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Theres a fair amount of quotes I'm too lazy to find now where Jobs expresses his absolute distain for the "enterprise" market. With enterprise software, the en
by giobox 4y ago
Theres a fair amount of quotes I'm too lazy to find now where Jobs expresses his absolute distain for the "enterprise" market.
With enterprise software, the end user is almost never the actual paying customer, which when you are trying to make really end-user focused products that delight in the way Apple do, can lead to incentives that prioritise enterprise needs over consumer - look at the huge number of enterprise specific features Microsoft historically have built, that have affected consumers too. Jobs loved making consumer products so much, I can't imagine he ever would have been able to really chase enterprise customers.
The move to targeting services and enterprise more at Apple happened under Cook, because, well, he has to continue growing the company and Services + more engagement with enterprise markets have been critical to growth post Jobs under Cook. Perhaps Steve ultimately would have done the same as Cook, given iPhone can't grow forever etc, but it would have been a major shift in his opinions/outlook for Apple.
I'm talking about "Enterprise" in the traditional software industry sense, which is not the same industry apple target for creative professionals, even if tools like MDM etc can overlap. Jobs loved "professional" users in creative industries, not enterprise volume sales and fleet management tools etc etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoEven worse than the Enterprise things that made their way into Microsoft's consumer products are the things that Microsoft rejected that enterprise wanted. Raymond Chen mentions these requests often in his 'The Old New Thing' blog. I can imagine Jobs going ballistic on enterprise customers who make one too many of these requests (and in some cases, the first request might be that one too many).
- spitfire 4y agoSteve jobs got burnt by enterprise customers at NeXT. Once he got burnt he had a habit of pivoting away and never revisiting a subject. Which is a shame NeXT (apple) had a world leading ORM and RPC system in 1990. It would still impress people today.
- KerrAvon 4y agoI dunno about that. The ORM was DatabaseKit? That didn't make into OS X, but if DO is the RPC system, that was available in Mac OS X. It was full of security holes and was prone to deadlocks. I also suspect people raised alongside ubiquitous web 2.0 technology would be a lot less impressed with the NeXT demos than all of us who saw them with pre-web eyes.
- spitfire 4y agoI was thinking enterprise objects framework which came after they realized databasekit was a dud. It’s equivalent to rails or similar orms. But it integrated with interface builder. See this [1] demo about 23 minutes in… just after he demos how great next step handles faces. He demos building a query crud app fully drag n drop. Are you sure DO was available in OS X? [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk