The Daydream Blog

A major European newspaper company has decided to move its entire workforce over to the Mac. Estimates for Axel Springer range between 10 - 12,000 desktops, which will make them Apple’s second largest client, behind Google.

There are continued criticisms of Apple’s lack of focus on the enterprise. With the iPhone, Apple made a concerted effort to answer their critics with one big software update. Whereas with the Mac, support for VPNs, Exchange, workgroup sharing, security keycards has been a slow, but steady process. The main outstanding issues are the lack of a public product timeline, guaranteed configurations available for 3-5 years and the lack of some key third party enterprise software.

With the switch to Intel, Apple’s product timeline is now at least translucent, if not transparent. With Apple’s financial stability, I believe that Apple can afford to be less secretive about its future product road map. Certainly with the iPhone and Apple TV, it has been willing to pre-announce products and deliver a roadmap. Whilst this is less critical when Apple’s minor updates can be accurately predicted from Intel’s plans, Apple should bring more openness to its Mac plans. For example, the MacBook Air was only a rumour until just a few days before the announcement. An enterprise client looking to make a large laptop purchase would have been very disappointed to have that announcement sprung on them just after placing a large order. Pre-announcement of better Exchange support in Snow Leopard is a step in the right direction.

With Mac OS X’s tight integration with Mac hardware, having a guaranteed configuration is a minor issue. IT departments are unlikely to face major issues with even major updates to the Mac line. The only concern here will be employee envy, where the newest staff may end up with the newest, fastest, computers.

The lack of third party software is a chicken and egg situation. Apple has slowly but surely been adding enterprise class software to Mac OS X Server, but there is still a lack of key software. Namely middle-ware, such as IBM’s Websphere MQ, TIBCO Rendezvous or Orbix; CRM software and HR software. As the Mac’s presence in enterprise grows, this is really an opportunity for small Mac software firms to become big Mac software firms.

Lost in the mists of time and in the obscurity of a niche platform, many do not realise that the Web was invented on a NeXT machine running NEXTSTEP (whichever form of capitalisation was prevalent at the time). And that NEXTSTEP is the precursor to Mac OS X. The MAKE blog has some photos of the NeXT machine that hosted the world’s first website.

The first browser, WorldWideWeb, was written in the precursor to Cocoa, the tools used to create most of the great, new, software on the Mac, including Differencia.

As I mentioned in “Web 0.9 beta“, Tim Berners-Lee always envisaged the web to be read/write, presaging Web 2.0, as can be seen in this screen-shot.

What is fascinating is that if you read the text in the about box, you can see that Berners-Lee already had the concept of helper applications. In this case, specifically for a NNTP news-reader, presaging RSS links on pages being opened by a third party news reader application such as NetNewsWire or NewsFire.

I used to be surprised that Apple did not make more of its Web heritage, but I guess you cannot really say much about how great your current products are, based on a third party product developed 17 years ago for a platform created by a company that you paid $400m to do a reverse take over of yourself.