Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Recently I had lunch with an old friend who had been a client while I was with Giga (now a part of Forrester). He worked for a large multi-national firm and remains a huge Apple fan. As a senior IT manager and because his firm, like many others, was upset with Microsoft, he was able to set up a meeting with Apple's executives to talk about a migration.

His firm was skeptical but relatively open-minded. They started off making the same request of Apple they make of companies like Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) Latest News about Dell and Microsoft. They wanted a two-year hardware/software roadmap and assurances they could buy a platform that would remain stable for at least 12, and hopefully 18, months.

In addition, they wanted early warning on all patches and changes to any of the platforms they were buying and solid assurances on price. They had issues with the fact they would have to single-source their hardware vendor but felt if Apple could meet their other requests they were willing to continue the discussion. (As is the case with any vendor, Microsoft has its share of very unhappy customers.)

The Apple executives, smiling, said "We're Apple and we don't do that." The meeting ended relatively quickly and my friend has since moved on to another, much smaller company, where he began the same process. Here the issue was compatibility with existing applications -- and the firm just wasn't willing to take the risk of buying a platform that couldn't run what they needed to run native or tying their future to one, single-sourced, hardware company.

It doesn't matter what Apple does to the product. Until the company can address the need for a multi-year roadmap that businesses can refer to, get a stable platform that will be deployable over a long period of time, and designate multiple hardware vendors clients can bid against one another to ensure the lowest price (as well as to avoid getting nailed by internal audit), enterprises simply won't buy Apple broadly.