one.
"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives."
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html#ixzz1I8QLSzZi
.. that a marketing droid from Dell would actually know anything about technology?
On the other hand, dealing with Apple's VAR or enterprise programmes is indeed excruciating. Been there, tried that, gave up. The pitch is all wrong and it ends up looking hard to deploy, hard to package, hard to integrate, hard to manage, and terrible support.
The new ipad is unrepairable at an economic price. From a corporate viewpoint it could not be considered economic to purchase these. Dell & HP can offer servicing for their products. Personally, I use a netbook for mobile use, but anticipate moving over to a "Dell Streak" type product when the price becomes acceptable (low!!) and the performance improves. If I need a bigger computer, for data purposes when traveling, then using the netbook/streak as a remote terminal meets all my requirements. I cannot see the logic of carting 7lbs of computer and 250G of data, thousands of miles. Dell & HP are suffering from being late into the game, but it's going to be a long haul game, so being second or third is not too important. No sensible business is locked into only one supplier, just as any supplier cannot afford to have only one customer.
Are you arguing a unit that is solid state, easy to use, and that's configuration is nigh-on impossible to corrupt (beyond having to change a few settings back to what they should be), have a higher total cost of ownership than a PC or a laptop? I hope not, because it certainly won't have.
Also I think you will find the Market imperative for a slim build and tight integration will make serviceability a thing of the past, no matter which vendor the tablet is from. Gone are they days of opening up the hood, rooting around in a cavernous standardised chassis and swapping memory, a graphics controller or an HDD.
,,,is coming from the fact that you obviously have no clue about enterprise networks that's you think he's wrong - you just don't know what are you talking about, period.
"Are you arguing a unit that is solid state, easy to use, and that's configuration is nigh-on impossible to corrupt (beyond having to change a few settings back to what they should be), have a higher total cost of ownership than a PC or a laptop? I hope not, because it certainly won't have"
Actually IT DOES COST MORE because - aside of irreparable units that only require a little pressure on the screen to become doorstops - YOU HAVE TO BUILD AN ENTIRE ECOSYSTEM TO EVEN USE IT for corporate stuff...
...y'know, stuff that goes beyond your limited "open-app-read-what's-in-it" or "check-email-in-browser" or "let's-use-it-as-a-heavy-clunky-ugly-two-handed-ebook-reader" daily usage of your iPad.
BTW even for daily browsing iPad simply SUCKS: THERE IS NO FLASH.
There. That's it. IMMEDIATELY USELESS.
I meant, of course, for anyone other than the usual dumb Mac-crowd: the classic web producer-filmmaker-musician-artist-wannabe a.k.a. waiter in the diner on the corner, the late wannabe-hipster in her 50s (w/ slight personality disorder), the digitally illiterate ones and, of course, the Jobs-Faithful-type who buys EVERYTHING the Puritan-in-Chief aka Steve "Freedom From Porn" Jobs offers up.
So yes, actually the chances for iPad or rather iOS-based devices, in their current form, to gain a foothold in the enterprise is next to nothing. Sorry but nothing, nada, zil.
Now go back and keep on reading on your big, two-handed, unpocketable slab. :)
You would have thought that if you were going to slag off a product you would have at least researched what it's flaws were.
The iPad, like the iPhone comes with it's own mail app that you can set up to read any e-mail you like. It even has, shock horror, enterprise integration with exchange and lotus notes intergration.
And why would I need Flash?
Obviously the iPad will not replace the desktop, it was never intended to. I use mine for when the missus is watching corrie on the telly. I power it up lie on the sofa and I can check mails, browse the internet and even play a quick game or two of plants vs zombies.
What is so wrong with that?
It's a valid question.
If a company supplies a piece of hardware to it's employees that has all the custom applications the employee needs to do their job, why does it need to have Flash?
After all, there are millions of company supplied Blackberries which seem to have managed perfectly well for years without Flash.
I'm also sure almost every company would be happy to have hardware that guarantees "Freedom From Porn", I can't think of any large company IT department that wouldn't prefer to keep the user from installing anything they liked.
Or are you just using the fact that only the very latest versions of only one of Apples several rivals OS can run Flash as an excuse to have a dig at Apple, whether or not it's relevant to the article.
Apple entreprise program gives companies full access to there iDevices for vertical applications. IT can actually run there own private app store and have full control of the devices without having Apple in the loop.
I worked in IT btw and idevices are great for entreprise deployment...
That's funny. My corporation has rolled out hundreds of them using JAMF's management suite called Casper.
And I'll tell you one thing, we get almost no supports calls about them other than trivial "how do I" questions compared to the near endless stream of people walking in with knackered Windows laptops.
Lay off the caps lock, son, and stop talking out of your arse. They're not perfect, admittedly, but to say that they're useless overall and of no value to the enterprise is uninformed and frankly ignorant.
Why do you think Dell's Streak of P*** be any cheaper to repair than an iPad?
Frankly with service contracts these days it seems cheaper to buy a few extra and throw out the old hardware (laptop, iPad, whatever) when it breaks. Let's face it, it's the people time to trouble-shoot and repair these things that costs.
Well, HP is crap in my book. They bought neoware and converted from the HP thin client OS to Neoware OS, you think things would be better, NOT. Tech support is terrible, speak poor english and have all kinds of issues, like WIFI not working on the Linux versions and the wired port taking 60 seconds to get a DHCP address. So they can't even make a thin client worth a damn. We are moving to all Wyse because they can do Linux thin clients and they can make all the features work, heck they even have tech support!
Even the article linked did not offer a definition.
Vendor... Affiliate... R... R... Rebate? Nah. Robot? That would be for android. Reseller? Ah, Vendor And Reseller? Weird. Ok, googled it: Value Added Resellers.
Funny, of the three words I had, Reseller is the one I would have doubted the most. I would think that the whole idea of "reseller" does not sit well with Apple. The way they see it, there is only one company allowed to sell anything to their customers; and anybody else is a parasite trying to leech off of their success. Maybe that could be why they don't encourage it?
"'Apple is great if you've got a lot of money and live on an island,' Dell global enterprise marketing honcho Andy Lark told CIO Australia."
I thought Australia is an island...
So, basically, Dell is saying definitely get the iPad if you live in the UK, South Pacific, Hawaii, Japan, or the Caribbean (etc). Nice.
It's not like he has to tell any MORE people to get an iPad. LOADS of people are buying them without his help. Even those of us whose "islands" are also referred to as "continents."
I'm a one man IT department who had iPads thrust upon me as my CEO thought they'd be great for our first hit salesmen.
On the plus side, they turn on instantly (no waiting for Windows to boot), they look good (form over function, but you know what salespeople are like) and the battery life is very good.
However, being tied to using iTunes to get anything on and off them is a nightmare. Not only that, but our multi-media authors had to reformat Quicktime movies, as the iPad doesn't support them fully - no warning that the resolution is wrong, just a little message to say that some content wasn't synced because it's unsupported.
Users were also perpelexed that they couldn't delete stuff from the iPad and that in order to do so they had to do it via iTunes.
As long as the iPad is tied to iTunes, I for one will never buy one, and will never consider them enterprise ready. iTunes has NO place on a business PC/network.
Now a tablet that can plug in via USB or link to a network file share from where I can drag and drop stuff would be a different matter.
Android anyone?
You'll find the iPads work better for business when streaming content, rather than syncing over itunes, and storing stuff locally. Plus who wants confidential data stored locally on a very-stealable device? Apart from the DVLA, and various other government branches, that is...
It's the reason my field ops (4 of them) don't go near itunes now, until a system update is needed.
Streaming? Like this:
CRM/SAP - web-based
email - IMAP-based, or VPN-to-exchange
Media - Streamed via HTML5/youtube (this works best if you've already got a webserver, see point 1)
Files and folders - airshare and the likes
Contacts - from the cloud or exchange (mobileme - yes, yes, I know, but it works...)
You'll need the 3G iPad versions though.
The advantage is, that even if ipads go out of fashion, we can move onto the next big thing the CEO wants without too much pain.
Also, streaming works best for domestic use too, especially for media (my media collection is 1.3 TB). Save money on the 64gb version, which you'll fill in no time anyway.
Having iOS so closely tied to iTunes makes everything just that little bit more difficult.
For example. Me and the partner are moving in together. All my films, music photos etc are stored on a lovely NAS and streamed to my TV quite happily through the PS3. Unfortunately they have an AppleTV and loads of DRM fueled videos purchased off the Apple Store.
This wouldn't be such a big deal except the AppleTV needs iTunes in order to stream. It can't stream directly from my NAS, you have to have a PC/laptop on and running iTunes to act as a go between. No big deal I guess, its just one more way that Apple's constant lock downs make everything that little bit more tedious.
You could jailbreak the AppleTv and put XBMC on it. imo dont buy anything on itunes until they start there clould based sercive. Managing DRM files sucks indeed.
The thing I do is I store my files on the NAS then drag them into itunes WITHOUT copying them (its in the itunes settings), so they are only shortcuts in itunes. You do need to have a PC/Mac on and running itunes but at least your files are on the NAS. This may change when the AppleTV has apps.
The keyword is enterprise. I know we have users who say they want a fondleslab, but when we ask for a business case they have absolutely no reason to buy one. The iPad is not an enterprise tool, but then I don't think Apple ever intended it to be one. As such Dell & HP are managing to state the bleeding obvious and bark up the wrong tree at the same time.
Try telling that to my CEO (we are a web design, coding and datacenter company), my sales director, three CEOs of our clients, 2 CIOs (one from the fore mentioned clients, one not), and one IT manager I had a meeting with last week.
Not only do they carry their iPads to all outside meetings, one CIO said his company is buying them for all management at director level and above. How do you not call that an enterprise tool? Or were you being self-referential?
If you do then you know if the suits use it, then you support it and by definition it's an enterprise tool, like it or not.
As to what can the do that a pen and paper doesn't? not kill trees for one. Calendar, contacts and Exchange active-sync for two-four. Cirtix, VNC, and MS RDP for five-seven. CRM/ERP, IM, SalesForce, Skype, Keynote (better than powerpoint), Google (all Internet for that matter), etc.
In short, everything you can do with a laptop without the crap form-factor but with all the shiny goodness suits crave.
Oh yes.. I most certainly do work in Enterprise... wish I didn't but the stuff I engineer is only used by the biggest companies...
So while I understand your pragmatism in pandering to the suits (we all have them) that doesn't make something Enterprise class. And it's not even something that should be being debated because it's clearly not where Apple position their stuff.
Enterprise means support, centralised control and management, security policies that cannot be circumvented, device encryption, capability of being integrated into existing systems and infrastructure and much more. If you can't push out a software update then stop right there.
Ok, my (large US bank) company are playing with Good software simply because too many of the suits now have iOS devices and don't want to carry around Blackberries and iPhones. It looks like a good solution for email but compare it to those Blackberries which were designed firstly as business tools and secondly for consumers. And the other clue about it not being Enterprise-ready is that only the suits are allowed it - obviously the people with the actual technical knowledge can't be trusted with it.
And to address your other uses, of course the iPad is capable of doing those things - I never said it was useless. I wish I could afford one. But when you start trying to argue that VNC, telnet etc are better on a small device with no keyboard or mouse... well just take a step back from the keyboard for a moment to see the absurdity of that statement. As cool as an iPad is, if I'm doing support at 2 in the morning I want a keyboard.
So to summarise, for consumers they're great (if annoyingly restrictive). For businesses, yes of course they have their uses, even just as a non-tree-killing substitute for pen and paper but they are not ready for the Enterprise.
Well, it's obviously not news that other companies criticise competing products. But how is that any different to Apple? Indeed, their advertising campaigns are usually centred around moaning about flaws in Windows or "PCs".
As for making predictions - let's not remember that Apple became more popular by dropping their OS, then switching to x86. It seems those who stated flaws in Macs and 68k/PPC were quite right; Apple survived not by selling Macs, but by becoming a PC seller.
"Iphones and ipads are the same lock in strategy but covered up by being revolutionary and first to market. Coupled with perfect use of free news media to boost hype and desireability."
They're not at all first to market - the Iphones nowhere near. But yes, they do have the overwhelming free advertising and hype from the media, which comes even before the products are officially announced, let alone released.
"If most people had the choice, they'd buy a Mac."
No, they wouldn't. Not to mention that ignoring price doesn't make sense. You're basically saying "If the things that people didn't like about Macs were fixed, people would buy Macs." Yes thank you for pointing out the obvious - the same would apply to any make of PC.
"There was a report done a year or so ago (since when Apple's share has only grown) that stated that Apple took 90% of money on all computers over $1000. So, it would appear that when people do have the choice, they buy Mac."
No, it doesn't prove that at all. Just because some people spend more on them, doesn't mean we all would like them better. All it shows is Apple are expensive.
(Not to mention the condtradiction that people say Apple aren't expensive - which is it?)
"He's probably bitching that it doesn't come with a stylus, either."
I much prefer the option of a stylus on my phone. A shame they've all gone to rubbish capacitive.
<quote>"If most people had the choice, they'd buy a Mac."
No, they wouldn't. Not to mention that ignoring price doesn't make sense. You're basically saying "If the things that people didn't like about Macs were fixed, people would buy Macs." Yes thank you for pointing out the obvious - the same would apply to any make of PC.</quote>
If price wasn't a consideration, then unless they are a rabid Apple hater then yes they would.
Would you really choose a Dell Latitude or Toshiba Satellite over a Macbook Pros aluminium unibody and great keyboard? After all, what's not to like about their hardware.
If your problem is that it doesn't run Windows or your favourite flavour of Linux, then that's fixed in the time it takes to run the install disk.
The reason I ask is because I work with a big insurance company who use ipads and the ipads are very much integrated into the enterprise. They have cisco communicator/webex etc.. apps connected to their enterprise level callmanager system.
They are all fully intergrated with their enterprise level lotus notes e-mail system.
They have citrix app onto them to gain access to their enterprise level MS Terminal Servers.
So, just which part of the "Enterprise" can the iPad not integrate into?
Or do you actually mean the desk top?
In which case you may have a point as there is no version of Office for iPad and iWork doesn't really cut it compared to Word and Excel.
The fact that Apple dont have a useless 'partner' system will simply save money.
iPads can be set up by the company, build your own apps using the enterprise SDK, lock them down, delete them at a distance, find them when they are lost.
You only need itunes for system updates.
Many companies are buying them, despite the warnings from Dell and HP, two lousy box-shippers.
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